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package au.edu.anu.portal.portlets.basiclti.support;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.net.URISyntaxException;
import java.net.URLEncoder;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;
import net.oauth.OAuthAccessor;
import net.oauth.OAuthConsumer;
import net.oauth.OAuthException;
import net.oauth.OAuthMessage;
import net.oauth.signature.OAuthSignatureMethod;
import org.apache.commons.logging.Log;
import org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory;
/**
* A set of OAuth methods
*
* @author Steve Swinsburg (steve.swinsburg@anu.edu.au)
*
*/
public class OAuthSupport {
private static final Log log = LogFactory.getLog(OAuthSupport.class.getName());
/**
* Charset to encode params with
*/
private final static String CHARSET= "UTF-8";
/**
* Sign a property Map with OAuth.
* @param url the url where the request is to be made
* @param props the map of properties to sign
* @param method the HTTP request method, eg POST
* @param key the oauth_consumer_key
* @param secret the shared secret
* @return
*/
public static Map<String,String> signProperties(String url, Map<String,String> props, String method, String key, String secret) {
if (key == null || secret == null) {
log.error("Error in signProperties - key and secret must be specified");
return null;
}
OAuthMessage oam = new OAuthMessage(method, url,props.entrySet());
OAuthConsumer cons = new OAuthConsumer("about:blank",key, secret, null);
OAuthAccessor acc = new OAuthAccessor(cons);
try {
oam.addRequiredParameters(acc);
log.info("Base Message String\n"+OAuthSignatureMethod.getBaseString(oam)+"\n");
List<Map.Entry<String, String>> params = oam.getParameters();
Map<String,String> headers = new HashMap<String,String>();
for (Map.Entry<String,String> p : params) {
//as per the spec, params must be encoded
String param = URLEncoder.encode(p.getKey(), CHARSET);
String value = p.getValue();
String encodedValue = value != null ? URLEncoder.encode(value, CHARSET) : "";
headers.put(param, encodedValue);
}
return headers;
} catch (OAuthException e) {
log.error(e.getClass() + ":"+ e.getMessage());
return null;
} catch (IOException e) {
log.error(e.getClass() + ":"+ e.getMessage());
return null;
} catch (URISyntaxException e) {
log.error(e.getClass() + ":"+ e.getMessage());
return null;
}
}
}
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 8,480
|
{"url":"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41598-017-16598-6?error=cookies_not_supported&code=89e06af5-fda4-45a4-8410-637b97e38fa6","text":"Article | Open | Published:\n\n# Intraspecific variation and plasticity in mitochondrial oxygen binding affinity as a response to environmental temperature\n\n## Abstract\n\nMitochondrial function has been suggested to underlie constraints on whole-organism aerobic performance and associated hypoxia and thermal tolerance limits, but most studies have focused on measures of maximum mitochondrial capacity. Here we investigated whether variation in mitochondrial oxygen kinetics could contribute to local adaptation and plasticity in response to temperature using two subspecies of the Atlantic killifish (Fundulus heteroclitus) acclimated to a range of temperatures (5, 15, and 33\u2009\u00b0C). The southern subspecies of F. heteroclitus, which has superior thermal and hypoxia tolerances compared to the northern subspecies, exhibited lower mitochondrial O2 P50 (higher O2 affinity). Acclimation to thermal extremes (5 or 33\u2009\u00b0C) altered mitochondrial O2 P50 in both subspecies consistent with the effects of thermal acclimation on whole-organism thermal tolerance limits. We also examined differences between subspecies and thermal acclimation effects on whole-blood Hb O2-P50 to assess whether variation in oxygen delivery is involved in these responses. In contrast to the clear differences between subspecies in mitochondrial O2-P50 there were no differences in whole-blood Hb-O2 P50 between subspecies. Taken together these findings support a general role for mitochondrial oxygen kinetics in differentiating whole-organism aerobic performance and thus in influencing species responses to environmental change.\n\n## Introduction\n\nBoth ambient temperature and O2 availability vary widely across the biosphere and this has profound implications for the geographic distributions of aquatic organisms1,2. The physiological constraints imposed by hypoxia and temperature are thought to be a consequence of their effects on aerobic metabolism and, by extension, mitochondrial function2,3,4,5,6. Attempts to link whole organism thermal and hypoxia performance and mitochondrial function have typically examined maximum mitochondrial capacity. Studies of this nature have had mixed success in identifying mitochondrial processes that putatively constrain whole-organism performance or that are altered following environmental stress7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17. In addition, in vitro studies of maximum mitochondrial capacity can be difficult to link back to in vivo function because mitochondria are unlikely to operate at maximum flux in vivo under most circumstances10.\n\nOne factor that can constrain mitochondrial flux is low O2 supply. The effects of O2 supply on mitochondrial function can be described using mitochondrial O2 P50 (Mito-P50), the O2 partial pressure (PO2) at which mitochondrial O2 consumption rate is 50% of maximum flux18. Because Mito-P50 is measured during the aerobic to anoxic transition, it provides information on mitochondrial function over a PO2 range that is relevant to in vivo performance. In theory, a low Mito-P50 results in a greater capacity to extract O2 from the cytosol. Consequently, there has been interest in this parameter as a predictor of whole-organism performance. Indeed, intraspecific variation in Mito-P50 is a predictor of basal metabolic rate in humans19. Moreover, Lau et al.19 provide evidence for putative adaptation of Mito-P50 as a mechanism underlying variation in hypoxia tolerance among intertidal sculpin species (family: Cottidae). Links between Mito-P50 and hypoxia tolerance are not universal, however, as Du et al.7 did not observe altered Mito-P50 following hypoxic acclimation in Fundulus heteroclitus. By comparison, nothing is known about variation in Mito-P50 in the context of putative local thermal adaptation or thermal acclimation. It has been suggested that there may be a link between whole-organism thermal performance and systemic hypoxemia, although there is some debate about the role of systemic O2 limitation as a general mechanism underlying thermal tolerance limits in fishes20,21. However, given the relationship between ambient temperature and aerobic metabolism, prolonged thermal stress likely alters mitochondrial function and thus an investigation of temperature effects on Mito-P50 is necessary3,4,6.\n\nTo address this question, here we utilize F. heteroclitus, a eurythermal teleost found in estuarine salt marshes along a large latitudinal range that spans a steep thermal gradient [(Northern Florida, USA (mean monthly southern temperature range Sapelo Island, GA, USA: 11\u201330\u2009\u00b0C22) to Nova Scotia, Canada (mean monthly northern temperature range 3\u201311\u2009\u00b0C Wells Inlet, ME, USA22)]. This species is highly tolerant of both thermal and hypoxic stress, experiencing considerable variation in these abiotic factors over diel as well as seasonal cycles23,24,25. Furthermore, northern and southern F. heteroclitus subspecies exhibit variation in thermal and hypoxia tolerance that is consistent with apparent adaptation to their local environments24,25. This species recruits a wide array of physiological responses to thermal stress, including altered mitochondrial function12,15,25,26,27. Thus, this species is an ideal model in which to investigate the potential roles of mitochondrial kinetic properties in thermal acclimation and adaptation.\n\nThe objectives of this study were three-fold, (1) determine if intraspecific variation in Mito-P50 exists between putatively thermally adapted northern (Fundulus heteroclitus heteroclitus) and southern (Fundulus heteroclitus macrolepidotus) Atlantic killifish subspecies, (2) investigate the effects of thermal acclimation (5, 15, and 33\u2009\u00b0C) on Mito-P50 and, (3) characterize the acute thermal response of Mito-P50 between F. heteroclitus subspecies acclimated to different temperatures. We also assessed intraspecific variation and thermal acclimation effects on hemoglobin (Hb) O2-P50, as there is some evidence of intraspecific variation in this parameter in F. heteroclitus 28 and any variation in this parameter could result in changes in PO2 gradients between the circulatory system and the mitochondrion.\n\n## Results\n\n### Whole-organism hypoxia tolerance (LOEhyp)\n\nWe measured time to loss of equilibrium in hypoxia (LOEhyp) at 15\u2009\u00b0C in fish acclimated to 15\u2009\u00b0C to confirm subspecies differences in whole organism hypoxia tolerance25. The northern and southern subspecies of killifish acclimated to 15\u2009\u00b0C differed in LOEhyp at Tassay\u2009=\u200915\u2009\u00b0C across a range of PO2 (Fig.\u00a01). Southern killifish exhibited greater hypoxia tolerance, as indicated by time to LOEhyp, when compared to northern killifish (psubspecies\u2009<\u20090.001). PO2 also affected LOEhyp, which decreased with decreasing PO2 (ppartial pressure\u2009<\u20090.001), as did the difference between the subspecies (ppartial pressure*subspecies\u2009<\u20090.05).\n\n### Hb and Mito-P50\n\nIn this study, we examined mitochondrial O2 binding affinity using isolated mitochondria from the liver because high-quality mitochondria can be isolated from this tissue in this species15,27. These assays were conducted using a mixture of substrates at saturating levels to be representative of working or stressed states. For Mito-P50, there were significant effects of subspecies (psubspecies\u2009<\u20090.05), assay temperature (passay\u2009<\u20090.0001), thermal acclimation (pacclimation\u2009<\u20090.0005), and the interaction between thermal acclimation and assay temperature (pacclimation*assay\u2009<\u20090.0001) on Mito-P50. No additional significant interaction effects were detected (psubspecies*acclimation\u2009=\u20090.181, psubspecies*assay\u2009=\u20090.144, ppopulation*acclimation*assay\u2009=\u20090.273) (Supplementary Fig.\u00a0S1).\n\nIn contrast, there was no significant effect of subspecies (psubspecies\u2009=\u20090.230) on Hb-P50, but we detected significant effects of thermal acclimation (pacclimation\u2009<\u20090.05), assay temperature (passay\u2009<\u20090.0001), the interaction between subspecies and assay temperature (psubspecies*assay\u2009<\u20090.001), and the interaction between subspecies, acclimation and assay temperature (psubspecies*acclimation*assay\u2009<\u20090.05) but no other significant interaction effects (psubspecies*acclimation\u2009=\u20090.146, pacclimation*assay\u2009=\u20090.071). (Supplementary Fig.\u00a0S2). Hill coefficients derived from Hb-O2 equilibrium curves did not differ between subspecies (Supplementary Fig.\u00a0S3; psubspecies\u2009=\u20090.196) or with acclimation (pacclimation\u2009<\u20090.181), but were significantly affected by assay temperature (passay\u2009<\u20090.05), and there were no significant interactions (psubspecies*acclimation\u2009=\u20090.070, psubspecies*assay\u2009=\u20090.634, pacclimation*assay\u2009=\u20090.637, psubspecies*acclimation*assay\u2009=\u20090.714). Hematocrit did not differ following thermal acclimation (Supplementary Fig.\u00a0S4; pacclimation\u2009=\u20090.080), or between subspecies (psubspecies\u2009=\u20090.992), and there were no significant interactions (pacclimation*subspecies\u2009=\u20090.350).\n\nBecause of the complex interactive effects of subspecies, acclimation temperature, and assay temperature on both Mito-P50 and Hb-P50, we tested a series of specific hypotheses regarding the effects of individual factors on both of these parameters.\n\n### Subspecies effects on mitochondrial and Hb-O2 affinity\n\nWe compared mitochondrial and Hb-P50 between subspecies when assayed at their acclimation temperature to test our prediction that southern killifish maintain lower O2 P50 when compared to northern killifish (Fig.\u00a02). Mito-P50 was lower in southern killifish compared to northern killifish when acclimated to 15\u2009\u00b0C and assayed at 15\u2009\u00b0C (Fig.\u00a02A; psubspecies\u2009<\u20090.005), but not in 33\u2009\u00b0C acclimated killifish assayed at 33\u2009\u00b0C (Fig.\u00a02B; psubspecies\u2009=\u20090.301). Hb-O2 binding affinity did not differ between subspecies at either acclimation temperature (Fig.\u00a02C,D; 15\u2009\u00b0C: psubspecies\u2009=\u20090.446, 33\u2009\u00b0C: psubspecies\u2009=\u20090.817).\n\n### Thermal acclimation effects on mitochondrial and Hb-O2 affinity\n\nWe compared thermal acclimation effects (5, 15, and 33\u2009\u00b0C) on mitochondrial (Fig.\u00a03A) and Hb-P50 (Fig.\u00a03B) between subspecies at a common assay temperature of 15\u2009\u00b0C to test our prediction that acclimation to higher temperatures would result in lower O2 P50 for both parameters. We used 5 and 33\u2009\u00b0C as our experimental acclimation temperatures as these are temperatures at which effects on whole-organism aerobic metabolism are first observed29. In addition, we acclimated F. heteroclitus to 33\u2009\u00b0C to avoid the induction of substantial breeding physiology at slightly lower temperatures (i.e., 25 to 30\u2009\u00b0C). These acclimation treatments represent the majority of temperatures experienced by natural F. heteroclitus populations22.\n\nWe detected a significant effect of acclimation on Mito-P50 (Fig.\u00a03A; pacclimation\u2009<\u20090.001). This effect was driven by higher Mito-P50 in 5\u2009\u00b0C acclimated killifish and lower Mito-P50 in 33\u2009\u00b0C acclimated northern killifish. We also detected a significant effect of subspecies that was driven by greater Mito-P50 in northern killifish (psubspecies\u2009<\u20090.05). Significant interactions between subspecies and thermal acclimation effects were a result of subspecies differences being removed as Tacclimation increased to 33\u2009\u00b0C (psubspecies*acclimation\u2009<\u20090.05).\n\nWe did not detect a significant effect of acclimation on Hb-P50 (Fig.\u00a03B; pacclimation\u2009=\u20090.087) or an effect of subspecies (psubspecies\u2009=\u20090.599) or an interaction between subspecies and acclimation temperature (psubspecies*acclimation\u2009=\u20090.140).\n\n### Acute thermal effects on mitochondrial and Hb-O2 affinity\n\nWe assessed the effects of thermal acclimation and local adaptation on \u0394 Mito-P50 (i.e., the difference in Mito-P50 between Tassay\u2009=\u200915 and 33\u2009\u00b0C) and the heat of oxygenation of Hb, \u0394H (Fig.\u00a04). We predicted that thermal acclimation and putative local adaptation would alter the acute thermal response for both parameters. Acute changes in temperature alter buffer pH, and this has the potential to affect both Mito-P50 and Hb-P50. But this variation in pH does not affect the interpretation of our specific predictions as most comparisons were made at the same assay temperature. The only exception is our assessment of acute thermal effects on O2 binding affinity (Fig.\u00a04), which might be subject to an interaction between intraspecific variation or thermal acclimation effects and pH variation induced by the acute temperature shift between 15 and 33\u2009\u00b0C.\n\nAcclimation temperature affected \u0394 Mito-P50 (Fig.\u00a04A; pacclimation\u2009<\u20090.001). Northern F. heteroclitus exhibited a greater \u0394 Mito-P50 when compared to the southern subspecies (psubspecies\u2009<\u20090.005). No significant interaction effects were detected (pacclimation*subspecies\u2009=\u20090.907).\n\nThermal acclimation did not significantly change \u0394H (Fig.\u00a04B; pacclimation\u2009=\u20090.583). Northern F. heteroclitus maintained more negative \u0394H when compared to southern F. heteroclitus (psubspecies\u2009<\u20090.005). No significant interaction effects were detected (pacclimation*subspecies\u2009=\u20090.371).\n\n## Discussion\n\nHere we demonstrate that Mito-P50 differs between putatively thermally adapted subspecies of killifish and is sensitive to thermal acclimation. These effects on Mito-P50 are consistent with intraspecific variation and the effects of thermal acclimation on whole-organism thermal and hypoxia tolerance25. These data provide evidence for altered mitochondrial oxygen affinity as a potential mechanism for maintaining whole-organism performance under environmental stress, which may ultimately contribute to subspecies-specific differences in thermal tolerance.\n\nThere were clear intraspecific differences in Mito-P50 between northern and southern F. heteroclitus subspecies, with southern fish maintaining lower O2-P50 (Fig.\u00a02A, S1). We propose that variation in Mito-P50 partially underlies intraspecific variation in hypoxia tolerance (Fig.\u00a01 25). Intraspecific variation in Mito-P50 may be a consequence of variation in genes encoding cytochrome c oxidase (CCO) subunits. CCO is the terminal acceptor of the electron transport chain and the primary site of O2 consumption in the mitochondrion. In addition, CCO subunits are encoded by both nuclear and mitochondrial genomes, the latter being subject to high mutation rates. Consequently, CCO function has been demonstrated to be a target of selection30,31,32. Genome sequencing efforts in F. heteroclitus 9 have revealed mixed evidence for the presence of functionally significant variation in CCO among F. heteroclitus populations, but at present there have been no comprehensive examinations of sequence variation between populations from the extremes of the species distribution. In addition, differences in CCO function could be a consequence of variation in mitochondrial membrane composition or post-translational modifications of the enzyme33.\n\nIn contrast to the variation between subspecies in Mito-P50, we did not observe significant differences in Hb-P50 between F. heteroclitus subspecies (Fig.\u00a02C,D), consistent with previous observations in a hybrid F. heteroclitus population28. However, in this population individuals with differing LDH-B genotypes differed in Hb-P50 following exhaustive swimming, implicating a genotype-specific Bohr shift (i.e., low pH decreasing O2 affinity) due to allosteric modification of Hb by ATP28. These differences are thought to result from differences in glycolytic metabolism due to variation in LDH-B34. Both subspecies maintain equivalent hematocrit (Supplementary Fig.\u00a0S4 28), indicating that if Hb characteristics differentiate aerobic performance between subspecies it likely occurs through allosteric mechanisms.\n\nHb-P50 in killifish (approximately 0.4\u2009kPa) is low relative to other fish species (e.g., Hb-P50\u2009=\u20093.6\u2009kPa in Oncorhynchus mykiss 35; 2.6\u2009kPa in Kryptolebias marmoratus 36; and ranges between 3\u20138\u2009kPa among intertidal sculpins37) suggesting that selection may have acted on F. heteroclitus to maximize O2 extraction from the environment. However, for Hb there is a trade-off between the ability to load O2 at the gills and unload at the tissues. The fact that we do not observe much variation between subspecies in Hb-P50 may reflect this trade-off. Thus, variation in Mito-P50 could represent an adaptation to maximize tissue O2 diffusion in the hypoxia tolerant southern subspecies. The hypothesis of a tissue O2 diffusion limitation in this species is supported by electron microscope observations of the location of the mitochondrion in this species, which at least in muscle are localized immediately below the plasma membrane26. However, both Hb-P50 and Mito-P50 are subject to considerable regulation in vivo, and this is an effect that we are unable to account for in our assays. Nevertheless, the difference in O2 binding affinity between Hb and the mitochondrion likely contributes to the shape of O2 diffusion gradients at the tissue38.\n\nIn humans, there is an inverse relationship between basal metabolic rate and Mito-P5032. We therefore predicted that northern F. heteroclitus would have lower Mito-P50 than southern fish, because northern populations maintain higher routine metabolic rates than do their southern counterparts29. In contrast, we found that the southern subspecies has a lower Mito-P50, suggesting that the relationship between metabolic rate and Mito-P50 does not represent a functional constraint in F. heteroclitus. Alternatively, the inconsistent relationship between Mito-P50 and estimates of basal metabolism in humans and F. heteroclitus may be a consequence of the energetic demands imposed by endothermy when compared with ectothermy. The combination of low routine metabolic rate and Mito-P50 exhibited by the southern subspecies may represent a beneficial strategy in high temperature hypoxic environments, allowing for greater tissue O2 extraction while also decreasing overall demand in the face of environmental hypoxia.\n\nOrganisms\u2019 thermal tolerance limits are thought to be shaped by temperature effects on aerobic metabolism that may, at least in part, be due to effects at the level of the mitochondrion3,6,13. However, these effects have mostly been examined in the context of mitochondrial respiratory capacity. Here we show that northern and southern F. heteroclitus subspecies that differ in thermal tolerance24 also exhibit differences in Mito-P50. The lower Mito-P50 in the southern subspecies, which reflects a greater mitochondrial oxygen affinity, could aid in the maintenance of mitochondrial O2 diffusion gradients, particularly at high temperatures, which could help to sustain aerobic metabolism at high temperatures. Similarly, low Mito-P50 has the potential to aid O2 delivery during environmental hypoxia. Thus, in southern habitats where temperatures are higher and hypoxic events are more likely, low Mito-P50 could be favored. Alternatively, the relatively low temperatures and higher oxygen levels in northern habitats might result in relaxed selection on these traits, reducing the constraints on Mito-P50 in this subspecies. Taken together, our demonstration of intraspecific variation in Mito-P50 thus provides a candidate trait accounting for potential covariation of both whole-organism hypoxia and thermal tolerance.\n\nAcclimation to both 5 and 33\u2009\u00b0C resulted in clear changes in Mito-P50 that were subspecies-dependent (Fig.\u00a03, S1). In contrast, Hb-P50 did not exhibit a clear response to thermal acclimation (Fig.\u00a04, S2). This previously undescribed phenomenon identifies potential targets and mechanisms of thermal acclimation and provides support for a role for mitochondrial function in maintaining performance following prolonged thermal stress.\n\nWe predicted that acclimation to 33\u2009\u00b0C would decrease Mito-P50 thereby compensating for the aerobic challenges associated with high temperature3,8,15,39. When compared at a common assay temperature of 15\u2009\u00b0C, acclimation to 33\u2009\u00b0C decreased Mito-P50 in northern but not southern F. heteroclitus (Fig.\u00a03A). Decreases in Mito-P50 under these conditions may alleviate limitations on total O2 flux suggested to occur with elevated temperatures3 and is consistent with the maintenance of a PO2 gradient to the mitochondrion. In contrast, southern F. heteroclitus exhibit low Mito-P50 (high oxygen affinity) at both intermediate and high temperatures, indicating a difference in strategy between the subspecies. However, when compared at a higher assay temperature of 33\u2009\u00b0C, acclimation to 33\u2009\u00b0C increased Mito-P50 in both subspecies (Supplementary Fig.\u00a0S1). This paradoxical response could represent maladaptive acclimation as this would presumably decrease O2 diffusion gradients to the tissues. Thus, it is possible that this response may instead be a consequence of sub-lethal effects associated with 33\u2009\u00b0C acclimation. 33\u2009\u00b0C is a non-lethal temperature to which F. heteroclitus can acclimate for prolonged periods24. However, acclimation to 33\u2009\u00b0C is associated with decreases in whole body mass and routine O2 consumption, perhaps indicative of trade-offs necessary to mitigate the effects of extremely high acclimation temperatures on energetic balance8,29. Thus, our observed change in Mito-P50 may be a consequence of other mitochondrial responses associated with high temperature acclimation (e.g., altered mitochondrial morphology and membrane composition40,41). This raises interesting questions as to the mitochondrial responses of organisms under conditions of sub-lethal stress, which are likely to have a profound influence on species' fitness42,43,44.\n\nIn both subspecies, we observed higher Mito-P50 in fish acclimated to low temperature when assayed at 15\u2009\u00b0C (Fig.\u00a03A). Indeed, cold acclimation is associated with increases in mitochondrial respiratory capacity, mitochondrial volume density and lipid content in aquatic ectotherms14,15,26,41. Increases in lipid content increase O2 solubility45 which may alleviate potential mitochondrial O2 limitations in systemic tissues at low temperatures that are brought on by decreased O2 diffusion rates46. This 5\u2009\u00b0C acclimation response may reveal a mechanism for life at low temperatures as it is consistent with the greater Mito-P50 exhibited by northern F. heteroclitus (Fig.\u00a02).\n\nSimilar to our demonstration of thermal acclimation effects on Mito-P50 (Fig.\u00a03A), prolonged exposure to hypoxia might be predicted to decrease Mito-P507,17, if reductions in Mito-P50 are important for maintaining O2 diffusion gradients. However, hypoxia acclimated northern F. heteroclitus exhibit no modification of Mito-P507. This suggests that declines in Mito-P50 at high temperatures are not directly mediated by the associated environmental hypoxia or resulting hypoxemia. Thus, the effects of thermal acclimation that we observe may play a role other than maintaining oxygen diffusion gradients. Alternatively, during hypoxic acclimation this species could recruit other mechanisms for maintaining O2 supply and demand balance, such reductions in demand23 would reduce the necessity for decreased Mito\u2013P50 following acclimation.\n\nAlthough we detected intraspecific variation and thermal acclimation effects on liver Mito-P50, this effect might not be present in mitochondria from other tissues47. Indeed, thermal acclimation and intraspecific variation effects on F. heteroclitus mitochondrial respiratory capacity vary among the heart, liver and brain8,15,27, suggesting that mitochondria from different tissues may respond differently. The role of liver mitochondria in constraining whole-organism hypoxia and thermal tolerance is not clear, whereas other tissues such as the heart and brain may be more important3,5,21. Consistent with this idea, variation in Mito-P50 from brain mitochondria has been shown to be associated with evolutionary variation in hypoxia tolerance19 whereas Mito-P50 from liver mitochondria does not change in response to hypoxic acclimation in F. heteroclitus despite changes in whole-organism hypoxia tolerance7. Thus, the role of the differences in liver Mito-P50 that we observe in setting whole organism thermal or hypoxia tolerance requires further investigation.\n\nAs assay temperature increased (assay temperature: 15\u201333\u2009\u00b0C), both Hb and Mito-P50 increased (Figs\u00a0S1, S2). The loss of Hb O2 affinity associated with increasing assay temperature is often observed and is primarily a consequence of the exothermic nature of Hb oxygenation48. Decreased Hb O2 binding affinity with acute increases in temperature might aid in unloading O2 to the tissues but might also compromise O2 loading at the gills. However, these effects are likely subject to considerable regulation in vivo. In contrast, decreased mitochondrial O2 affinity with increased assay temperature has not been previously characterized and is presumably a result of temperature effects on enzyme stability. This decrease in mitochondrial O2 binding affinity at high assay temperatures might cause a decline in mitochondrial ATP synthesis, perhaps revealing an aspect of declining mitochondrial function associated with acute increases in temperature.\n\nWe detected clear subspecies effects on the acute thermal sensitivity of O2 binding affinity at all acclimation temperatures (Fig.\u00a03). Northern F. heteroclitus exhibited greater \u0394 Mito-P50 and a more exothermic Hb \u0394H (i.e., greater thermal sensitivity) when compared to the southern subspecies (Tassay\u2009=\u200915 to 33\u2009\u00b0C). These data indicate that northern F. heteroclitus exhibit a greater relative loss of O2 binding affinity than the southern subspecies following acute increases in temperature. This loss of O2 binding affinity at high acute temperatures may result in greater constraints on aerobic metabolism in this subspecies, which could be associated with the differences between subspecies in acute thermal tolerance limits24.\n\nThermal acclimation also altered the acute thermal sensitivity of Mito-P50 (Supplementary Fig.\u00a0S1). This is reflected by increased \u0394 Mito-P50 following 33\u2009\u00b0C acclimation in both F. heteroclitus subspecies (Fig.\u00a04A). This increase in sensitivity may be a consequence of sub-lethal effects associated with 33\u2009\u00b0C acclimation and changes in mitochondrial morphology as discussed previously. In contrast, we did not detect significant thermal acclimation effects on hemoglobin thermal sensitivity (\u0394H\u00b0, Fig.\u00a04B), although such effects have been detected in other fish species. (e.g., Oncorhynchus mykiss 49).\n\nIn this study, we demonstrate clear effects of intraspecific variation and thermal acclimation on Mito-P50. This variation in kinetic properties is consistent with subspecies differences and the effects of thermal acclimation on hypoxia and thermal tolerance. These changes in Mito P50 may help to maintain oxygen diffusion gradients particularly at high temperatures. We thus propose that altered Mito-P50 is involved in differentiating organism-level aerobic and thermal performance between putatively adapted F. heteroclitus subspecies and in response to thermal acclimation and could represent a novel target for thermal adaptation.\n\n## Methods\n\n### Animals\n\nAll procedures were carried out at the University of British Columbia according to the University of British Columbia Animal Care Committee approved protocol #A01-0180. Northern (Fundulus heteroclitus macrolepidotus; Ogden\u2019s Pond Estuary, NS, 45\u00b071\u2032N; 61\u00b090\u2032W) and southern (Fundulus heteroclitus heteroclitus; Jekyll Island, GA, 31\u00b002\u2032N; 81\u00b025\u2032W) Atlantic killifish were collected in summer, 2014, and were transported to UBC's Aquatics Facility where they were kept in 190\u2009L tanks with biological filtration. Fish were held at 15\u2009\u00b1\u20092\u2009\u00b0C, and 20\u2009ppt salinity, with a 12:12\u2009L:D photoperiod. Animals were fed once daily to satiation (Nutrafin Max). In June 2015, fish were transferred to 114\u2009L tanks with biological filtration. Temperature was held at 5, 15 or 33\u2009\u00b1\u20092\u2009\u00b0C and all other conditions were maintained. After a minimum of four weeks of thermal acclimation, fish were fasted for 24\u2009h and sampled as described below.\n\n### Loss of equilibrium in hypoxia assay\n\nBrackish water (Ta\u2009=\u200915\u2009\u00b0C, 20 ppt salinity) was circulated in a 50\u2009l plexiglass arena with bubblewrap at the water's surface to prevent O2 diffusion. Fish were placed in individual containers in the arena (10 fish per trial, 1 fish\u00a0per container), where the former allowed for full mixing of water while preventing access to the water's surface. PO2 was monitored continuously using a fiber-optic oxygen probe (NEO-Fox, Ocean Optics, Dunedin, FL). Following 10\u2009min of acclimation to the container, PO2 was decreased over 30\u2009min by bubbling N2 gas to one of four PO2 values (0.84, 0.44, 0.24, or 0.13\u2009\u00b1\u2009.02\u2009kPa). When the desired PO2 was reached, the trial began and time to LOEhyp was recorded. LOEhyp was determined as the time at which fish no longer responded to gentle movement of their containers following which fish were removed and placed in a recovery tank.\n\n### Hemoglobin O2 P50 and hematocrit content\n\nFundulus heteroclitus were removed from the 5, 15, or 33\u2009\u00b0C thermal acclimation tanks at 8:00 AM PST, euthanized by cervical dislocation and weighed. The caudal peduncle was severed and blood was collected from the incision using micro-hematocrit tubes. Micro-hematocrit tubes were centrifuged (10\u2009min, 12,700\u2009g, 25\u2009\u00b0C) and hematocrit was measured as the volume percentage of packed RBCs within the total blood sample.\n\nMicro-hematocrit tubes were separated at the boundary between RBCs and plasma. RBCs were re-suspended to approximately the same measured hematocrit content with buffered saline (50\u2009mM HEPES with 100\u2009mM NaCl, final osmolality\u2009=\u2009390 Osm kg\u22121, pH\u2009=\u20097.8 at 25\u2009\u00b0C) for O2 equilibria experiments50. Osmolality of the buffered saline solution was set based on plasma osmolality measurements (10\u2009\u03bcL of whole blood measured using standard protocols with an osmometer, Vapro 5520, Wescor, Logan, UT) from five randomly selected 15\u2009\u00b0C acclimated F. heteroclitus (396\u2009\u00b1\u200914 Osmkg\u22121 mean\u2009\u00b1\u2009sd).\n\nOxygen equilibrium curves were generated using protocols described by Lilly et al.51. Re-suspended RBCs (3\u2009\u03bcL) were sandwiched between two sheets of low density polyethylene that were secured on an aluminum ring with two plastic O-rings. Blood samples were placed in a gas tight tonometry cell modified to fit into a SpectraMax 190 microplate reader (Molecular Devices, Sunnyvale, USA). Assay temperature was maintained at 15 or 33\u2009\u00b0C, and blood from the three acclimation temperatures were assayed at both assay temperatures. Samples were equilibrated with pure N2 for 30\u2009min to achieve full Hb deoxygenation (deoxyHb). O2 tension was increased by 6 to 12 increments of air (21% O2) balanced with N2 using a W\u04e7sthoff DIGAMIX gas mixing pump (H. W\u00f6sthoff Messtechnik, Bochum, Germany). Optical density (OD) was measured every 10\u2009s at 390\u2009nm, and 430\u2009nm, which correspond to the isosbestic point (i.e., OD is independent of Hb-O2 saturation), and maxima for deoxygenated Hb, respectively. Hb was assumed to be fully saturated (oxyHb) with O2 (100% air) when no change in OD at 430\u2009nm was detected after three equilibration steps.\n\nHb-O2 saturation for each equilibration step was calculated using Eqn.\u00a01.\n\n$$Hb-{O}_{2}\\,saturation=\\,\\frac{(O{D}_{430nm}-O{D}_{390nm})}{[{(O{D}_{430nm}-O{D}_{390nm})}_{oxyHb}-{(O{D}_{430nm}-O{D}_{390nm})}_{deoxyHb}]}$$\n(1)\n\nOxygen equilibrium curves (OECs) were constructed for each sample by non-linear least squares curve fitting to fit the Hb-O2 saturation data to the Hill equation (Eqn.\u00a02).\n\n$$y=\\frac{P{{\\rm{O}}}_{2}^{n}}{P{{\\rm{O}}}_{2}^{n}+{P}_{50}^{n}}$$\n(2)\n\nWhere P50 is the PO2 at which Hb is 50% saturated and is a measure of Hb-O2 affinity, and n is the cooperativity (Hill) coefficient51. All curves used in the final analyses fit well to the data (r2\u2009>\u20090.99).\n\nWe estimated the effects of acute thermal shifts (Tassay\u2009=\u200915 to 33\u2009\u00b0C) on Hb-O2 affinity by calculating the apparent heat of oxygenation using the van't Hoff isochore (\u0394H, Eqn.\u00a03 52).\n\n$$\\Delta H=2.303\\cdot R\\cdot \\frac{{\\rm{\\Delta }}\\,\\mathrm{log}({P}_{50})}{(\\frac{1}{{T}_{1}-{T}_{2}})}$$\n(3)\n\nWhere R is the gas constant and T1 and T2 are the absolute temperatures 306 and 288\u2009K respectively.\n\n### Liver mitochondrial isolation\n\nSeven F. heteroclitus were removed from the 5, 15, or 33\u2009\u00b0C thermal acclimation tanks and euthanized for liver mitochondrial isolation as described previously15. Liver tissue was excised and pooled into one aliquot of ice-cold homogenization buffer (250\u2009mM sucrose, 50\u2009mM KCl, 0.5\u2009mM EGTA, 25\u2009mM KH2PO4, 10\u2009mM HEPES, 1.5% BSA, pH\u2009=\u20097.4 at 20\u2009\u00b0C). Liver tissue was cut into approximately 1 mm3 pieces and homogenized with 5 passes of a loose-fitting Teflon pestle followed by filtration through 1-ply cheesecloth. Crude liver homogenate was centrifuged at 4\u2009\u00b0C for 10\u2009min at 600\u2009g. The fat layer was removed with aspiration and the remaining supernatant was filtered through 4-ply cheesecloth. Filtered supernatant was centrifuged at 4\u2009\u00b0C for 10\u2009min at 6000\u2009g. The resulting pellet was washed twice and suspended in 800\u2009\u03bcL of homogenization buffer and stored on ice until experimentation. Protein content was determined using a Bradford assay with BSA as a standard53.\n\n### Mitochondrial assays\n\nMitochondrial O2 binding affinity (Mito-P50) was measured using a high-resolution respirometry system (O2k MiPNetAnalyzer; Oroboros Instruments, Innsbruck, Austria). Air-saturated and O2-depleted (achieved with a yeast suspension) calibrations of respiration buffer (MiRO5; 110\u2009mM sucrose, 0.5\u2009mM EGTA, 3\u2009mM MgCl2, 60 mM K-lactobionate, 20\u2009mM taurine, 10\u2009mM KH2PO4, 20\u2009mM HEPES, 0.1% BSA, pH\u2009=\u20097.1 at 30\u2009\u00b0C54) were taken at each assay temperature (15, 33 and 37\u2009\u00b0C) using published O2 solubilities55. Mito-P50 was determined using DatLab 2 software (Oroboros Instruments). Mitochondrial respiration rate during the transition into anoxia was fit against Eqn.\u00a04.\n\n$${\\dot{M}}_{{O}_{2}}=\\frac{{J}_{max}\\times {P}_{{O}_{2}}}{{P}_{50}+{P}_{{O}_{2}}}$$\n(4)\n\nwhere $${\\dot{M}}_{{O}_{2}}$$ is the mitochondrial respiration rate, J max is maximal respiration rate and P 50 is the $${P}_{{O}_{2}}$$ at which respiration rate is half of J max . We accounted for the time delay of the O2 sensor, background O2 consumption and internal zero drift at each assay temperature18.\n\nTwo ml of MiRO5 was air-equilibrated at each assay temperature (15, 33 and 37\u2009\u00b0C) followed by the addition of liver mitochondria (0.5\u2009mg protein). A saturating mixture of substrates (glutamate 10\u2009mM, pyruvate 10\u2009mM, malate 2\u2009mM, succinate 10\u2009mM, palmitoyl-carnitine 20\u2009mM) was added to the chamber followed by ADP (2.5\u2009mM) to fuel mitochondrial respiration. Mitochondrial respiration was allowed to proceed until all O2 was consumed (i.e., anoxia). Anoxic conditions were maintained for 15\u2009min, followed by the termination of the experiment.\n\nThe effects of acute temperature shifts on Mito-P50 (i.e., \u0394 Mito-P50) were estimated by calculating the difference in Mito-P50 between Tassay\u2009=\u200915 and 33\u2009\u00b0C for each treatment.\n\n### Statistics and calculations\n\nStatistical tests were completed using R software (v3.3.3). Data are presented as mean\u2009\u00b1\u2009SEM and \u03b1 was set at.05. We confirmed the presence of normal distributions and homogeneity of variance in our data using Shapiro-Wilk and Bartlett's tests respectively. Sample size is indicated (n) in the respective figure captions.\n\nWe compared the effects of subspecies, thermal acclimation, assay temperature using three-separate linear mixed effect models (individual as the random effect) to compare Hb and Mito-P50 and Hill coefficients.\n\nWe used separate t-tests to compare subspecies effects on Hb and mitochondrial O2 binding affinity. Comparisons were made between subspecies assayed at their acclimation temperature (e.g., 33\u2009\u00b0C acclimated northern and southern fish assayed at 33\u2009\u00b0C). We accounted for an increased false discovery rate by adjusting \u03b1 using a Benjamini-Hochberg correction for our specific test of subspecies effects.\n\nThermal acclimation effects (5, 15, and 33\u2009\u00b0C) were assessed between subspecies at Tassay\u2009=\u200915\u2009\u00b0C using a two-way ANOVA. The effects of acute thermal shifts (Tassay\u2009=\u200915 to 33\u2009\u00b0C) on mitochondrial (\u0394 Mito-P50) and Hb- P50 (\u0394H) were assessed between subspecies and among thermal acclimation treatments using a two-way ANOVA.\n\nThermal acclimation and subspecies effects on hematocrit content were assessed using a two-way ANOVA. The effects of subspecies and decreasing PO2 on time to LOEhyp were assessed using a two-way ANOVA.\n\n### Data availability\n\nThe data generated during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.\n\nPublisher's note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.\n\n## References\n\n1. 1.\n\nSunday, J. M., Bates, A. E. & Dulvy, N. K. Global analysis of thermal tolerance and latitude in ectotherms. Proc. Roy. Soc. B 278, 1823\u20131830 (2011).\n\n2. 2.\n\nDeutsch, C., Ferrel, A., Seibel, B., P\u00f6rtner, H. O. & Huey, R. B. Climate change tightens a metabolic constraint on marine habitats. Science 348, 1132\u20131135 (2015).\n\n3. 3.\n\nP\u00f6rtner, H. Climate change and temperature-dependent biogeography: oxygen limitation of thermal tolerance in animals. Naturwissenschaften 88, 137\u2013146 (2001).\n\n4. 4.\n\nP\u00f6rtner, H. O. & Farrell, A. P. 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Mitochondrial respiration at low levels of oxygen and cytochrome c. Biochem. Soc. Trans. 30, 252\u2013258 (2002).\n\n55. 55.\n\nGnaiger, E. & Forstner, H. In Polarographic Oxygen Sensors 321\u2013333 (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1983). https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/978-3-642-81863-9_28.\n\n## Acknowledgements\n\nA. Cooper, K. Crowther T. Healy, and B. Marshall for assistance with animal collection. Funding was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery grants to PMJ and CJB, and an NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship to DJC.\n\n## Author information\n\n### Affiliations\n\n1. #### Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T1Z4, Canada\n\n\u2022 Dillon J. Chung\n\u2022 ,\u00a0P. R. Morrison\n\u2022 ,\u00a0H. J. Bryant\n\u2022 ,\u00a0E. Jung\n\u2022 ,\u00a0C. J. Brauner\n\u2022 \u00a0&\u00a0P. M. Schulte\n\n### Contributions\n\nD.J.C. and P.M.S. designed the experiment; D.J.C. wrote the manuscript; D.J.C. and P.M.S. revised the manuscript; D.J.C., P.R.M., H.J.B. and E.J. conducted experiments; D.J.C. analyzed the data; C.J.B. and P.M.S. secured equipment.\n\n### Competing Interests\n\nThe authors declare that they have no competing interests.\n\n### Corresponding author\n\nCorrespondence to Dillon J. 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\section{Introduction}\label{slope_intro}
A {\em straight-line drawing} of a graph, $G$, in the plane is obtained if the vertices of $G$ are represented by distinct points in the plane and every edge is represented by a straight-line segment connecting the corresponding pair of vertices and not passing through any other vertex of $G$.
If it leads to no confusion, in notation and terminology we make no distinction between a vertex and the corresponding point, and between an edge and the corresponding segment.
The {\em slope} of an edge in a straight-line drawing is the slope of the corresponding segment.
Wade and Chu \cite{wc94} defined the {\em slope number}, $sl(G)$, of a graph $G$ as the smallest number $s$ with the property that $G$ has a straight-line drawing with edges
of at most $s$ distinct slopes.
Our terminology is somewhat unorthodox: by the {\em slope} of a
line $\ell$, we mean the angle $\alpha$ modulo $\pi$ such that a
counterclockwise rotation through $\alpha$ takes the $x$-axis to a
position parallel to $\ell$. The slope of an edge (segment) is the
slope of the line containing it. In particular, the slopes of the
lines $y=x$ and $y=-x$ are $\pi/4$ and $-\pi/4$, and they are
called {\em Northeast} (or Southwest) and {\em Northwest} (or
Southeast) lines, respectively.
Directions are often
abbreviated by their first letters: N, NE, E, SE, etc. These four
directions are referred to as {\em basic}. That is, a line $\ell$
is said to be of one of the four basic directions if $\ell$ is
parallel to one of the axes or to one of the NE and NW lines $y=x$
and $y=-x$.
Obviously, if $G$ has a vertex of degree $d$, then its slope number is at least
$\lceil d/2\rceil$. Dujmovi\'c et al.~\cite{dsw04} asked if the slope number of a graph with bounded maximum degree $d$ could be arbitrarily large. Pach and P\'alv\"olgyi \cite{pp06} and Bar\'at, Matou\v sek, Wood \cite{bmw06} (independently) showed with a counting argument that the answer is yes for $d\ge 5$.
In \cite{kppt08_2}, it was shown that cubic ($3$-regular) graphs could be drawn with five slopes. The major result from which this was concluded was that subcubic graphs\footnote{A graph is subcubic if it is a proper subgraph of a cubic graph, i.e. the degree of every vertex is at most three and it is not cubic (not $3$-regular).} can be drawn with the four basic slopes.
We note here that the proof of this was slightly incorrect. We give below
a stronger version of that theorem, in which the shortcomings of the incorrect
proof can be overcome. Before the statement of the theorem, we clarify
some terminology used in it.
For any two points $p_1=(x_1,y_1), p_2=(x_2,y_2)\in {\bf R}^2$, we
say that $p_2$ is {\em to the North} (or {\em to the South} of $p_1$ if
$x_2=x_1$ and $y_2>y_1$ (or $y_2<y_1$). Analogously, we say that
$p_2$ is to the Northeast (to the Northwest) of $p_1$ if $y_2>y_1$
and $p_1p_2$ is a Northeast (Northwest) line.
\begin{theorem}\label{slopenum2} Let $G$ be a graph without components that are cycles
and whose every vertex has degree at most three.
Suppose that $G$ has at least one vertex of degree less than
three, and denote by $v_1, ..., v_m$ the vertices of degree at most two $\;(m\ge 1)$.
Then, for any sequence $x_1, x_2, \ldots , x_n$ of real numbers,
linearly independent over the rationals, $G$ has a straight-line
drawing with the following properties:
\noindent(1) {\em Vertex $v_i$ is mapped into a point with
$x$-coordinate $x(v_i)=x_i\; (1\le i\le m)$;}
\noindent(2) {\em The slope of every edge is $0, \pi/2, \pi/4,$ or
$-\pi/4.$}
\noindent(3) {\em No vertex is to the North of any vertex of
degree {\it two}.}
\noindent(4) {\em No vertex is to the North or to the Northwest of
any vertex of degree {\it one}.}
\noindent(5) {\em The $x$-coordinates of all the vertices are a linear combination with rational coefficients of $x_1,\ldots,x_n$.}
\end{theorem}
Therefore, cubic graphs require one additional slope and hence, five slopes. We improve this as following.
\begin{theorem}\label{thm_4slopes}
Every connected cubic graph has a straight-line drawing with only four slopes.
\end{theorem}
The above theorem gives a drawing of connected cubic graphs with four slopes,
one of which is not a basic slope. Further, for disconnected cubic graphs,
we require $5$ slopes.
We show a reduction of cubic graphs with triangles (Lemma \ref{triangle_free})
because of which, instead of the above theorem, our focus will be to prove the following.
\begin{theorem}\label{subthm_4slopes}
Every triangle-free connected cubic graph has a straight-line drawing with only four slopes.
\end{theorem}
We note that the four slopes used above are not the four basic slopes.
Towards this, it
was shown by Max Engelstein \cite{eng} that $3$-connected cubic graphs with a Hamiltonian cycle can be drawn with the four basic slopes.
We later improve all these results by the following
\begin{theorem}\label{thm_4basic_slopes}
Every cubic graph has a straight-line drawing with only the four basic slopes.
\end{theorem}
\begin{figure*}[htp]
{\centering
\subfigure[Petersen graph]{
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=1]
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (1) at (1,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (2) at (0,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (3) at (2,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (4) at (4,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (5) at (3,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (6) at (0,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (7) at (1,3) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (8) at (2,3) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (9) at (3,3) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (10) at (4,2) {};
\draw [black] (1) -- (2) -- (3) -- (4) -- (5) -- (1) -- (7) -- (8) -- (9) -- (10) -- (6) -- (7);
\draw [black] (2) -- (6);
\draw [black] (3) -- (8);
\draw [black] (4) -- (10);
\draw [black] (5) -- (9);
\end{tikzpicture}
}
\qquad
\subfigure[$K_{3,3}$]{
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=1]
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (1) at (1,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (2) at (3,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (3) at (4,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (4) at (3,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (5) at (1,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (6) at (0,1) {};
\draw [black] (1) -- (2) -- (3) -- (4) -- (5) -- (6) -- (1);
\draw [black] (1) -- (4);
\draw [black] (2) -- (5);
\draw [black] (3) -- (6);
\end{tikzpicture}
}
\caption[The Petersen graph and $K_{3,3}$]{The Petersen graph and $K_{3,3}$ drawn with the four basic slopes.}
}
\label{fig:petersen}
\end{figure*}
This is the first result about cubic graphs that uses a nice, fixed set of slopes instead of an unpredictable set, possibly containing slopes that are not rational multiples of $\pi$.
Also, since $K_4$ requires at least $4$ slopes, this settles the question of determining the minimum number of slopes required for cubic graphs.
We also prove
\begin{theorem}\label{karakterizacio}
Call a set of slopes {\em good} if every cubic graph has a straight-line drawing with them.
Then the following statements are equivalent for a set $S$ of four slopes.
\begin{enumerate}
\item $S$ is good.
\item $S$ is an affine image of the four basic slopes.
\item We can draw $K_4$ with $S$.
\end{enumerate}
\end{theorem}
The problem whether the slope number of graphs with maximum degree four is unbounded or not remains an interesting open problem.
There are many other related graph parameters.
The {\em thickness} of a graph $G$ is defined as the smallest number of planar subgraphs it can be decomposed into \cite{MuOS}. It is one of the several widely known graph parameters that measures how far $G$ is from being planar.
The {\em geometric thickness} of $G$, defined as the smallest number of {\em crossing-free} subgraphs of a straight-line drawing of $G$ whose union is $G$, is another similar notion \cite{Ka}.
It follows directly from the definitions that the thickness of any graph is at most as
large as its geometric thickness, which, in turn, cannot exceed its slope number.
For many interesting results about these parameters, consult \cite{DiEH, dek04, dsw04, DuW, E04, HuSW}.
A variation of the problem arises if (a) two vertices in a drawing have an edge between them if and only if the slope between them belongs to a certain set $S$ and, (b) collinearity of points is allowed. This violates the condition stated before that an edge cannot pass through vertices other than its end points. For instance, $K_n$ can be drawn with one slope. The smallest number of slopes that can be used to represent a graph in such a way is called the {\em slope parameter} of the graph.
Under these set of conditions, \cite{ambaha06} proves that the slope parameter of subcubic outerplanar graphs is at most $3$.
It was shown in \cite{kppt10} that the slope parameter of every cubic graph is at most seven.
If only the four basic slopes are used, then the graphs drawn with the above conditions are called Queen's graphs and \cite{amba06} characterizes certain graphs as Queen's graphs. Graph theoretic properties of some specific Queen's graphs can be found in \cite{bs09}.
Another variation for planar graphs is to demand a planar drawing. The {\em planar slope number} of a planar graph is the smallest number of distinct slopes with the property that the graph has a straight-line drawing with non-crossing edges using only these slopes.
Dujmo\-vi\'c, Eppstein, Suderman, and Wood \cite{dsw07} raised the question whether there exists a function $f$ with the property that the planar slope number of every planar graph with maximum degree $d$ can be bounded from above by $f(d)$.
Jelinek et al.~\cite{JJ10} have shown that the answer is yes for {\em outerplanar} graphs, that is, for planar graphs that can be drawn so that all of their vertices lie on the outer face.
Eventually the question was answered in \cite{kpp10} where it was proved that any bounded degree planar graph has a bounded planar slope number.
Finally we would mention a slightly related problem. Didimo et al.~\cite{Didimo} studied drawings of graphs where edges can only cross each other in a right angle. Such a drawing is called an RAC (right angle crossing) drawing. They showed that every graph has an RAC drawing if every edge is a polygonal line with at most three bends (i.e. it consists of at most four segments). They also gave upper bounds for the maximum number of edges if less bends are allowed. Later Arikushi et al.~\cite{rado} showed that such graphs can have at most $O(n)$ edges. Angelini et al.~\cite{Angelini} proved that every cubic graph admits an RAC drawing with at most one bend. It remained an open problem whether every cubic graph has an RAC drawing with straight-line segments. If besides orthogonal crossings, we also allow two edges to cross at $45^\circ$, then it is a straightforward corollary of Theorem \ref{thm_4basic_slopes} that every cubic graph admits such a drawing with straight-line segments.
\begin{figure*}[htp]
{\centering
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=0.5]
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (1) at (0,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (2) at (1,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (3) at (2,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (4) at (3,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (5) at (4,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (6) at (6,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (7) at (6,3) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (8) at (5,3) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (9) at (0,4) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (10) at (3,4) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (11) at (6,4) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (12) at (1,9) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (13) at (4,9) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (14) at (5,9) {};
\draw [black] (1) -- (2) -- (3) -- (4) -- (5) -- (6) -- (1);
\draw [black] (3) -- (8) -- (7) -- (6);
\draw [black] (9) -- (10) -- (11) -- (12) -- (13) -- (14) -- (9);
\draw [black] (1) -- (9);
\draw [black] (2) -- (12);
\draw [black] (4) -- (10);
\draw [black] (5) -- (13);
\draw [black] (7) -- (11);
\draw [black] (8) -- (14);
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption[The Heawood graph]{The Heawood graph drawn with the four basic slopes.}
}
\label{fig:heawood}
\end{figure*}
\section{Correct Proof of the Subcubic Theorem}
We would like the reader to note that this is a modification
of the proof as it appears in \cite{kppt08_2}.
Note that it is enough to establish the theorem for connected graphs, because if the different components of $G$ are drawn separately and placed far above each other, then none of the properties will be violated.
\subsection{Embedding Cycles}
Let $C$ be a straight-line drawing of a cycle in the plane. A
vertex $v$ of $C$ is said to be a {\em turning point} if the
slopes of the two edges meeting at $v$ are not the same.
We start with two simple auxiliary statements.
\begin{lemma}\label{slopenumlem21} Let $C$ be a straight-line drawing
of a cycle such that the slope of every edge is $0$, $\pi/4$, or
$-\pi/4$. Then the $x$-coordinates of the vertices of $C$ are {\it
not} independent over the rational numbers.
Moreover, there is a vanishing linear combination of the
$x$-coordinates of the vertices, with
as many nonzero
(rational) coefficients as many turning points $C$ has.
\end{lemma}
\noindent{\bf Proof.} Let $v_1, v_2,\ldots, v_n$ denote the
vertices of $C$ in cyclic order ($v_{n+1}=v_1$). Let $x(v_i)$ and
$y(v_i)$ be the coordinates of $v_i$. For any $i\; (1\le i\le n)$,
we have
$y(v_{i+1})-y(v_i)=\lambda_i\left(x(v_{i+1})-x(v_i)\right),$ where
$\lambda_i=0,1,$ or $-1$, depending on the slope of the edge
$v_iv_{i+1}$. Adding up these equations for all $i$, the left-hand
sides add up to zero, while the sum of the right-hand sides is a
linear combination of the numbers $x(v_1), x(v_2),\ldots, x(v_n)$
with integer coefficients of absolute value at most {\em two}.
Thus, we are done with the first statement of the lemma, unless
all of these coefficients are zero. Obviously, this could happen
if and only if $\lambda_1=\lambda_2=\ldots=\lambda_n$, which is
impossible, because then all points of $C$ would be collinear,
contradicting our assumption that in a proper {\em straight-line
drawing} no edge is allowed to pass through any vertex other than
its endpoints.
To prove the second statement, it is sufficient to notice that the
coefficient of $x(v_i)$ vanishes if and only if $v_i$ is not a
turning point. \hfill $\Box$
\medskip
Lemma \ref{slopenumlem21} shows that Theorem \ref{slopenum2} does not hold if $G$ is a cycle.
Nevertheless, according to the next claim, cycles satisfy a very
similar condition. Observe, that the main difference is that here
we have an exceptional vertex, denoted by $v_0$.
\begin{lemma}\label{slopenumlem22} Let $C$ be a cycle with vertices
$v_0, v_1, \ldots , v_m$, in this cyclic order.
Then, for any real numbers $x_1, x_2, \ldots , x_m$, linearly
independent over the rationals, $C$ has a straight-line drawing
with the following properties:
\noindent(1) {\em Vertex $v_i$ is mapped into a point with
$x$-coordinate $x(v_i)=x_i\; (1\le i\le m)$;}
\noindent(2) {\em The slope of every edge is $0, \pi/4,$ or
$-\pi/4.$}
\noindent(3) {\em No vertex is to the North of any other vertex.}
\noindent(4) {\em No vertex has a larger $y$-coordinate than
$y(v_0)$.}
\noindent(5) {\em The $x$-coordinate of $v_0$ is a linear combination with rational coefficients of $x_1,\ldots,x_m$.}
\end{lemma}
\noindent {\bf Proof.}
We can assume without loss of generality that $x_2>x_1$.
Place $v_1$ at the point $(x_1,0)$ of the
$x$-axis. Assume that for some $i<m$, we have already determined
the positions of $v_1, v_2, \ldots v_{i}$, satisfying conditions
(1)--(3). If $x_{i+1}>x_i$, then place $v_{i+1}$ at the (unique)
point Southeast of $v_i$, whose $x$-coordinate is $x_{i+1}$. If
$x_{i+1}<x_i$, then put $v_{i+1}$ at the point West of $x_i$,
whose $x$-coordinate is $x_{i+1}$. Clearly, this placement of
$v_{i+1}$ satisfies (1)--(3), and the segment $v_iv_{i+1}$ does
not pass through any point $v_j$ with $j<i$.
After $m$ steps, we obtain a noncrossing straight-line drawing of
the path $v_1v_2\ldots v_{m}$, satisfying conditions (1)--(3). We
still have to find a right location for $v_0$. Let $R_W$ and
$R_{SE}$ denote the rays (half-lines) starting at $v_1$ and
pointing to the West and to the Southeast. Further, let $R$ be the
ray starting at $v_m$ and pointing to the Northeast. It follows
from the construction that all points $v_2, \ldots, v_{m}$ lie in
the convex cone below the $x$-axis, enclosed by the rays $R_W$ and
$R_{SE}$.
Place $v_0$ at the intersection point of $R$ and the
$x$-axis. Obviously, the segment $v_mv_0$ does not pass through
any other vertex $v_j\;(0<j<m)$. Otherwise, we could find a
drawing of the cycle $v_jv_{j+1}\ldots v_m$ with slopes $0,
\pi/4,$ and $-\pi/4$. By Lemma \ref{slopenumlem21}, this would imply that the
numbers $x_j, x_{j+1}, \ldots, x_m$ are {\em not} independent over
the rationals, contradicting our assumption. It is also clear that
the horizontal segment $v_0v_1$ does not pass through any vertex
different from its endpoints because all other vertices are
below the horizontal line determined by $v_0v_1$.
Hence, we obtain a proper
straight-line drawing of $C$ satisfying conditions (1),(2), and
(4). Note that (5) automatically follows from Lemma \ref{slopenumlem21}.
It remains to verify (3). The only thing we have to check is that
$x(v_0)$ does not coincide with any other $x(v_i)$. Suppose it
does, that is, $x(v_0)=x(v_i)=x_i$ for some $i>0$. By the second
statement of Lemma \ref{slopenumlem21}, there is a vanishing linear combination
$$\lambda_0x(v_0)+\lambda_1x_1+\lambda_2x_2+\ldots+\lambda_mx_m=0$$
with rational coefficients $\lambda_i$, where the number of
nonzero coefficients is at least the number of turning points,
which cannot be smaller than {\em three}. Therefore, if in this
linear combination we replace $x(v_0)$ by $x_i$, we still obtain a
nontrivial rational combination of the numbers $x_1, x_2,\ldots,
x_m$. This contradicts our assumption that these numbers are
independent over the rationals. \hfill $\Box$
\medskip
\subsection{Subcubic Graphs - Proof of Theorem \ref{slopenum2}}
First we settle Theorem \ref{slopenum2} in a special case.
\begin{lemma}\label{slopenumlem31} Let $m,k\ge 2$ and let $G$ be a graph consisting of two
disjoint cycles, $C=\{v_0, v_1, \ldots , v_m\}$ and $C'=\{v_0', v_1', \ldots , v_m'\}$,
connected by a single edge $v_0v'_0$.
Then, for any sequence $x_1, x_2, \ldots , x_m, x'_1, x'_2, \ldots , x'_k$
of real numbers, linearly independent over the rationals, $G$ has a
straight-line drawing satisfying the following conditions:
\noindent(1) {\em The vertices $v_i$ and $v'_j$ are mapped into points with
$x$-coordinates $x(v_i)=x_i\; (1\le i\le m)$ and $x(v_j)=x'_j\; (1\le j\le k)$.}
\noindent(2) {\em The slope of every edge is $0, \pi/2, \pi/4,$ or $-\pi/4.$}
\noindent(3) {\em No vertex is to the North of any vertex of degree {\it two}.}
\noindent(4) {\em The $x$-coordinates of all the vertices are a linear combination with rational coefficients of $x_1, x_2, \ldots , x_m, x'_1, x'_2, \ldots , x'_k$.}
\end{lemma}
\noindent {\bf Proof.}
Apply Lemma \ref{slopenumlem22} to cycle $C$ with vertices $v_0, v_1, \ldots , v_m$ and with
assigned $x$-coordinates $x_1, x_2, \ldots , x_m$, and analogously,
to the cycle $C'$, with vertices $v'_0, v'_1, \ldots , v'_k$ and assigned
$x$-coordinates $x'_1, x'_2, \ldots , x'_k$. For simplicity, the resulting
drawings are also denoted by $C$ and $C'$.
Let $x_0$ and $x'_0$ denote the $x$-coordinates of $v_0\in C$ and $v'_0\in C'.$
It follows from (5) of Lemma \ref{slopenumlem22} that $x_0$
is a linear combination of $x_1, x_2, \ldots , x_m$, and $x_0'$
is a linear combination of $x'_1, x'_2, \ldots , x'_k$ with rational coefficients.
Therefore, if $x_0=x'_0$, then there is a nontrivial
linear combination of $x_1, x_2, \ldots , x_m, x'_1, x'_2, \ldots , x'_k$
that gives $0$, contradicting the assumption that these numbers are
independent over the rationals. Thus, we can conclude that $x_0\ne x'_0$.
Assume without loss of generality that $x_0<x'_0$.
Reflect $C'$ about the $x$-axis, and shift it in the vertical
direction so that $v'_0$ ends up to the Northeast from $v_0$. Clearly, we can
add the missing edge $v_0v'_0$. Let $D$ denote the resulting drawing of $G$.
We claim that $D$ meets all the requirements. Conditions (1),
(2), (3) and (4) are obviously satisfied, we only have to check that no vertex lies
in the interior of an edge. It follows from Lemma \ref{slopenumlem22} that the $y$-coordinates
of $v_1, \ldots , v_m$ are all smaller than or equal to the $y$-coordinate of
$v_0$ and the $y$-coordinates of $v'_1, \ldots , v'_k$ are all greater than or
equal to the $y$-coordinate of $v'_0$. We also have $y(v_0)<y(v'_0)$.
Therefore, there is no vertex in the interior of $v_0v'_0$.
Moreover, no edge of $C$ (resp. $C'$) can contain any vertex
of $v'_0, v'_1, \ldots , v'_k$ (resp. $v_0, v_1, \ldots , v_m$)
in its interior. \hfill $\Box$
\medskip
The rest of the proof is by induction on the number of vertices of $G$. The
statement is trivial if the number of vertices is at most {\em
two}. Suppose that we have already established Theorem \ref{slopenum2} for all
graphs with fewer than $n$ vertices.
Suppose that $G$ has $n$ vertices, it is not a cycle and not
the union of two cycles
connected by one edge.
Unfortunately we have to distinguish several cases. Most of these are very special and less interesting instances that prevent us from using our main argument, which is considered last after clearing all obstacles, as Case 9.
\medskip
\noindent{\bf Case 1:} {\em $G$ has a vertex of degree {\it one}}.
\smallskip
Assume, without loss of generality, that $v_1$ is such a vertex.
If $G$ has no vertex of degree {\em three}, then it consists of a
simple path $P=v_1v_2\ldots v_m$, say. Place $v_m$ at the point
$(x_m,0)$. In general, assuming that $v_{i+1}$ has already been
embedded for some $i<m$, and $x_i<x_{i+1}$, place $v_{i}$ at the
point West of $v_{i+1}$, whose $x$-coordinate is $x_{i}$. If
$x_i>x_{i+1}$, then put $v_{i}$ at the point Northeast of
$v_{i+1}$, whose $x$-coordinate is $x_{i}$. The resulting drawing
of $G=P$ meets all the requirements of the theorem. To see this,
it is sufficient to notice that if $v_j$ would be Northwest of
$v_m$ for some $j<m$, then we could apply Lemma \ref{slopenumlem21} to the cycle
$v_jv_{j+1}\ldots v_m$, and conclude that the numbers $x_j,
x_{j+1},\ldots, x_m$ are dependent over the rationals. This
contradicts our assumption.
Assume next that $v_1$ is of degree {\em one}, and that $G$ has at
least one vertex of degree {\em three}. Suppose without loss of
generality that $v_1v_2\ldots v_kw$ is a path in $G$, whose
internal vertices are of degree {\em two}, but the degree of $w$
is {\em three}. Let $G'$ denote the graph obtained from $G$ by
removing the vertices $v_1, v_2, \ldots , v_{k}$. Obviously, $G'$
is a connected graph, in which the degree of $w$ is {\em two}.
If $G'$ is a {\em cycle}, then apply Lemma \ref{slopenumlem22} to $C=G'$ with $w$
playing the role of the vertex $v_0$ which has no preassigned
$x$-coordinate. We obtain an embedding of $G'$ with edges of
slopes $0, \pi/4,$ and $-\pi/4$ such that $x(v_i)=x_i$ for all
$i>k$ and there is no vertex to the North, to the Northeast, or to
the Northwest of $w$. By (5) of Lemma \ref{slopenumlem22}, $x(w)$ is a linear combination of
$x_{k+1},\ldots, x_m$ with rationals coefficients.
Therefore, $x(w)\neq x_k$, so we can place $v_k$ at the point to
the Northwest or to the Northeast of $w$, whose $x$-coordinate is
$x_k$, depending on whether $x(w)>x_k$ or $x(w)<x_k$. After this,
embed $v_{k-1}, \ldots , v_1$, in this order, so that $v_i$ is
either to the Northeast or to the West of $v_{i+1}$ and
$x(v_i)=x_i$. According to property (4) in Lemma \ref{slopenumlem21}, the path
$v_1v_2\ldots v_k$ lies entirely above $G'$, so no point of
$G$ can lie to the North or to the Northwest of $v_1$.
If $G'$ is {\em not a cycle}, then use the induction hypothesis to
find an embedding of $G'$ that satisfies all conditions of Theorem
\ref{slopenum2}, with $x(w)=x_k$ and $x(v_i)=x_i$ for every $i>k$. Now place
$v_k$ very far from $w$, to the North of it, and draw $v_{k-1},
\ldots , v_1$, in this order, in precisely the same way as in the
previous case. Now if $v_k$ is far enough, then none of the points
$v_k, v_{k-1},\ldots, v_1$ is to the Northwest or to the Northeast
of any vertex of $G'$. It remains to check that condition (4) is true
for $v_1$, but this follows from the fact that there is no point
of $G$ whose $y$-coordinate is larger than that of $v_1$.
\smallskip
{} From now on, we can and will assume that $G$ has {\em no vertex of
degree one}.
A graph with {\em four} vertices and {\em five} edges between them
is said to be a {\em $\Theta$-graph}.
\medskip
\noindent{\bf Case 2:} {\em $G$ contains a $\Theta$-subgraph.}
\smallskip
Suppose that $G$ has a $\Theta$-subgraph with vertices $a,b,c,d,$
and edges $ab$, $bc$, $ac$, $ad$, $bd$.
If neither $c$ nor $d$ has a third
neighbor, then $G$ is identical to this graph, which can easily be
drawn in the plane with all conditions of the theorem satisfied.
If $c$ and $d$ are connected by an edge, then all four points of
the $\Theta$-subgraph have degree {\em three}, so that $G$ has no
other vertices. So $G$ is a complete graph of four vertices, and it
has a drawing that meets the
requirements.
Suppose that $c$ and $d$ have a common neighbor $e\neq a,b$. If
$e$ has no further neighbor, then $a,b,c,d,e$ are the only
vertices of $G$, and again we can easily find a proper drawing.
Thus, we can assume that $e$ has a third neighbor $f$. By the
induction hypothesis, $G'=G\setminus \{a,b,c,d,e\}$ has a drawing
satisfying the conditions of Theorem \ref{slopenum2}. In particular, no vertex
of $G'$ is to the North of $f$ (and to the Northwest of $f$,
provided that the degree of $f$ in $G'$ is {\em one}). Further,
consider a drawing $H$ of the subgraph of $G$ induced by the
vertices $a,b,c,d,e$, which satisfies the requirements. We
distinguish two subcases.
If the degree of $f$ in $G'$ is {\em one}, then take a very small
{\em homothetic} copy of $H$ (i.e., similar copy in parallel
position), and rotate it about $e$ in the clockwise direction
through $3\pi/4$. There is no point of this drawing, denoted by
$H'$, to the Southeast of $e$, so that we can translate it into a
position in which $e$ is to the Northwest of $f\in V(G')$ and very
close to it, to a sufficient distance so that (5) is satisfied.
Connecting now $e$ to $f$, we obtain a drawing of $G$
satisfying the conditions. Note that it was important to make $H'$
very small and to place it very close to $f$, to make sure that
none of its vertices is to the North of any vertex of $G'$ whose
degree is at most {\em two}, or to the Northwest of any vertex of
degree {\em one} (other than $f$).
If the degree of $f$ in $G'$ is {\em two}, then we follow the same
procedure, except that now $H'$ is a small copy of $H$, rotated by
$\pi$. We translate $H'$ into a position in which $e$ is to the
North of $f$, and connect $e$ to $f$ by a vertical segment. It is
again clear that the resulting drawing of $G$ meets the
requirements in Theorem \ref{slopenum2}. Thus, we are done if $c$ and $d$ have a
common neighbor $e$.
Suppose now that only one of $c$ and $d$ has a third neighbor,
different from $a$ and $b$. Suppose, without loss of generality,
that this vertex is $c$, so that the degree of $d$ is {\em two}.
Then in $G'=G\setminus \{a,b,d\}$, the degree of $c$ is {\em one}.
Apply the induction hypothesis to $G'$ so that the $x$-coordinate
originally assigned to $d$ is now assigned to $c$ (which had no
preassigned $x$-coordinate in $G$). In the resulting drawing, we
can easily reinsert the remaining vertices, $a, b, d$, by adding a
very small square whose lowest vertex is at $c$ and whose
diagonals are parallel to the coordinate axes. The highest vertex
of this square will represent $d$, and the other two vertices will
represent $a$ and $b$.
We are left with the case when both $c$ and $d$ have a third
neighbor, other than $a$ and $b$, but these neighbors are
different. Denote them by $c'$ and $d'$, respectively. Create a
new graph $G'$ from $G$, by removing $a, b, c, d$ and adding a new
vertex $v$, which is connected to $c'$ and $d'$. Draw $G'$ using
the induction hypothesis, and reinsert $a,b,c,d$ in a small
neighborhood of $v$ so that they form the vertex set of a very
small square with diagonal $ab$. (See Figure \ref{slopenumfig1}.) As before, we
have to choose this square sufficiently small to make sure that
$a, b, c, d$ are not to the North of any vertex $w\neq c',d',v$ of
$G'$, whose degree is at most {\em two}, or to the Northwest of
any vertex of degree {\em one} and pick an appropriate scaling
to make sure that (5) is satisfied.
Thus, we are done if $G$ has a $\Theta$-subgraph.
\smallskip
So, from now on we assume that $G$ has {\em no
$\Theta$-subgraph}.
\begin{figure}[htb]
\epsfxsize=10truecm
\begin{center}
\epsffile{theta-vissza.eps}
\caption{Replacing $v$ by $\Theta$.}
\label{slopenumfig1}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\medskip
\noindent{\bf Case 3:} {\em $G$ has no cycle that passes through a
vertex of degree {\em two}.}
\smallskip
Since $G$ is not three-regular, it contains at least one vertex of
degree {\em two}. Consider a decomposition of $G$ into
$2$-connected blocks and edges. If a block contains a vertex of
degree {\em two}, then it consists of a single edge. The block
decomposition has a treelike structure, so that there is a vertex
$w$ of degree {\em two}, such that $G$ can be obtained as the
union of two graphs, $G_1$ and $G_2$, having only the vertex $w$
in common, and there is no vertex of degree {\em two} in $G_1$.
By the induction hypothesis, for any assignment of rationally
independent $x$-coordinates to all vertices of degree less than
{\em three}, $G_1$ and $G_2$ have proper straight-line embeddings
(drawings) satisfying conditions (1)--(5) of the theorem. The only
vertex of $G_1$ with a preassigned $x$-coordinate is $w$. Applying
a vertical translation, if necessary, we can achieve that in both
drawings $w$ is mapped into the same point. Using the induction
hypothesis, we obtain that in the union of these two drawings,
there is no vertex in $G_1$ or $G_2$ to the North or to the
Northwest of $w$, because the degree of $w$ in $G_1$ and $G_2$ is
{\em one} (property (4)). This is stronger than what we need:
indeed, in $G$ the degree of $w$ is {\em two}, so that we require
only that there is no point of $G$ to the North of $w$ (property
(3)).
The superposition of the drawings of $G_1$ and $G_2$ satisfies all
conditions of the theorem. Only two problems may occur:
\begin{enumerate}
\item A vertex of $G_1$ may end up at a point to the North
of a vertex of $G_2$ with degree {\em two}.
\item The (unique) edges in $G_1$ and $G_2$, incident to $w$,
may partially overlap.
\end{enumerate}
Notice that both of these events can be avoided by enlarging the
drawing of $G_1$, if necessary, from the point $w$, and rotating
it about $w$ by $\pi/4$ in the clockwise direction. The latter
operation is needed only if problem 2 occurs. This completes the
induction step in the case when $G$ has no cycle passing through a
vertex of degree {\em two}.
\medskip
\noindent{\bf Case 4:} {\em $G$ has two adjacent vertices of degree {\em two}}.
\smallskip
Take a longest path that contains only degree two vertices. Without loss of generality, assume that this path is $v_1v_2\ldots v_k$. Denote the degree three neighbor of $v_1$ by $u$ and the degree three neighbor of $v_k$ by $w$.
Let
$G'=G\setminus \{v_1\ldots v_k\}$.
Now we distinguish two subcases depending on whether these two vertices are the same or not.
\medskip
{\em Case} 4/a: {\em $u\ne w$}.
\smallskip
First suppose that $G'$ is connected.
If $G'$ is not a cycle, embed it using induction with $x_1$ being the prescribed $x$-coordinate of $u$ and $x_k$ being the prescribed $x$-coordinate of $w$. Now place the $v_i$ vertices one by one high above this drawing, starting with $v_1$, using NW and NE directions. Finally we embed $v_k$ above $w$ and we are done.
If $G'$ is a cycle, then embed it using Lemma \ref{slopenumlem22} with $v_0=u$ and prescribed $x$-coordinate $x_k$ for $w$. Remember that there are no vertices above $u$. So first, we can place $v_1$ to the NW or NE from $u$. Then we place the $v_i$ vertices one by one using NW and NE directions. Finally we embed $v_k$ above $w$ and we are done.
Now suppose
$G'$
has two components. If none of them is a cycle,
embed both of them using induction, high above each other, with $x_1$ being the prescribed $x$-coordinate of $u$ and $x_k$ being the prescribed $x$-coordinate of $w$. Now place the $v_i$ vertices one by one high above the so far drawn components, starting with $v_1$, using NW and NE directions. Finally we embed $v_k$ above $w$ and we are done.
Finally, if $G'=G\setminus \{v_1\ldots v_k\}$ has two components one of which, say the one containing $w$, is a cycle, then embed the component of $u$ using induction with prescribed $x$-coordinate $x_1$ for $u$ or, if it is a cycle, Lemma \ref{slopenumlem22} with $v_0=u$. It is easy to see that we can embed the $v_i$ vertices one by one, starting with $v_1$, just like in the previous cases, and then the rest of the $v_i$ vertices one by one using NW and NE directions. Finally we embed the cycle containing $w$ using Lemma \ref{slopenumlem22} with $v_0=w$, but upside down, so that $w$ has (one of) the smallest $y$-coordinate(s). Shift this cycle vertically such that the edge $v_kw$ has NW or NE direction and we are done.
Note that this last case even works for $k=1$.
\medskip
{\em Case} 4/b: {\em $u=w$}.
\smallskip
Denote the third neighbor of $u$ by $t$.
If the degree of $t$ is two, then deleting the longest path containing $t$ that contains only degree two vertices, the remaining graph will have two components, one of which is a cycle. Thus we end up exactly in the last subcase of Case 4/a, thus we are done.
If the degree of $t$ is three, apply Lemma \ref{slopenumlem22} with $v_0=u$ to the cycle $C=uv_1\ldots v_k$. Denote the $x$-coordinate of $u$ by $x_0$. If $G\setminus C$ is a cycle, we can use Lemma \ref{slopenumlem31}. Otherwise, embed $G\setminus C$ using induction with $x_0$ being the prescribed $x$-coordinate of $t$. Now place $C$ sufficiently high above this drawing.
\medskip
\medskip
\noindent{\bf Case 5 (Main case):} {\em $G$ has a cycle passing through a
vertex of degree {\em two}}.
\smallskip
By assumption, $G$ itself is not a cycle. Therefore, we can also
find a {\em shortest} cycle $C$ whose vertices are denoted by $v,
u_1, \ldots , u_{k}$, in this order, where the degree of $v$ is
{\em two} and the degree of $u_1$ is {\em three}. The length of
$C$ is $k+1$.
It follows from the minimality of $C$ that $u_i$ and $u_j$ are not
connected by an edge of $G$, for any $|i-j|>1$. Moreover, if
$|i-j|>2$, then $u_i$ and $u_j$ do not even have a common neighbor
$(1\le i\neq j\le k)$. This implies that any vertex $v\in
V(G\setminus C)$ has at most {\em three} neighbors on $C$, and
these neighbors must be consecutive on $C$. However, {\em three}
consecutive vertices of $C$, together with their common neighbor,
would form a $\Theta$-subgraph in $G$ (see Case 2). Hence, we can
assume that every vertex belonging to $G\setminus C$ is joined to
at most {\em two} vertices on $C$.
Consider the list $v_1, v_2,\ldots, v_m$ of all vertices of $G$
with degree {\em two}. (Recall that we have already settled the
case when $G$ has a vertex of degree {\em one}.) Assume without
loss of generality that $v_1=v$ and that $v_i$ belongs to $C$ if
and only if $1\le i\le j$ for some $j\le m$.
\medskip
Let ${\bf x}$ denote the {\em assignment} of $x$-coordinates to
the vertices of $G$ with degree {\em two}, that is, ${\bf
x}=(x(v_1), x(v_2), \ldots,$$x(v_m))$$=(x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_m)$.
Given $G$, $C$, ${\bf x}$, and a real parameter $L$, we define the
following so-called {\sc Embedding Procedure$(G, C, {\bf x}, L)$}
to construct a drawing of $G$ that meets all requirements of the
theorem, and satisfies the additional condition that the
$y$-coordinate of every vertex of $C$ is at least $L$ higher than
the $y$-coordinates of all other vertices of $G$.
\medskip
Let $u_1'$ be the neighbor of $u_1$ in $G \setminus C$.
We mark two different cases here and all the steps in the Embedding
Procedure will be defined for both the cases.
If $u_1'$ is a vertex of degree three in $G$, we will call it Subcase 5(a),
and we define $G' = G \setminus C$.
On the other hand, if $u_1'$ is a vertex of degree two, then by Case 4, its
other neighbor (besides $v$), say $u_1''$, is a degree three vertex. We call
this Subcase 5(b) and define
$G' = G \setminus (C \cup \{u_1'\})$.
The main idea
of the Embedding procedure is to inductively embed $G'$ and place the
rest of the graph in a convenient way.
\smallskip
Let $B_i$ denote the set of all vertices of $G'$ that
have precisely $i$ neighbors on $C\; (i=0,1,2)$. Thus, we have
$V(G')=B_0\cup B_1\cup B_2$. Further, $B_1=B_1^2\cup
B_1^3$, where an element of $B_1$ belongs to $B_1^2$ or $B_1^3$,
according to whether its degree in $G$ is {\em two} or {\em
three}.
\noindent{\sc Step} 1: If $G'$ is {\em not} a cycle, then
construct recursively a drawing of
$G'$ satisfying the conditions of Theorem \ref{slopenum2} with the
assignment ${\bf x}'$ of $x$-coordinates $x(v_i)=x_i$ for $j<i\le
m$, and
$x(u_1')=x_1$ in Subcase 5(a), and, $x(u_1'')= x(u_1')$ in Subcase 5(b).
\smallskip
If $G'$ is a cycle, then, by assumption, there are at least two
edges between $C$ and $G'$. One of them connects $u_1$ to $u_1'$.
Let $u_{\alpha}u'_{\alpha}$ be another such edge, where
$u_{\alpha}\in C$ and $u'_{\alpha}\in G'$. Since the maximum degree is three,
$u'_1\ne u'_{\alpha}$.
Now construct recursively a drawing of
$G'$ satisfying the conditions of Lemma \ref{slopenumlem22},
with the exceptional vertex as $u'_{\alpha}$.
\smallskip
We note here that if $G'$ is disconnected, but the components are not
cycles, then we just place them vertically far apart and we still have a
good recursive drawing of $G'$.
Suppose that it is disconnected and
some components are cycles. If the component connected to $u_1$ or
$u_1'$ (based on Subcase 5(a) or 5(b)) is a cycle,
we draw the cycle exactly as in the
preceding paragraph. For all other components that are cycles,
we note that since $G$ is connected, there must be at least
one vertex of the cycle connected to $G \setminus G'$ (in fact at least two
because of Case $4$). This is a degree three vertex in $G$ and we will
call this the exceptional vertex and draw the cycle using Lemma
\ref{slopenumlem22}. At the end, we shift all components vertically to
place them sufficiently far apart. We note that this drawing of $G'$
will satisfy all the conditions in Theorem \ref{slopenum2}.
\smallskip
\noindent{\sc Step} 2: For each element of $B_1^2\cup B_2$, take
two rays starting at this vertex, pointing to the Northwest and to
the North. Further, take a vertical ray pointing to the North from
each element of $B_1^3$ and each element of the set $B_{\bf
x}:=\{(x_2, 0), (x_3, 0), \ldots , (x_j, 0)\}$. Let ${\cal R}$
denote the set of all of these rays. Choose the $x$-axis above all
points of $G'$ and all intersection points between the rays in
$\cal R$.
For any $u_h\; (1\le h\le k)$ whose degree in $G$ is {\em three},
define $N(u_h)$ as the unique neighbor of $u_h$ in $G'$.
If $u_h$ has degree {\em two} in $G$, then $u_h=v_i$ for some
$1\le i\le j$, and let $N(u_h)$ be the point $(x_i, 0)$.
\smallskip
\begin{figure}[htb]
\epsfxsize=6.5truecm
\begin{center}
\epsffile{cycle.eps}
\caption[Recursively placing vertices]{Recursively place $u_1, u_2, \ldots u_{k}$
on the rays belonging to ${\cal R}$.}
\label{slopenumfig2}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\noindent{\sc Step} 3: Recursively place $u_1, u_2, \ldots u_{k}$
on the rays belonging to ${\cal R}$, as follows.
In Subcase 5(a), place $u_1$ on
the vertical ray starting at $N(u_1)=u_1'$ such that $y(u_1)=L$.
In Subcase 5(b), place $u_1'$ on the vertical ray starting at $N(u_1') = u_1''$
such that $y(u_1') = L$. If $x_1< x(u_1')$ then place $u_1$ to the
West of $u_1'$ on the line $x=x_1$, otherwise place $u_1$ to the
Northeast of $u_1$, again on $x=x_1$.
Suppose that for some $i<k$ we have already placed $u_1, u_2,
\ldots u_{i}$, so that $L\le y(u_1)\le y(u_2)\le\ldots\le y(u_i)$
and there is no vertex to the West of $u_i$. Next we determine the
place of $u_{i+1}$.
If $N(u_{i+1})\in B_1^2$, then let $r\in{\cal R}$ be the ray
starting at $N(u_{i+1})$ and pointing to the Northwest. If
$N(u_{i+1})\in B_1^3\cup B_{\bf x}$, let $r\in{\cal R}$ be the ray
starting at $N(u_{i+1})$ and pointing to the North. In both cases,
place $u_{i+1}$ on $r$: if $u_i$ lies on the left-hand side of
$r$, then put $u_{i+1}$ to the Northeast of $u_i$; otherwise, put
$u_{i+1}$ to the West of $u_i$.
If $N(u_{i+1})\in B_2$, then let $r\in{\cal R}$ be the ray
starting at $N(u_{i+1})$ and pointing to the North, or, if we have
already placed a point on this ray, let $r$ be the other ray from
$N(u_{i+1})$, pointing to the Northwest, and proceed as before.
\smallskip
\begin{figure}[htb]
\epsfxsize=7truecm
\begin{center}
\epsffile{kor-vege.eps}
\caption{Finding the right position for $u_0$.}
\label{slopenumfig3}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\noindent{\sc Step} 4: Suppose we have already placed $u_{k}$. It
remains to find the right position for $u_0:=v$, which has only
two neighbors, $u_1$ and $u_{k}$. Let $r$ be the ray at $u_{1}$,
pointing to the North. If $u_{k}$ lies on the left-hand side of
$r$, then put $u_0$ on $r$ to the Northeast of $u_k$; otherwise,
put $u_0$ on $r$, to the West of $u_{k}$.
During the whole procedure, we have never placed a vertex on any
edge, and all other conditions of Theorem \ref{slopenum2} are satisfied \hfill $\Box$.
\medskip
Remark that the $y$-coordinates of the vertices $u_0=v, u_1,
\ldots , u_{k}$ are at least $L$ higher than the $y$-coordinates
of all vertices in $G\setminus C$. If we fix $G, C,$ and ${\bf
x}$, and let $L$ tend to infinity, the coordinates of the vertices
given by the above {\sc Embedding Procedure$(G, C, {\bf x}, L)$}
change continuously.
\section{Proof of Theorem \ref{subthm_4slopes}}
\subsection{Assumptions}
This subsection is dedicated to showing that assuming that the cubic
graph is bridgeless and triangle free does not restrict generality.
We would use theorem \ref{slopenum2} to patch together different components of a cubic graph obtained after removal of some edges. For this we would want to note that we could rotate the components by any multiple of $\pi/4$ and still have a graph with the four basic slopes.
\begin{claim}\label{edge_conn}
A cubic graph with a bridge or a minimal two-edge disconnecting set can be drawn with the four basic slopes.
\end{claim}
\begin{proof}
We note that the above method cannot be extended to a minimal disconnecting set with more edges, as then, one of the components might be a cycle and then the above theorem cannot be invoked.
Both components obtained by removing the bridge can be drawn with four slopes using Theorem \ref{slopenum2}. Both have the north direction free for the vertex of degree two. To put these together, rotate the second one by $\pi$ and place the degree two vertices above each other. Move the components far enough so that none of the other vertices or edges overlap.
For a two-edge disconnecting set, we may note that these edges must be vertex-disjoint or the graph would contain a bridge. Then, the same procedure as above can be used, now keeping the distance between the two vertices of degree two the same in both components.
\end{proof}
\begin{claim}\label{vert_conn}
A cubic graph with a cut-vertex or a two-vertex disconnecting set can be drawn with the four basic slopes.
\end{claim}
\begin{proof}
If the graph has a cut-vertex, then it has a bridge. If it has a two-vertex disconnecting set, then it has a two-edge disconnecting set. In both cases we can then invoke Claim \ref{edge_conn} to draw the graph with four slopes.
\end{proof}
\begin{remark}\label{conn_remark}
A consequence of the above discussion is that any cubic graph that cannot be drawn with the four basic slopes (N,E,NE,NW) must be three vertex and edge connected.
\end{remark}
\begin{claim}\label{triangle_free}
Any cubic graph with a triangle can be drawn with four slope
\end{claim}
\begin{proof}
First we note that by using the above claims, we may assume that we only consider cubic graphs in which all triangles are connected to the rest of the graph by vertex disjoint edges. If not, then the graph is either $K_4$ or has a two-vertex disconnecting set. A $K_4$ can be drawn using the vertices of a square. In the later case, we can draw the graph with four slopes using Claim \ref{vert_conn}.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\begin{center}
\psset{xunit=.5cm,yunit=.5cm,dotsize=5pt}
\begin{pspicture}(0,0)(20,8)
\psellipse[fillcolor=lightgray](4,4)(3,4)
\psline(2.5,5.5)(4,4)
\psline(3,2)(4,4)
\psline(6,5)(4,4)
\psellipse(4,4)(0.3,0.3)
\parabola[doubleline=true,doublesep=0.015]{->}(4.2,4.4)(7,6)
\rput(4,-0.5){$G'$}
\rput(4.1,3.4){$v$}
\psline(9.7,5.5)(11.2,4)
\psline(10.2,2)(11.2,4)
\psline(13.2,5)(11.2,4)
\psline(10.2,5)(12.2,4.5)
\psdot(11.2,4)
\psdot(10.2,5)
\psdot(12.2,4.5)
\rput(11.4,3.5){$v_1$}
\rput(10.3,5.5){$v_2$}
\rput(12.1,5){$v_3$}
\psline{->}(11.1,4.9)(12,6.5)
\rput(12.1,6.9){Fourth slope}
\end{pspicture}
\end{center}
\caption[Adding a triangle]{Adding the triangle to the drawing of $G'$ with four slopes. \label{figure:drawingp}}
\end{figure}
We now prove the claim by contradiction. Suppose there exist cubic graphs with triangles that cannot be drawn with four slopes. By the preceding discussion all triangles in these graphs are necessarily connected to the graphs with vertex-disjoint edges. Of all such graphs consider the one with minimum number of vertices, say $G$. The graph $G'$ obtained by contracting the edges of the triangle $\{v_1,v_2,v_3\}$ is also cubic and has fewer vertices. Either all triangles in $G'$ are connected to the rest of $G'$ with vertex-disjoint edges, in which case we invoke the minimality of $G$ to conclude that $G'$ can be drawn with $4$ slopes (note: here the method of drawing the graph is unknown. We just know there exists a drawing of $G'$ with four slopes). Or, some triangles in $G'$ could be connected to the rest of $G'$ with edges that are not vertex-disjoint. Here we can use Theorem \ref{slopenum2} and the argument of the preceding paragraph to draw $G'$ using four slopes. And lastly, $G'$ could be a triangle-free graph. In this case we use Theorem \ref{subthm_4slopes} to draw $G'$. Hence, $G'$ can always be drawn with four slopes. In $G'$, we call the vertex formed by contracting the edges of the triangle as $v$. Since there is one slope that is not used by the edges incident on $v$, we draw a segment with this slope in a very small neighborhood of $v$ as shown in the figure, to obtaining a drawing of $G$ with four slopes. This contradicts the existence of a minimal counterexample and hence all graphs with triangles can be drawn with four slopes.
\end{proof}
\begin{remark} \label{triangle_free_remark}
We note here that the preceding Lemma also holds in stricter conditions. To be precise, if the set of basic slopes are sufficient to draw all triangle-free cubic graphs, then they are sufficient to draw all cubic graphs.
\end{remark}
\begin{remark}
It must be noted that this also gives an algorithm for drawing cubic graphs with triangles, namely, we contract triangles until we get a graph that can be drawn with either the Claims \ref{edge_conn},\ref{vert_conn},\ref{triangle_free} or Theorem \ref{slopenum2} or with our drawing strategy for triangle-free bridgeless graphs. Then we can backtrack with placing a series of edges which give us back all the contracted triangles.
\end{remark}
\subsection{Drawing strategy}
\begin{figure}[h!]
\begin{center}
\psset{xunit=.5cm,yunit=.5cm,dotsize=5pt}
\begin{pspicture}(0,-6)(20,23)
\pspolygon(0,20.5)(3,22.5)(6,20.5)(5,18)(1,18)
\pspolygon(1.5,20.2)(4.5,20.2)(2,19)(3,21)(4,19)
\psline[linewidth=2pt](3,21)(3,22.5)
\rput(3.29,21.75){3}
\psline[linewidth=2pt](0,20.5)(1.5,20.2)
\rput(0.85,20.7){1}
\psline[linewidth=2pt](1,18)(2,19)
\rput(1.45,19){2}
\psline[linewidth=2pt](5,18)(4,19)
\rput(4.55,19){4}
\psline[linewidth=2pt](4.5,20.2)(6,20.5)
\rput(5.15,20.7){5}
\psline[doubleline=true,doublesep=1.5pt]{->}(9,20)(11,20)
\psline[linewidth=2pt](14,18)(14,23)
\rput(14,23.5){1}
\psline[linewidth=2pt](15,18)(15,23)
\rput(15,23.5){2}
\psline[linewidth=2pt](16,18)(16,23)
\rput(16,23.5){3}
\psline[linewidth=2pt](17,18)(17,23)
\rput(17,23.5){4}
\psline[linewidth=2pt](18,18)(18,23)
\rput(18,23.5){5}
\psline[linewidth=2pt](0,14.5)(3,16.5)(6,14.5)(5,12)(1,12)
\psline(0,14.5)(1,12)
\pspolygon(1.5,14.2)(4.5,14.2)(2,13)(3,15)(4,13)
\psline[doubleline=true,doublesep=1.5pt]{->}(9,14)(11,14)
\psline(14,12)(14,17)
\psline(15,12)(15,17)
\psline(16,12)(16,17)
\psline(17,12)(17,17)
\psline(18,12)(18,17)
\psline[linewidth=2pt](14,15)(16,15.5)(18,16)(17,16.25)(15,16.75)
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\psdot(16,15.5)
\psdot(18,16)
\psdot(17,16.25)
\psdot(15,16.75)
\psline[linewidth=2pt](4,7)(1.5,8.2)(4.5,8.2)(2,7)(3,9)
\psline(4,7)(3,9)
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\caption{Process of drawing the cycles. \label{figure:drawingp}}
\end{figure}
Because of the above claims, we would now only focus on graphs that are bridgeless and triangle-free. Since the graph is bridgeless, Petersen's theorem implies that it has a matching. We fix the slope of all the edges in the matching to be $\pi/2$ so that they all lie on (distinct) vertical lines (Figure~\ref{figure:drawingp}). If this matching is removed, then the graph consists of disjoint cycles. Next we isolate one special edge from each cycle. Our method of drawing the graph with four slopes then is as follows: For each cycle, remove the selected edge and draw the remaining path by going between corresponding vertical lines of the cycle alternating with slopes $\pi/4,3\pi/4$ depending on whether we draw the edges with increasing/decreasing $x$-coordinate. This ensures that the cycles all grow upwards. Since we have the freedom to place the cycles where we want, we place them vertically on the matching so that they are very far apart (non-intersecting). Also, if the special edge of each cycle was between adjacent vertical lines then this edge would not pass through any other vertex of the graph either. Then, the only thing we would need is that the final edge in each cycle is drawn with the same slope. Figure~\ref{figure:drawingp} illustrates this and the next remark is followed by a formal description of the problem.
\begin{remark} In \cite{eng} a similar strategy of drawing the matching on vertical lines was employed. However, the cycles were drawn with alternating $\pi/4, 3\pi/4$ slopes for adjacent edges, so that the cycles were not ``growing upwards'' as in our construction. It leads to a different algebraic formulation of the problem giving tight bounds for the case when the cubic graph contains a Hamiltonian cycle.
\end{remark}
Let $M$ be a matching in $G$. Each cycle $C$ in $E(G)\setminus M$
can be represented as a cyclic sequence $C = (v_{1},\ldots,v_{k})$,
where each $v_{i}$ is an element of $M$. The sequence represents the elements of $M$ as we go around the cycle.
We can assume (by Claim \ref{triangle_free}) that
$k\ge 4$. An {\em edge} of $C$ by definition
is $(v_{i},v_{i+1})$ (all indices are understood mod $k$), which is
although formally
a pair formed by two distinct elements of $M$, also
corresponds to an actual edge of the cycle.
Notice that each element of $M$ is either shared by two cycles
or occurs twice in a single cycle.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\begin{center}
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\end{center}
\caption[Distinguished edges and cycles]{Distinguished ``matching-edges'' of Figure 1 are represented by dashed lines while distinguished cycle-edges are represented by dotted lines.\label{figure:distp}}
\end{figure}
We now want to pick a distinguished edge (as in Figure~\ref{figure:distp})
$(v_{i},v_{i+1})$ in $C$ (and in other cycles) such that the
set of distinguished cycle-edges will satisfy certain
properties.
\linebreak
Notation: Each distinguished cycle-edge is adjacent with two edges from the matching. These would be called the distinguished matching-edges of the cycle. In particular, the collection of
distinguished edges from all cycles
form the set of {\em distinguished matching-edges}.
We would hope that distinguished matching-edges corresponding to a distinguished cycle-edge
can be drawn as adjacent vertical lines for all cycles so that this
would naturally enforce that the distinguished cycle-edge would not go through
any other vertex of the graph.
\begin{definition}
Two cycles are {\em connected} if
they share a distinguished matching-edge, and two cycles
{\em belong to the same component} if they can be reached one from another
by going through connected cycles. (An alternate way of looking at this would be that two cycles are adjacent iff the sets of distinguished matching-edges corresponding to the two cycles have a non-empty intersection).
In other words, we define a graph on the cycles
that we call the {\bf cycle-connectivity graph.}
Notice that in this graph each cycle can have at most two neighbors,
thus the graph is a union of paths and cycles.
The set of distinguished matching-edges associated with
the component where cycle $C$ belongs is denoted by $D(C)$.
(Clearly, if $C_{1}$ and $C_{2}$ belong to the same
component, then $D(C_{1}) = D(C_{2})$).
\end{definition}
\begin{figure}[h!]
\begin{center}
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\caption{Graph and its connectivity graph.\label{figure:conng}}
\end{figure}
\begin{remark}
We note that in the cycle-connectivity graph two cycles
are not necessarily connected if they share a matching-edge but only
if they share a distinguished matching-edge. We can define
another graph, where two cycles are connected if
they share any matching-edge. It is easy to see
that $G$ is connected iff the latter graph is connected.
\end{remark}
\begin{remark}
We also note that we may get a multigraph for the cycle-connectivity graph in the event that two cycles pick distinguished cycle-edges between the same set of matching-edges. Condition I below avoids that scenario also.
\end{remark}
\medskip
\noindent{\bf Condition I:}
The cycle-connectivity graph does not contain cycles (only paths).
Equivalently,
we can enumerate the distinguished
matching-edges associated with the cycles of a component in
some linear order
$y_{1},\ldots, y_{l}$
in such a way that the pairs of consecutive
matching-edges of this order are exactly the distinguished cycle-edges
associated with the cycles in the component.
\medskip
\noindent{\bf Condition II:}
In each component there is at most one cycle $C$ such that
$C\subseteq D(C)$.
\medskip
Assume that the lines of the matching are ordered $v_1,...,v_n$. From Condition I, we can ensure that every distinguished cycle-edge takes up two adjacent lines in this ordering. A drawing of these lines would be completely determined by the distance between consecutive lines. If $v_i,v_{i+1}$ form a distinguished cycle-edge of the $k^{th}$ cycle, then call the distance between these lines $x_k$. Otherwise fix this distance to be some arbitrary positive constant $c_i$. This is illustrated in Figure~\ref{figure:defxc}.
\begin{figure}[h!]
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\caption{Definition of variables $x_i$ and $c_i$. \label{figure:defxc}}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[h!]
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`
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\caption[Cycle connectivity graph]{Paths of cycles will have adjacent distinguished cycle-edges in the drawing (because of the distinguished matching-edge they share). Hence it is necessary to not have cycles in the connectivity graph. \label{figure:condI}}
\end{figure}
Now draw a cycle by starting at one of the distinguished matching-edges and first drawing the path obtained by removing the distinguished cycle-edge. If an edge of the cycle is $v_k,v_l$ where $k<l$ then use a slope of $\pi/4$ and $3\pi/4$ otherwise. Notice that the vertical distance traveled across this edge is equal to the distance between the lines $v_k$ and $v_l$. Hence the slope of the distinguished cycle-edge would look like
$g_{i} = {\LL_{i}(\x)
\over x_{i}}$
where $\LL_{i}(\x)=a_{i,0} + \sum_{j=1}^{n} a_{i,j}x_{j}$ for $1\le i \le m$ ($m$ being the number of cycles)
is a linear equation on $\x$ with non-negative coefficients. We will use the following Solvability Theorem to ensure that these slopes can always be matched. This will be proved in the next subsection.
\begin{theorem}\label{generalt}
Let
$\LL_{i}(\x)=a_{i,0} + \sum_{j=1}^{n} a_{i,j}x_{j}$ for $1\le i \le n$
be linear forms, such that
all coefficients are non-negative.
Define a directed graph, $\G = \G(\overline{\LL})$ with
vertex set $V(\G) = \{0,1,\ldots, n\}$ and edge
set $E(\G) = \{(j,i)\;\mid\; a_{i,j} \neq 0\}$.
Let $g_{i} = {\LL_{i}(\x)
\over x_{i}}$ for $1\le i \le n$. Assume that
in $\G(\overline{\LL})$ every node can be reached from $0$. Then
\begin{equation}\label{maineq2}
g_{1}(\x) = g_{2}(\x) = \cdots = g_{n}(\x)
\end{equation}
has an all-positive solution.
\end{theorem}
\begin{definition}
We define $r(i) = dist(0,i)$ in the above graph $\G(\overline{\LL})$ and for a cycle $C$ if the variable was $x_i$ for its distinguished cycle-edge, we would denote $r(C)$ to mean $r(i)$.
\end{definition}
\begin{theorem}
If Conditions I and II hold then we can use Theorem \ref{generalt}
to prove that every connected graph $G$ is implementable with four directions.
\end{theorem}
\begin{proof}
Condition I
ensures that the slope associated with the
distinguished cycle-edge of each cycle $i$ can be expressed as $g_{i}(\x)$
(as we have seen).
Condition II is sufficient for the reachability condition (for $\G$) of
Theorem \ref{generalt}.
We will in fact show that $r(C)\le 2$ for every cycle $C$.
The linear expression
for cycle $C$ has a non-zero constant term iff
$C\setminus D(C)\neq \emptyset$.
Consider a fixed component.
By Condition II all cycles, except perhaps one,
have associated linear expressions
with non-zero constant terms, therefore they have $r=1$.
\begin{figure}[h!]
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\end{pspicture}
\end{center}
\caption[Cycles spanning over only distinguished edges]{Here the dotted edges represent a set of adjacent distinguished cycle-edges. $r(C) \neq 1$ if all edges of the cycle span over these adjacent distinguished cycle-edges. But all $v_i$'s in the figure have both vertices of the matching-edges used up by cycles. So $C$ could at best be a 4 cycle (since the graph is triangle-free) using up the first and the last vertical lines of this contiguous block and one distinguished cycle-edge. \label{figure:spcaserC}}
\end{figure}
It is sufficient to show that
the single cycle $C$ for which
$C\subseteq D(C)$, if exists, has $r(C)=2$. Indeed,
let $y_{1},\ldots, y_{l}$ be the distinguished matching-edges belonging to
this component in this linear order,
and let $y_{p}$ and $y_{p+1}$ be the distinguished matching-edges that belong to
cycle $C$. Since $C$ is at least a four cycle, it either
contains some other $y_{p'}\not\in\{y_{p},y_{p+1}\}$,
in which case indeed, it is geometrically easy to see that
one of the other variables from the component has to occur in
$\LL_{C}$ or $C$ is a four cycle and both $y_{p}$ and $y_{p+1}$
occur with multiplicity two in it. In the latter case
$C$ would form a separate $K_{4}$ component, thus $G=K_{4}$.
In the former case the variable has $r=1$, so $r(C)=2$.
\end{proof}
We are left with proving that we can pick
distinguished cycle-edges from the cycles such that
Conditions I and II are satisfied.
Indeed, start from any cycle, and pick an
edge for a distinguished cycle-edge, which has at least
one adjacent matching-edge $y$ that is common with a different cycle.
If there is none, the cycle is the single (Hamiltonian) cycle,
and if we distinguish any edge, Conditions I and II are clearly satisfied.
Otherwise, in the cycle that contains $y$, pick one of the two edges
adjacent to $y$, look at the other adjacent matching-edge, $y'$, of this edge,
look for another cycle that is adjacent with $y'$, etc.
The process ends when we get back to any cycle (including the current one)
that has already been visited.
There is one reason for back-track and this is when we return to the
other adjacent matching-edge, $z$, of the starting edge. In this case we choose
the other edge (recall we always have two choices).
It would be fatal to get back to $z$, since then Condition
I would not hold.
Assume that the above procedure has gone through. Then we have
distinguished at most three matching-edges adjacent to any cycle. But this is not all.
We have to do the same procedure from $z$ as well.
The procedure terminates when we encounter a cycle that has already
been encountered. Thus in the final step we might create a fourth
distinguished matching-edge adjacent to one of the cycles, but only in one of them.
This can be the single cycle $C$ in
the component for which $C\subseteq D(C)$. And because the graph is triangle-free, all the other components would have $C \setminus D(C) \neq \emptyset$.
Once we are done with creating
the first component, we select a cycle not
involved in it, and start the same procedure as before
with the only difference that in
subsequent rounds we also stop if we encounter
a cycle visited in one of the previous rounds. It is easy to see,
that now for the distinguished cycle-edges that we have selected Conditions I and II hold.
\subsection{Solvability}
Before we prove Theorem \ref{generalt}, we will look at the following special case when all the constant terms in $\LL_i$ are positive.
\begin{theorem}\label{specialth}
Let $B_{1},\ldots,B_{n} > 0$ be positive constants,
$\LL_{i}(\x)=\sum_{j=1}^{n} a_{i,j}x_{j}$ for $1\le i \le n$ be linear forms.
Let $g_{i} = {B_{i} + \LL_{i}(\x)
\over x_{i}}$ for $1\le i \le n$. Then
\begin{equation}\label{maineq}
g_{1}(\x) = g_{2}(\x) = \cdots = g_{n}(\x)
\end{equation}
has an all-positive solution.
\end{theorem}
\begin{proof} The intuition behind the proof is this: Let $\epsilon$ be very
small and $\alpha_{1},\ldots,\alpha_{n}> 0$ be fixed. If we set
$x_{i} = \epsilon B_{i}\alpha_{i}^{-1}$ then
$g_{i}(\x)\approx \epsilon^{-1}\alpha_{i}$. In particular, let $\Alpha$ range
in the $[1,2]^{n}$ solid cube. Then, if $\epsilon$ is small enough, the
vector $(g_{1}(\x),\ldots,g_{n}(\x))$ will range roughly in the
$[\epsilon^{-1},2\epsilon^{-1}]^{n}$ cube, thus
$\epsilon^{-1}(1.5,\ldots,1.5)$,
which is the center of this cube, has to be in the image.
To make this proof idea precise we will use the following version of
Brouwer's well known fix point theorem:
\begin{theorem}[Brouwer]\label{brower}
Let $f:[1,2]^{n}\rightarrow [1,2]^{n}$ be a continuous function. Then
$f$ has a fix point, i.e. an $\x_{0} \in [1,2]^{n}$ for which
$f(\x_{0}) = \x_{0}$.
\end{theorem}
We will use the fix point theorem as below.
We first define
\[
h(\alpha_{1},\ldots,\alpha_{n}) = (\epsilon g_{1}(\x),
\ldots,\epsilon g_{n}(\x)),
\]
where $\x = \epsilon (\alpha_{1}^{-1} B_{1},\ldots,
\alpha_{n}^{-1} B_{n}) = \epsilon \x'$,
and we think of $\epsilon$ as some fixed
positive number. Notice that $\x'$ is just a function
of $\Alpha$, independent of $\epsilon$.
It is sufficient to show that
if $\epsilon$ is small enough,
there are $\alpha_{1},\ldots,\alpha_{n}$ such that $h(\Alpha) =
(1.5,\ldots,1.5)$, since then $\x$ satisfies
(\ref{maineq}) with common value $1.5 \epsilon^{-1}$. We have:
\[
\epsilon g_{i}(\x) =
\epsilon {B_{i} + \LL_{i}(\x) \over
\epsilon \alpha_{i}^{-1} B_{i}} = \alpha_{i}( 1 + \epsilon B_{i}^{-1}
\LL_{i}(\x')).
\]
Here we used that $\LL_{i}(\epsilon \x') = \epsilon \LL_{i}(\x')$.
We would like to have
\begin{equation}\label{secondeq}
\alpha_{i}( 1 + \epsilon B_{i}^{-1}
\LL_{i}(\x')) = 1.5 \;\;\;\;\; \mbox{for $1\le i\le n$}.
\end{equation}
Define
\begin{eqnarray*}
K & = & \max_{i} \sup_{\Alpha \in [1,2]^{n}}
B_{i}^{-1} \LL_{i}(\x'); \\
\epsilon & = & 1/(10 K).
\end{eqnarray*}
To use the fix point theorem we consider the map
\[
f: (\alpha_{1},\ldots,\alpha_{n}) \rightarrow
\left(
{1.5 \over
1 + \epsilon B_{1}^{-1}
\LL_{1}(\x')},
\ldots ,
{1.5 \over
1 + \epsilon B_{n}^{-1}
\LL_{n}(\x')}\right)
\]
on the cube $[1,2]^{n}$. The image is contained in
$[1,2]^{n}$, since if $\Alpha\in [1,2]^{n}$ then
for $1\le i \le n$ we have
\[
1\; <\; {1.5 \over 1+ 0.1} \; = \; {1.5 \over 1+ \epsilon K} \; \le\;
{1.5 \over
1 + \epsilon B_{i}^{-1}
\LL_{i}(\x')} \; \le \; {1.5 \over 1- \epsilon K} \; = \;
{1.5 \over 1 - 0.1} \; < \; 2.
\]
Therefore, by Theorem \ref{brower} there is an $\Alpha\in [1,2]^{n}$ such that
$\alpha_{i} = {1.5 \over
1 + \epsilon B_{i}^{-1}
\LL_{i}(\x')}$ for $1\le i \le n$, which is equivalent to
(\ref{secondeq}).
\end{proof}
In Theorem \ref{specialth} all linear forms have non-zero constant terms.
We can, however generalize this to Theorem \ref{generalt}. We discuss its proof below.
\begin{remark}
The non-negativity of the coefficients can be relaxed such that
the theorem becomes a true generalization of Theorem \ref{specialth}.
Since the more general condition is slightly technical,
we will stay with the simpler non-negativity condition, which is
sufficient for us.
\end{remark}
\begin{proof}
For $1\le i\le n$ let $r(i)= dist(0,i)$ in $\G(\overline{\LL})$.
(In Theorem \ref{specialth} each $r(i)$ was $1$.) Define
\[
x_{i} = \epsilon^{r(i)}x'_{i},
\]
where $\epsilon>0$ will be a small enough
number that we will appropriately fix later, but as of now
we think about it as a quantity tending to zero.
We can rewrite (\ref{maineq}) as:
\[
\epsilon g_{1}(\x) = \epsilon g_{2}(\x) = \cdots = \epsilon g_{n}(\x).
\]
If we fix $\x'$ and take epsilon tending to zero, then,
\[
\epsilon g_{i}(\x)\rightarrow {\beta_{i}(\x')\over x'_{i}},
\]
where $\beta_{i}(\x') = a_{i,0}/x'_{i}$ if $r(i) = 1$, otherwise
\[
\beta_{i}(\x') = \sum_{j:\;r(j) = r(i)-1} a_{i,j} x'_{j}.
\]
We can now solve the system
\[
{\beta_{i}(\x')\over x'_{i}} = 1.5
\]
and even the system
\begin{equation}\label{syseq}
{\beta_{i}(\x')\over x'_{i}} = \alpha_{i},
\end{equation}
where $1 \le \alpha_{i} \le 2$ for $1\le i\le n$.
Indeed, the solution can be obtained iteratively, by
first computing the values of the variables
$x_i$ with $r(i)=0$, then with $r(i)=1$, etc.
We can again use the fix point theorem of Brouwer to show that
if $\epsilon$ is sufficiently small, the system
\[
\epsilon g_{i}(\x) =
1.5\hspace{0.5in}\mbox{for $1\le i\le n$}
\]
has a solution. For this we again parameterize $\x'$ with
$\Alpha$. When $\Alpha$ ranges in
the solid cube $[1,2]^{n}$ then $\x'$ will range in
some domain $D$, where we obtain $D$ by solving the system
(\ref{syseq}) for all $\alpha_{i}\in [1,2]^{n}$.
Now we have to set $\epsilon$ small enough such that everywhere
in $D$ it should hold that
\begin{equation}\label{rgeq}
0.9 \le
{ {\beta_{i}(\x') / x'_{i}} \over \epsilon g_{i}(\x)}
= {\alpha_{i} \over \epsilon g_{i}(\x)}
\le 1.1 \hspace{0.5in}\mbox{for $1\le i\le n$.}
\end{equation}
This is easily seen to be possible, since $D$ is contained in
a closed cube in the strictly positive orthant.
We then apply the fix point theorem to
\[
f: \Alpha \rightarrow \boldsymbol{\gamma},
\]
where
\[
\gamma_{i} = { 1.5\alpha_{i}
\over
\epsilon g_{i}(\x)}.
\]
The fix point theorem applies, since the
range of $f$ remains in the $[0.9\cdot 1.5,1.1\cdot 1.5]^{n}\subset
[1,2]^{n}$
cube by Equation (\ref{rgeq}).
For the fixed point $\alpha_{i} = { 1.5\alpha_{i}
\over
\epsilon g_{i}(\x)}$ for $1\le i\le n$, which implies
$\epsilon g_{i}(\x)=1.5$ for $1\le i\le n$.
\end{proof}
\section{Proof of Theorem \ref{thm_4basic_slopes}}
We start with some definitions we will use throughout this section.
\subsection{Definitions}
\indent \vspace{-0.3cm}
Throughout this section $\log$ always denotes $\log_2$, the logarithm in base $2$.
We recall that the girth of a graph is the length of its shortest cycle.
\begin{definition}
Define a {\em supercycle} as a connected graph where every degree is at least two and not all are two. Note that a minimal supercycle will look like a ``$\theta$'' or like a ``dumbbell''.
\end{definition}
We recall that a {\em cut} is a partition of the vertices into two sets. We say that an edge is in the cut if its ends are in different subsets of the partition. We also call the edges in the cut the {\em cut-edges}. The {\em size} of a cut is the number of cut-edges in it.
\begin{definition}
We say that a cut is an {\em $M$-cut} if the cut-edges form a matching, in other words, if their ends are pairwise different vertices.
We also say that an {\em $M$-cut} is suitable if after deleting the cut-edges, the graph has two components, both of which are supercycles.
\end{definition}
We refer the reader to Section \ref{slope_intro} for the exact statement of Theorem \ref{slopenum2} \cite{kppt08_2} about subcubic graphs.
Note that Theorem \ref{slopenum2} proves the result of Theorem \ref{thm_4basic_slopes} for subcubic graphs.
Another minor observation is that we may assume that the graph is connected.
Since we use the basic four slopes, if we can draw the components of a
disconnected graph, then we just place them far apart in the plane so
that no two drawings intersect.
So we will assume for the rest of the section that the graph is cubic and connected.
\subsection{Preliminaries}
The results in this subsection are also interesting independent of the current problem we deal with. The following is also called the Moore bound.
\begin{lemma}\label{girth}
Every connected cubic graph on $n$ vertices contains a cycle of length at most
$2 \lceil \log ( \frac{n}{3} +1) \rceil $.
\end{lemma}
\begin{figure*}[h]
{\centering
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=0.5]
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (1) at (7,7) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (2) at (3,6) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (3) at (7,6) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (4) at (11,6) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (5) at (2,5) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (6) at (4,5) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (7) at (6,5) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (8) at (8,5) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (9) at (10,5) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (10) at (12,5) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (11) at (0,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (12) at (0.5,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (13) at (1,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (14) at (2,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (15) at (2.5,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (16) at (3,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (17) at (4,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (18) at (4.5,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (19) at (5,0) {};
\node (20) at (11,-1) {};
\node (26) at (3.5,-1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt,label=right:$v$] (21) at (11.5,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (22) at (12,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (23) at (13,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (24) at (13.5,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (25) at (14,0) {};
\draw [black] (2) -- (5);
\draw [black] (4) -- (10);
\draw [red] (2) -- (1) -- (4);
\draw [black] (1) -- (3) -- (7);
\draw [red] (2) -- (6);
\draw [black] (8) -- (3);
\draw [red] (9) -- (4);
\draw [black] (11) -- (12) -- (13);
\draw [black] (12) -- (0.5,1.5);
\draw [black] (18) -- (4.5,1.5);
\draw [black] (24) -- (13.5,1.5);
\draw [black] (14) -- (15);
\draw [red] (16) -- (15);
\draw [black] (17) -- (18) -- (19);
\draw [black] (23) -- (24) -- (25);
\draw [black] (21) -- (22);
\draw [red] (21) .. controls (20) and (26) .. (16);
\draw [red] (6) .. controls (3,4) and (4,3) .. (15);
\draw [red] (9) .. controls (9,4) and (12,3) .. (21);
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption[Cycle in BFS tree]{Finding a cycle in the BFS tree using that the left child of $v$ already occurred.
}
}
\label{fig:cycle}
\end{figure*}
\begin{proof}
Start at any vertex of $G$ and conduct a breadth first search (BFS) of
$G$ until a vertex repeats in the BFS tree.
We note here that by iterations we will (for the rest of the subsection)
mean the number of levels of the BFS tree.
Since $G$ is cubic, after $k$ iterations, the number of vertices visited
will be $1 + 3+ 6+ 12 + \ldots +3 \cdot 2^{k-2} = 1+3(2^{k-1}-1)$.
And since $G$ has $n$ vertices, some vertex must repeat after
$k = \lceil \log (\frac{n}{3} + 1) \rceil +1$ iterations.
Tracing back along the two paths obtained for the vertex that reoccurs,
we find a cycle of length at most
$2 \lceil \log ( \frac{n}{3} +1) \rceil $.
\end{proof}
\begin{lemma}\label{supercycle}
Every connected cubic graph on $n$ vertices with girth $g$ contains a supercycle with at most $2 \lceil \log (\frac{n+1}{g}) \rceil +g-1$ vertices.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
Contract the vertices of a length $g$ cycle, obtaining a multigraph $G'$ with $n-g+1$ vertices, that is almost $3$-regular, except for one vertex of degree $g$, from which we start a BFS. It is easy to see that the number of vertices visited after $k$ iterations is at most $1 + g + 2g + 4g + \ldots + g\cdot 2^{k-2} = g(2^{k-1} -1)+1$.
And since $G'$ has $n-g+1$ vertices, some vertex must repeat after
$k = \lceil \log (\frac{n-g+1}{g} + 1) \rceil +1=\lceil \log (\frac{n+1}{g}) \rceil +1$ iterations.
Tracing back along the two paths obtained for the vertex that reoccurs,
we find a cycle (or two vertices connected by two edges) of length at most $2 \lceil \log (\frac{n+1}{g}) \rceil$ in $G'$.
This implies that in $G$ we have a supercycle with at most $2 \lceil \log (\frac{n+1}{g}) \rceil +g-1$ vertices.
\end{proof}
\begin{lemma}\label{Mcut}
Every connected cubic graph on $n>2s -2$ vertices with a supercycle with $s$ vertices contains a suitable $M$-cut of size at most $s -2$.
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
The supercycle with $s$ vertices, $A$, has at least two vertices of degree $3$.
The size of the $(A, G-A)$ cut is thus at most $s -2$.
This cut need not be an $M$-cut because the edges may have a common neighbor
in $G-A$. To repair this, we will now add, iteratively,
the common neighbors of edges in the cut to $A$,
until no edges have a common neighbor in $G-A$.
Note that in any iteration, if a vertex, $v$, adjacent to exactly two cut-edges
was chosen, then the size of $A$ increases by $1$ and the size of the cut decreases
by $1$ (since, these two cut-edges will get added to $A$ along with $v$, but
since the graph is cubic, the third edge from $v$ will become a part of the
cut-edges).
If a vertex adjacent to three cut-edges was chosen, then the size of $A$ increases
by $1$ while the number of cut-edges decreases by $3$.
From this we can see that the maximum number of vertices that could
have been added to $A$ during this process is $s -3$.
Now there are three conditions to check.
The first condition is that this process returns
a non-empty second component. This would occur if
$$ (n- s) - (s-3)>0$$
or,
$$ n > 2s -3.$$
The second condition is that the second component should not be a collection of disjoint cycles.
For this we note that it is enough to check that at every stage, the
number of cut-edges is strictly smaller than the number of vertices
in $G-A$. But since in the above iterations, the number of cut-edges decreases
by a number greater than or equal to the decrease in the size of $G-A$, it is enough to
check that before the iterations, the number of cut-edges is strictly
smaller than the number of vertices in $G-A$.
This is the condition
$$n - s > s-2$$
or,
$$ n>2s -2.$$
Note that if this inequality holds then the non-emptiness condition will
also hold.
Finally, we need to check that both components are connected. $A$ is connected
but $G-A$ need not be. We pick a component
in $G-A$ that has more vertices than the number of cut-edges adjacent to it.
Since the number of cut-edges is strictly smaller than the number of vertices in
$G-A$, there must be one such component, say $B$, in $G-A$. We add every other
component of $G-A$ to $A$. Note that the size of the cut only decreases with
this step. Since $B$ is connected and has more vertices than the number of
cut-edges, $B$ cannot be a cycle.
\end{proof}
\begin{corollary}\label{exisMcut}
Every connected cubic graph on $n \ge 18$ vertices contains a suitable $M$-cut.
\end{corollary}
\begin{proof}
Using the first two lemmas, we have a supercycle with $s\le 2 \lceil \log (\frac{n+1}{g}) \rceil +g-1$ vertices where $3\le g\le 2\lceil \log ( \frac{n}{3} +1) \rceil $. Then using the last lemma, we have an $M$-cut with both partitions being a supercycle if $n>2s-2$. So all we need to check is that $n$ is indeed big enough.
Note that
$$s\le 2 \log (\frac{n+1}{g}) +g+1= 2 \log (n+1) + g+1 -2\log g \le $$
$$ \le 2 \log (n+1) + 2 \log ( \frac{n}{3} +1) -2\log (2 \log ( \frac{n}{3} +1))+1$$
where the last inequality follows from the fact that $x-2\log x$ is increasing for $x\ge 2/\log_e 2\approx 2.88$. So we can bound the right hand side from above by $4 \log (n+1) +1$. Now we need that
$$n> 2(4 \log (n+1) +1)-2=8\log (n+1)$$
which holds if $n\ge 44$.
The statement can be checked for $18\le n\le 42$ with code that can be found in the Appendix. It outputs for a given value of $n$, the $g$ for which $2s-2$ is maximum and this maximum value.
Based on the output we can see that for $n \ge 18$, this value is smaller.
\end{proof}
\subsection{Proof}
\begin{lemma}\label{cubicdr}
Let $G$ be a connected cubic graph with a suitable $M$-cut.
Then, $G$ can be drawn with the four basic slopes.
\end{lemma}
\begin{figure*}[h]
{\centering
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=0.55]
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (1) at (1,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (2) at (2,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (3) at (5,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (4) at (6,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (5) at (7,1.5) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (6) at (11,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (7) at (12,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (8) at (13,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (9) at (16,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (10) at (17,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (11) at (11,9) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (12) at (12,8) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (13) at (13,9) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (14) at (16,8) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (15) at (17,8.5) {};
\draw [black] (8,1.35) arc (0:360:4cm and 1.2cm);
\draw [black] (18.2,1.35) arc (0:360:4cm and 1.2cm);
\draw [black] (18.2,8.5) arc (0:360:4cm and 1.2cm);
\draw [dashed,black] (11,-1.9) node[below] {$x_1$} -- (6);
\draw [dashed,black] (12,-1) node[below] {$x_2$} -- (7);
\draw [dashed,black] (13,-1.9) node[below] {$x_3$} -- (8);
\draw [dashed,black] (16,-1) node[below] {$x_{m-1}$} -- (9);
\draw [dashed,black] (17,-1.9) node[below] {$x_m$} -- (10);
\draw [dashed,black] (1,-1.9) node[below] {$-x_m$} -- (1);
\draw [dashed,black] (2,-1) node[below] {$-x_{m-1}$} -- (2);
\draw [dashed,black] (5,-1.9) node[below] {$-x_3$} -- (3);
\draw [dashed,black] (6,-1) node[below] {$-x_2$} -- (4);
\draw [dashed,black] (7,-1.9) node[below] {$-x_1$} -- (5);
\draw [black] (6) -- (11);
\draw [black] (7) -- (12);
\draw [black] (8) -- (13);
\draw [black] (9) -- (14);
\draw [black] (10) -- (15);
\draw [very thick,double,->] (4,3) node[above=3cm] {Rotated and translated} arc (180:90:5cm);
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption[Patching components of $M$-cut]{The $x$-coordinates of the degree $2$ vertices is suitably chosen and one component is rotated and translated to make the $M$-cut vertical.}
}
\label{fig:final}
\end{figure*}
\begin{proof}
The proof follows rather straightforwardly from Theorem \ref{slopenum2}.
Note that the two components are subcubic graphs and we can choose
the $x$-coordinates of the vertices of the $M$-cut (since they are
the vertices with degree two in the components). If we picked coordinates
$x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_m$ in one component, then for the neighbors of these vertices in the other component we pick the $x$-coordinates $-x_1,-x_{2},\ldots, -x_m$. We now rotate the second
component by $\pi$ and place it very high above the other component so that the drawings
of the components do not intersect
and align them so that the edges of the $M$-cut will be vertical (slope $\pi/2$).
Also, since Theorem \ref{slopenum2} guarantees that degree two vertices have
no other vertices on the vertical line above them, hence the drawing
we obtain above is a valid representation of $G$ with the basic slopes.
\end{proof}
By combining Lemma \ref{exisMcut} and Lemma \ref{cubicdr}, we can see that Theorem \ref{thm_4basic_slopes}
is true for all cubic graphs with $n\ge 18$. For smaller graphs, we
reduce the number of graphs we have to check with the
help of Lemma \ref{vert_conn} and Remark \ref{conn_remark} as a
consequence of which, a graph that cannot be drawn with the four basic
slopes must be three vertex and edge connected.
We also employ the following theorem by Max Engelstein \cite{eng}.
\begin{lemma}\label{maxeng}
Every $3$-connected cubic graph with a Hamiltonian cycle can be drawn
in the plane with the four basic slopes.
\end{lemma}
Note that combining this with Lemma \ref{vert_conn}
we even get
\begin{corollary}
Every cubic graph with a Hamiltonian cycle can be drawn
in the plane with the four basic slopes.
\end{corollary}
The graphs which now need to be checked satisfy the following conditions:
\begin{enumerate}
\item the number of vertices is at most $16$
\item the graph is $3$-connected
\item the graph does not have a Hamiltonian cycle.
\end{enumerate}
\begin{remark}
We now bring the attention of our reader to Remark \ref{triangle_free_remark} to add that we may also add to the above list that the graph does not contain a triangle. However, we use our girth lemmas to have an easy way to analyze the
graphs excluded by only the above three assertions.
\end{remark}
\begin{figure}[htp]\label{fig:tietze}
{\centering
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=1]
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (1) at (0,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (2) at (0,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (3) at (1,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (4) at (3,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (5) at (4,2) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (6) at (4,1) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (7) at (3,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (8) at (2,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (9) at (1,0) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (10) at (0,3) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (11) at (4,3) {};
\node [fill=black,circle,inner sep=1pt] (12) at (2,5) {};
\draw [black] (1) -- (2) -- (3) -- (4) -- (5) -- (6) -- (1);
\draw [black] (1) -- (9) -- (8) -- (7) -- (6);
\draw [black] (10) -- (11) -- (12) -- (10);
\draw [black] (9) -- (4);
\draw [black] (7) -- (3);
\draw [black] (2) -- (10);
\draw [black] (8) -- (12);
\draw [black] (5) -- (11);
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption[The Tietze's graph]{The Tietze's graph drawn with the four basic slopes.}
}
\end{figure}
Note that if the number of vertices is at most $16$, then it follows from Lemma \ref{girth} that the girth is at most $6$.
Luckily there are several lists available of cubic graphs with a given number of vertices, $n$ and a given girth, $g$.
If $g=6$, then there are only two graphs with at most $16$ vertices (see \cite{graphlist, meringer}), both containing a Hamiltonian cycle.
If $g=5$ and $n=16$, then Lemma \ref{supercycle} gives a supercycle with at most $8$ vertices, so using Lemma \ref{Mcut} we are done.
If $g=5$ and $n=14$, then there are only nine graphs (see \cite{graphlist, meringer}), all containing a Hamiltonian cycle.
If $g\le 4$ and $n=16$, then Lemma \ref{supercycle} gives a supercycle with at most $8$ vertices, so using Lemma \ref{Mcut} we are done.
If $g\le 4$ and $n=14$, then Lemma \ref{supercycle} gives a supercycle with at most $7$ vertices, so using Lemma \ref{Mcut} we are done.
Finally, all graphs with at most $12$ vertices are either not $3$-connected or contain a Hamiltonian cycle, except for the Petersen graph and Tietze's Graph (see \cite{wiki}).
For the drawing of these two graphs, see the respective Figures.
\section{Which four slopes? and other concluding questions}
After establishing Theorem \ref{thm_4basic_slopes} the question arises whether we could have used any other four slopes.
Call a set of slopes {\em good} if every cubic graph has a straight-line drawing with them.
In this section we prove Theorem \ref{karakterizacio} that claims that the following statements are equivalent for a set $S$ of four slopes.
\begin{enumerate}
\item $S$ is good.
\item $S$ is an affine image of the four basic slopes.
\item We can draw $K_4$ with $S$.
\end{enumerate}
\begin{proof}
Since affine transformation keeps incidences, any set that is the affine image of the four basic slopes is good.
On the other hand, if a set $S=\{s_1,s_2,s_3,s_4\}$ is good, then $K_4$ has a straight-line drawing with $S$. Since we do not allow a vertex to be in the interior of an edge, the four vertices must be in general position. This implies that two incident edges cannot have the same slope. Therefore there are two slopes, without loss of generality $s_1$ and $s_2$, such that we have two edges of each slope. These four edges must form a cycle of length four, which means that the vertices are the vertices of a parallelogram. But in this case there is an affine transformation that takes the parallelogram to a square. This transformation also takes $S$ into the four basic slopes.
\end{proof}
Note that a similar reasoning shows that no matter how many slopes we take, their set need not be good, because we cannot even draw $K_4$ with them unless they satisfy some correlation.
The above proofs use the four basic slopes only in a few places (for rotation invariance and to start induction). Thus, we make the following conjecture.
\begin{conjecture}
There is a (not necessarily connected, finite) graph such that a set of slopes is good if and only if this graph has a straight-line drawing with them.
\end{conjecture}
This finite graph would be the disjoint union of $K_4$, maybe the Petersen graph and other small graphs. We could not even rule out the possibility that $K_4$ (or maybe another, connected graph) is alone sufficient. Note that we can define a partial order on the graphs this way. Let $G < H$ if any set of slopes that can be used to draw $H$ can also be used to draw $G$. This way of course $G\subset H \Rightarrow G<H$ but what else can we say about this poset?
Is it possible to use this new method to prove that the slope parameter of cubic graphs is also four?
The main question remains to prove or disprove whether the slope number of graphs with maximum degree four is unbounded.
\section{Introduction}
Consider a set $P$ of points in the plane and a set of closed polygonal obstacles whose vertices together with the points in $P$ are in {\em general position}, that is, no {\em three} of them are on a line. The corresponding {\em visibility graph} has $P$ as its vertex set, two points $p,q\in P$ being connected by an edge if and only if the segment $pq$ does not meet any of the obstacles. Visibility graphs are extensively studied and used in computational geometry, robot motion planning, computer vision, sensor networks, etc.; see \cite{BKOS00}, \cite{G07}, \cite{OR97}, \cite{O99}, \cite{Ur00}.
Recently, Alpert, Koch, and Laison \cite{AKL09} introduced an interesting new parameter of graphs, closely related to visibility graphs. Given a graph $G$, we say that a set of points and a set of polygonal obstacles as above constitute an {\em obstacle representation} of $G$, if the corresponding visibility graph is isomorphic to $G$. A representation with $h$ obstacles is also called an $h$-obstacle representation. The smallest number of obstacles in an obstacle representation of $G$ is called the {\em obstacle number} of $G$ and is denoted by ${\rm obs}(G)$. If we are allowed to use only {\em convex} obstacles, then the corresponding parameter ${\rm obs}_{c}(G)$ is called the {\em convex obstacle number} of $G$. Of course, we have ${\rm obs}(G)\leq {\rm obs}_c(G)$ for every $G$, but the two parameters can be very far apart.
A special instance of the obstacle problem has received a lot of attention, due to its connection to the Szemer\'edi-Trotter theorem on incidences between points and lines~\cite{ST83a}, \cite{ST83b}, and other classical problems in incidence geometry~\cite{PA95}. It is an exciting open problem to decide whether the obstacle number of ${\overline{K}}_n$, the empty graph on $n$ vertices, is $O(n)$ if the obstacles must be {\em points}. The best known upper bound is
$n2^{O(\sqrt{\log n})}$; see
Pach
\cite{Pach03}, Dumitrescu et al.~\cite{DPT09}, Matou\v sek~\cite{M09}, and Aloupis et al. \cite{A+10conf}.
Alpert et al.~\cite{AKL09} constructed a bipartite graph and a split graph (a graph whose vertex set is the union of a complete graph and an independent set), both with a fixed number of vertices, with obstacle number
at least
{\em two}. In \cite{mps10} another graph, whose vertex set is the union of two complete subgraphs, was shown to have obstacle number at least two.
Consequently, no graph of obstacle number {\em one} can contain a subgraph isomorphic to these graphs. Using this and some extremal graph theoretic tools developed by Erd\H os, Kleitman, Rothschild, Frankl, R\"odl, Pr\"omel, Steger, Bollob\'as, Thomason and others, the following was proved.
\begin{theorem}[\cite{mps10}]
\label{ult}
For any fixed positive integer $h$, the number of graphs on $n$ (labeled) vertices with obstacle number at most $h$ is at most $2^{o(n^2)}.$
\end{theorem}
Since the number of bipartite graphs with $n$ labeled vertices is $\Omega(2^{n^2/4})$, this also implies that there exist bipartite graphs with arbitrarily large obstacle number.
For every sufficiently large $n$, Alpert et al. constructed a
graph with $n$ vertices with obstacle number at least $\Omega\left(\sqrt{\log n}\right)$.
By using the existence of graphs with obstacle number at least $2$ and
a result by Erd{\H{o}}s and Hajnal \cite{EH89},
we show the existence of graphs with much larger obstacle numbers.
\begin{theorem}
\label{thm_obstacle1}
For every $\varepsilon>0$, there exists an integer $n_0=n_0(\varepsilon)$ such that for all $n\geq n_0$, there are graphs $G$ on $n$ vertices such that their obstacle numbers satisfy
$${\rm obs}(G)\geq \Omega\left(n^{1-\varepsilon}\right).$$
\end{theorem}
In Section~\ref{padmini}, we improve on the last two corollaries, using some estimates on the number of different {\em order types} of $n$ points in the Euclidean plane, discovered by Goodman and Pollack~\cite{GP86}, \cite{GP93} (see also Alon~\cite{Al86}). We establish the following results.
\begin{theorem}
\label{enumeration}
For any fixed positive integer $h$, the number of graphs on $n$ (labeled) vertices with obstacle number at most $h$ is at most $$2^{O(hn\log^2n)}.$$
\end{theorem}
\begin{theorem}\label{thm_obstacle2}
For every $n$, there exist graphs $G$ on $n$ vertices with obstacle numbers
$${\rm obs}(G)\geq \Omega\left({n}/{\log^2n}\right).$$
\end{theorem}
Note that the last statement directly follows from Theorem~\ref{enumeration}. Indeed, since the total number of (labeled) graphs with $n$ vertices is $2^{\Omega(n^2)}$, as long as
$2^{O(hn\log^2n)}$ is smaller that this quantity, there is a graph with obstacle number larger than $h$.
We prove a slightly better bound for convex obstacle numbers.
\begin{theorem}\label{convex}
For every $n$, there exist graphs $G$ on $n$ vertices with convex obstacle numbers
$${\rm obs}_c(G)\geq \Omega\left({n}/{\log n}\right).$$
\end{theorem}
If we only allow segment obstacles, we get an even better bound.
Following Alpert et al., we define the {\em segment obstacle number} ${\rm obs}_s(G)$ of a graph $G$ as the minimal number of obstacles in an obstacle representation of $G$, in which each obstacle is a straight-line segment.
\begin{theorem}\label{segment}
For every $n$, there exist graphs $G$ on $n$ vertices with segment obstacle numbers
$${\rm obs}_s(G)\geq \Omega\left({n^2}/{\log n}\right).$$
\end{theorem}
We then improve the bound for the general obstacle number as follows.
\begin{theorem}\label{concave}
For every $n$, there exists a graph $G$ on $n$ vertices with
obstacle number
$${\rm obs}(G)\geq \Omega\left({n}/{\log n}\right).$$
\end{theorem}
This comes close to answering the question in \cite{AKL09} whether
there exist graphs with $n$ vertices and obstacle number at least
$n$. However, we have no upper bound on the maximum obstacle
number of $n$-vertex graphs, better than $O(n^2)$.
Given any placement (embedding) of the vertices of $G$ in general position in the plane, a {\em drawing} of $G$ consists of the image of the embedding and the set of {\em open segments} connecting all pairs of points that correspond to the edges of $G$. If there is no danger of confusion, we make no notational difference between the vertices of $G$ and the corresponding points, and between the pairs $uv$ and the corresponding open segments. The complement of the set of all points that correspond to a vertex or belong to at least one edge of $G$ falls into connected components. These components are called the {\em faces} of the drawing. Notice that if $G$ has an obstacle representation with a particular placement of its vertex set, then
(1) each obstacle must lie entirely in one face of the drawing, and
(2) each non-edge of $G$ must be blocked by at least one of the obstacles.
\section{Extremal methods and proof of Theorem \ref{thm_obstacle1}}
In order to prove Theorem~\ref{thm_obstacle1}, we need the following result, which shows that if $G$ avoids at least one induced subgraph with $k$ vertices, for some $k\ll \log n$, then the Erd\H os-Szekeres bound on ${\rm hom}(G)$ can be substantially improved. We note that $hom(G)$ for a graph $G$ is defined as the size of the largest clique or independent set in the graph. Also, a graph is $k$-universal if it contains every graph on $k$ vertices as induced subgraph.
\begin{theorem}[Erd\H os, Hajnal \cite{EH89}]\label{ehthm}
For any fixed positive integer $t$, there is an $n_0 = n_0(t)$ with the following property. Given any graph $G$ on $n>n_0$ vertices and any integer $k<2^{c\sqrt{log n}/t}$, either $G$ is $t$-universal or we have ${\rm hom}(G) \ge k$. (Here $c>0$ is a suitable constant.)
\end{theorem}
We now prove Theorem~\ref{thm_obstacle1}.
\medskip
\begin{proof
For the sake of clarity of the presentation, we systematically omit all floor and ceiling functions wherever they are not essential. Let $H$ be a graph of $t$ vertices that does not admit a $1$-obstacle representation. Fix any $0<\varepsilon<1$, and choose an integer $N\ge n_0$, that satisfies the inequality
\begin{equation}\label{szamozott}
2^{c\sqrt{\varepsilon\log N}/t} > 2\log N,
\end{equation}
where $c,n_0$ are constants that appear in the previous theorem.
For any $n\ge N$, we set $m=n^{1-\varepsilon}$.
According to a theorem of Erd\H os~\cite{Er47}, there exists a graph $G$ with $n$
vertices such that
$${\rm hom}(G)<2\log n< 2^{c\sqrt{\log (n/m)}/t}.$$
\input{FigSources/nepsObstacles.tex}
Consider an obstacle representation of $G$ with the smallest number $h$ of obstacles. Suppose without loss of generality that in our coordinate system all points of $G$ have different $x$-coordinates. By vertical lines, partition the plane into $m$ strips, each containing $n/m$ points. Let $G_i$ denote the subgraph of $G$ induced by the vertices lying in the $i$-th strip $(1\le i\le m)$.
Obviously, we have
$${\rm hom}(G_i)\le {\rm hom}(G)<2^{c \sqrt{\log (n/m)}/t},$$
for every $i$. Hence, applying Theorem~\ref{ehthm} to each $G_i$ separately, we conclude that each must be $t$-universal. In particular, each $G_i$ contains an induced subgraph isomorphic to $H$. That is, we have ${\rm obs}(G_i)>1$ for every $i$, which means that each $G_i$ requires at least {\em two} obstacles.
As was explained at the end of the Introduction, each obstacle must be contained in an interior or in the exterior face of the graph. Therefore, in an $h$-obstacle representation of $G$, each $G_i$ must have at least one internal face that contains an obstacle, and there must be at least one additional obstacle (which may possibly contained in the interior face of every $G_i$). At any rate, we have $h>m=n^{1-\varepsilon},$ as required.
\end{proof}
\section{Encoding graphs of low obstacle number}
\label{padmini}
The aim of this section is to prove Theorems~\ref{enumeration}--\ref{segment}. The idea is to find a short encoding of the obstacle representations of graphs, and to use this to give an upper bound on the number of graphs with low obstacle number.
We need to review some simple facts from combinatorial geometry. Two sets of points, $P_1$ and $P_2$, in general position in the plane are said to have the same {\em order type} if there is a one to one correspondence between them with the property that the orientation of any triple in $P_1$ is the same as the orientation of the corresponding triple in $P_2$. Counting the number of different order types is a classical task, see e.g.
\begin{theorem}[Goodman, Pollack~\cite{GP86}]\label{GoodmanPollack}
The number of different order types of $n$ points in general position in the plane is $2^{O(n\log n)}$.
\end{theorem}
\noindent Observe that the same upper bound holds for the number of different order types of $n$ {\em labeled} points, because the number of different permutations of $n$ points is $n!=2^{O(n\log n)}$.
In a graph drawing, the \emph{complexity} of a face is the number of line segment sides bordering it.
The following result was proved by Arkin, Halperin, Kedem, Mitchell, and Naor (see Matou\v sek, Valtr~\cite{MV97} for its sharpness).
\begin{theorem}[Arkin et al.~\cite{AHK95}]\label{Arkin}
The complexity of a single face in a drawing of a graph with $n$ vertices is at most $O(n\log n)$.
\end{theorem}
\noindent Note that this bound does not depend of the number of edges of the graph. We are now ready to prove Theorem~\ref{enumeration}.
\medskip
\begin{proof}
For any graph $G$ with $n$ vertices that admits an $h$-obstacle representation, fix such a representation. Consider the visibility graph $G$ of the vertices in this representation. As explained at the end of the Introduction, any obstacle belongs to a single face in this drawing. In view of Theorem~\ref{Arkin}, the complexity of every face is $O(n\log n)$. Replacing each obstacle by a slightly shrunken copy of the face containing it, we can achieve that every obstacle {\em is} a polygonal region with $O(n\log n)$ sides.
Notice that the order type of the sequence $S$ starting with the vertices of $G$, followed by the vertices of the obstacles (listed one by one, in cyclic order, and properly separated from one another) completely determines $G$. That is, we have a sequence of length $N$ with $N\le n + c_1 h n\log n$. According to
Theorem~\ref{GoodmanPollack} (and the following comment), the number of different order types with this many points is at most
$$2^{O(N\log N)}<2^{chn\log^2 n},$$
for a suitable constant $c>0$. This is a very generous upper bound: most of the above sequences do not correspond to any visibility graph $G$.
\end{proof}
If in the above proof the average number of sides an obstacle can have is small, then we obtain
\begin{theorem}\label{sidelemma}
The number of graphs admitting an obstacle representation with at most $h$ obstacles, having a total of at most $hs$ sides, is at most
$$ 2^{O(n\log n + hs\log (hs))}.$$
\end{theorem}
In particular, for segment obstacles ($s=2$), Theorem~\ref{sidelemma} immediately implies Theorem~\ref{segment}. Indeed, as long as the bound in Theorem~\ref{sidelemma} is smaller than $2^{n\choose 2}$, the total number of graphs on $n$ labeled vertices, we can argue that there is a graph with segment obstacle number larger than $h$.
We now show how to prove Theorem \ref{convex} with an easier way to encode the drawing of a graph and its convex obstacles.
\begin{proof}
As before, it is enough to bound the number of graphs that admit an obstacle representation with at most $h$ convex obstacles. Let us fix such a graph $G$, together with a representation. Let $V$ be the set of points representing the vertices, and let $O_1,\ldots, O_h$ be the convex obstacles. For any obstacle $O_i$, rotate an oriented tangent line $\ell$ along its boundary in the clockwise direction. We can assume without loss of generality that $\ell$ never passes through two points of $V$. Let us record the sequence of points met by $\ell$. If $v\in V$ is met at the right side of $\ell$, we add the symbol $v_+$ to the sequence, otherwise we add $v_-$ (Figure 2.2).
When $\ell$ returns to its initial position, we stop. The resulting sequence consists of $2n$ characters. From this sequence, it is easy to reconstruct which pairs of vertices are visible in the presence of the single obstacle $O_i$. Hence, knowing these sequences for every obstacle $O_i$, completely determines the visibility graph $G$. The number of distinct sequences assigned to a single obstacle is at most $(2n)!$, so that the number of graphs with convex obstacle number at most $h$ cannot exceed $((2n)!)^h/h!<(2n)^{2hn}$. As long as this number is smaller than $2^{n\choose 2}$, there is a graph with convex obstacle number larger than $h$.
\end{proof}
\input{FigSources/convexObstacle.tex}
\section{Proof of Theorem \ref{concave}}\label{sec:concave}
Here we prove Theorem \ref{concave} that claims that for every
$n$, there exists a graph $G$ on $n$ vertices with obstacle number
${\rm obs}(G)\geq \Omega\left({n}/{\log n}\right).$
\begin{proof
The proof will be a counting argument. From Theorem
\ref{enumeration} we know that the number of graphs on $k$
(labeled) vertices with obstacle number at most one is at most
$2^{o(k^2)}$. Now we will count the graphs with obstacle number
less than $n/2k$. Suppose $G$ has a representation with less than
$n/2k$ obstacles. Fix one such representation. There are $n!$
possibilities for the order of the vertices of $G$ from left to
right (we can suppose that no two are below each other). We divide
the vertices into $n/k$ groups of size $k$, from left to right.
Denote the respective induced graphs by $G_i$.
\begin{claim} At least half of the $G_i$'s require at most one obstacle.
\end{claim}
\begin{proof} By contradiction, suppose that at least half of the $G_i$'s require at least two obstacles. One of each of these obstacles must be in an interior face of the respective $G_i$'s. Thus these obstacles are pair-wise separated by edges and must be different. This together would be at least $n/2k$ obstacles which contradicts the choice of $G$.
\end{proof}
For the subset of $G_i$'s that require at most one obstacle there
are less than $2^{n/k}$ possibilities. Since the number of graphs
on $k$ vertices whose obstacle number is at most one is $2^{o(k^2)}$, the
probability that a $G_i$ has a representation with at most one obstacle is
$2^{o(k^2)-{k\choose 2}}$. Therefore, the probability that a
random graph $G$ has obstacle number at most $n/2k$ is at most
$$n!\cdot 2^{n/k}\cdot (2^{o(k^2)-{k\choose 2}})^{n/2k}= 2^{n\log n - \frac{kn}{4}+o(kn)}.$$}
If $k=\Omega\left(5\log n\right)$, this number tends to zero.
Therefore some graphs need at least $\Omega\left({n}/{\log
n}\right)$ obstacles.
\end{proof}
\section{Further properties}
In this section, we describe further properties of obstacle numbers. We start
with another question from \cite{AKL09}.
\begin{theorem}\label{exactly}
For every $h$, there exists a graph with obstacle number exactly
$h$.
\end{theorem}
\begin{proof}
Pick a graph $G$ with obstacle number $h'>h$. (The existence of such a graph follows, e.g., from Corollary~\ref{ult}.) Let $n$ denote the number of vertices of $G$. Consider a complete graph $K_n$ on $V(G)$. Its obstacle number is {\em zero}, and $G$ can be obtained from $K_n$ by successively deleting edges. Observe that as we delete an edge from a graph $G'$, its obstacle number cannot increase by more than {\em one}. This follows from the fact that by blocking the deleted edge with an additional small obstacle that does not intersect any other edge of $G'$, we obtain a valid obstacle representation of the new graph. (Of course, the obstacle number of a graph can also {\em decrease} by the removal of an edge.) Since at the beginning of the process, $K_n$ has obstacle number {\em zero}, at the end $G$ has obstacle number $h'>h$, and whenever it increases, the increase is {\em one}, we can conclude that at some stage we obtain a graph with obstacle number precisely $h$.
\end{proof}
The same argument applies to the convex obstacle number, to the segment obstacle number, and many similar parameters.
Let $H$ be a fixed graph. According to a classical conjecture of Erd\H os and Hajnal~\cite{EH89}, any graph with $n$ vertices that does not have an induced subgraph isomorphic to $H$ contains an independent set or a complete subgraph of size at least $n^{\varepsilon(H)}$, for some positive constant $\varepsilon(H)$. It follows that for any hereditary graph property there exists a constant $\varepsilon>0$ such that every graph $G$ on $n$ vertices with this property satisfies ${\rm hom}(G)\ge n^{\varepsilon}$.
Here we show that the last statement holds for the property that the graph has bounded obstacle number.
\begin{theorem} For any fixed integer $h>0$, every graph on $n$ vertices with ${\rm obs}_{c}(G) \le h$ satisfies ${\rm hom}(G)\ge \frac{1}{2}n^{\frac{1}{h+1}}$.
\end{theorem}
\begin{proof}
We proceed by induction on $h$. For $h=1$, Alpert et al.~\cite{AKL09} showed that all graphs with convex obstacle number {\em one} are so-called "circular interval graphs" (intersection graphs of a collection of arcs along the circle). It is known that all such graphs $G$ whose maximum complete subgraph is of size $x$ has an independent set of size at least $\frac{n}{2x}$; see \cite{T75}. Setting $x=\sqrt{n/2}$, it follows that ${\rm hom}(G)\geq \frac{1}{2}\sqrt{n}$.
Let $h>1$, and assume that the statement has already been verified for all graphs with convex obstacle number smaller than $h$. Let $G$ be a graph that requires $h$ convex obstacles, and consider one of its representations. Then we have $G = \cap_i G_i$, where $G_i$ denotes the visibility graph of the same set of points after the removal of all but the $i$-th obstacle.
If the size of the largest independent set in $G_1$ is at least $\frac{1}{2}n^{\frac{1}{h+1}}$, then the statement holds, because this set is also an independent set in $G$. If this is not the case, then, by the above property of circular arc graphs, $G$ must have a complete subgraph $K$ of size at least $n^{\frac{h}{h+1}}$. Consider now the subgraph of $\cap_{i=2}^h G_i$ induced by the vertices of $K$. This graph requires only $h-1$ obstacles. Thus, we can apply the induction hypothesis to obtain that it has a complete subgraph or an independent set of size at least $\frac{1}{2}(n^{\frac{h}{h+1}})^{\frac{1}{h}} = \frac{1}{2}n^{\frac{1}{h+1}}$.
\end{proof}
It is easy to see that every graph $G$ on $n$ vertices with convex obstacle number at most $h$ has the following stronger property, which implies that they satisfy the Erd\H os-Hajnal conjecture: There exists a constant $\varepsilon=\varepsilon(h)$ such that $G$ contains a complete subgraph of size at least $\varepsilon n$ or two sets of size at least $\varepsilon n$ such that no edges between them belongs to $G$ (cf.~\cite{FP08}).
Finally, we make a comment on higher dimensional representations.
\begin{proposition}
In dimensions $d=4$ and higher, every graph can be represented with one convex obstacle.
\end{proposition}
\begin{proof}
Let $G$ be a graph with $n$ vertices.
Consider the moment curve $$\{(t,t^2,t^3,t^4):t \in \mathbf{R}\}.$$ Pick $n$ points $v_i = (t_i, {t_i}^2,{t_i}^3,{t_i}^4)$ on this curve, $i=1,\ldots, n$. The convex hull of these points is a {\em cyclic polytope} $P_n$. The vertex set of $P_n$ is $\{v_1,\ldots, v_n\}$, and any segment connecting a pair of vertices of $P_n$ is an edge of $P_n$ (lying on its boundary). Denote the midpoint of the edge $v_iv_j$ by $v_{ij}$, and let $O$ be the convex hull of the set of all midpoint $v_{ij}$, for which $v_i$ and $v_j$ are not connected by an edge in $G$. Obviously, the points $v_i$ and the obstacle $O$ (or its small perturbation, if we wish to attain general position) show that $G$ admits a representation with a single convex obstacle.
\end{proof}
\section{Open Problems}
The problems we have considered in the last few sections were to ascertain
the obstacle number of graphs when we restrict the kind of obstacles we use,
namely, general polygons, convex polygons and segments.
Two other ways to consider the problem would be, firstly, to consider
restrictions on the placement of the obstacles, and secondly, to consider
restrictions on the kind of graphs we consider. For the first question,
an interesting problem raised in \cite{AKL09} was to determine graphs which
require only one obstacle in their outer face.
For the second problem, we realize from Theorem~\ref{ult} that the problem
is more interesting if we consider sparse graphs.
In \cite{AKL09},
it was shown that outerplanar graphs can be drawn with exactly one obstacle
in the outer face that was not necessarily convex. Hence, they raised the
question whether outerplanar graphs can be drawn with a finite number of
convex obstacles.
To this, in \cite{fss11}
it was shown that outerplanar graphs can be drawn with
only five convex obstacles. Since every tree is an outerplanar graph, this
also settles the question for trees.
It is an interesting open problem if planar graphs can be drawn
with a finite number of (convex) obstacles.
Any graph with $e$ edges can be drawn with $2e$ segment obstacles, by placing
a segment very close to every vertex between any two adjacent edges in the
drawing. Hence, a sublinear bound on obstacle (or convex obstacle) number
of planar graphs would also be interesting.
In three dimensions, it is easy to see that every graph can be represented
with one obstacle. It is interesting, however, to find a bound when we
restrict ourselves to convex obstacles.
Finally, the upper bound of obstacle numbers is wide open and nothing better
is known than $2n^2/3$ (this can be achieved since a graph with $e$ edges
needs at most $n(n-1)/2 -e$ obstacles, or $2e$ obstacles from the above
observation). Hence, even a subquadratic bound would be interesting.
\section{Introduction}
A central topic of combinatorial game theory is the study of positional games. The interested reader can find the state of the art methods in Beck's Tic-Tac-Toe book \cite{B}. In general, positional games are played between two players on a {\em board}, the points of which they alternatingly occupy with their marks and whoever first fills a {\em winning set} completely with her/his marks wins the game.
Thus a positional game can be played on any hypergraph, but in this chapter, we only consider
{\em semi-infinite} games
where all winning sets are finite.
If after countably many steps none of them occupied a winning set, we say that the game ended in a draw.
It is easy to see that we can suppose that the next move of the players depends only on the actual position of the board and is deterministic.\footnote{This is not the case for infinite games and even in semi-infinite games it can happen that the first player can always win the game but there is no $N$ such that the game could be won in $N$ moves. For interesting examples, we refer the reader to the antique papers \cite{ACN, BC, CN}.}
We say that a player has a {\em winning strategy} if no matter how the other player plays, she/he always wins.
We also say that a player has a {\em drawing strategy} if no matter how the other player plays, she/he can always achieve a draw (or win).
A folklore strategy stealing argument shows that the second player (who puts {\em his} first mark after the first player puts {\em her} first mark, as ladies go first) cannot have a winning strategy, so the best that he can hope for is a draw.
Given any semi-infinite game, either the first player has a winning strategy, or the second player has a drawing strategy.
We say that the second player can achieve a {\em pairing strategy draw} if there is a matching among the points of the board such that every winning set contains at least one pair. It is easy to see that the second player can now force a draw by putting his mark always on the point which is matched to the point occupied by the first player in the previous step (or anywhere, if the point in unmatched).
Note that in a relaxation of the game for the first player, by allowing her to win if she occupies a winning set (not necessarily first), the pairing strategy still lets the second player to force a draw.
Such drawing strategies are called {\em strong draws}.
Since in these games only the first player is trying to complete a winning set and the second is only trying to prevent her from doing so, the first player is called {\em Maker}, the second {\em Breaker}, and the game is called a {\em Maker-Breaker} game.
This chapter is about a generalization of the Five-in-a-Row game\footnote{Aka Go-Muku and Am\H oba.} which is the more serious version of the classic Tic-Tac-Toe game. This generalized game is played on the $d$-dimensional integer grid, $\Z^d$, and the winning sets consist of $m$ consecutive gridpoints in $n$ previously given directions. For example, in the Five-in-a-Row game $d=2$, $m=5$ and $n=4$, the winning directions are the vertical, the horizontal and the two diagonals with slope $1$ and $-1$.
Note that we only assume that the greatest common divisor of the coordinates of each direction is $1$, so a direction can be arbitrarily long, e.g.\ $(5,0,24601)$.
The question is, for what values of $m$ can we guarantee that the second player has a drawing strategy?
It was shown by Hales and Jewett \cite{B}, that for the four above given directions of the two dimensional grid and $m=9$ the second player can achieve a pairing strategy draw. In the general version, a somewhat weaker result was shown by Kruczek and Sundberg \cite{KS1}, who showed that the second player has a pairing strategy if $m\ge 3n$ for any $d$.
They conjectured that there is always a pairing strategy for $m\ge 2n+1$, generalizing the result of Hales and Jewett.\footnote{It is not hard to show that if $m=2n$, then such a strategy might not exist, we show why in Section 3.}
\begin{conjecture}[Kruczek and Sundberg] If $m=2n+1$, then in the Maker-Breaker game played on $\Z^d$, where Maker needs to put at least $m$ of his marks consecutively in one of $n$ given winning directions, Breaker can force a draw using a pairing strategy.
\end{conjecture}
Our main result asymptotically solves their conjecture.
\begin{theorem}\label{one} There is an $m=2n+o(n)$ such that in the Maker-Breaker game played on $\Z^d$, where Maker needs to put at least $m$ of his marks consecutively in one of $n$ given winning directions, Breaker can force a draw using a pairing strategy.
\end{theorem}
In fact we prove the following theorem, which is clearly stronger because of the classical result \cite{H} showing that there is a prime between $n$ and $n+o(n)$.
\begin{theorem}\label{two} If $p=m-1\ge 2n+1$ is a prime, then in the Maker-Breaker game played on $\Z^d$, where Maker needs to put at least $m$ of his marks consecutively in one of $n$ given winning directions, Breaker can force a draw using a pairing strategy.
\end{theorem}
The proof of the theorem is by reduction to a game played on $\Z$ and then using the following recent number theoretic result of Preissmann and Mischler. Later this result was independently rediscovered by Kohen and Sadofschi \cite{KS} and by Karasev and Petrov \cite{KP}, they both gave a short proof using the Combinatorial Nullstellansatz \cite{A}. The latter paper also gives an even shorter topological proof and generalizations.
\begin{lemma}\label{prime}\cite{PM} Given $d_1,\ldots,d_n$ and $p\ge 2n+1$ prime, we can select $2n$ numbers, $x_1,\ldots,x_n,y_1,\ldots,y_n$ all different modulo $p$ such that $x_i+d_i\equiv y_i \mod p$.
\end{lemma}
We prove our theorem in the next section and end the chapter with some additional remarks.
\section{Proof of Theorem \ref{two}}
We consider the winning directions to be the primitive vectors\footnote{A vector $(v_1,\ldots,v_d)\in \Z^d$ is primitive if $gcd(v_1,\ldots,v_d)=1$.} $\vec v_1,...,\vec v_n$.
Using a standard compactness argument it is enough to show that there is a pairing strategy if the board is $[N]^d$, where $[N]$ stands for $\{1,\ldots,N\}$. For interested readers, the compactness argument is discussed in detail at the end of this section.
First we reduce the problem to one dimension.
Take a vector $\vec r = (r_1,r_2,...,r_d)$ and transform each grid point $\vec v$ to $\vec v\cdot \vec r$.
If $\vec r$ is such that $r_j>0$ and $r_{j+1} > N(r_1+\ldots+r_j)$ for all $j$, then this transformation is injective from $[N]^d$ to $\Z$ and each winning direction is transformed to some number, $d_i = |\vec r \cdot \vec v_i|$.\footnote{It is even possible that some of these numbers are zero, we will take care of this later.}
So we have these $n$ differences, $d_1,\ldots, d_n$, and the problem reduces to avoiding arithmetic progressions of length $m$ with these differences.
From the reduction it follows that if we have a pairing strategy for this game, we also have one for the original.
Let $p$ be a prime such that $2n+1 \le p \le 2n+1+o(n)$. (In \cite{H} it was shown that we can always find such a $p$).
If we pick a vector $\vec u$
uniformly at random from $[p]^d$,
then for any primitive vector $\vec v$,
$\vec u \cdot \vec v$
will be divisible by $p$ with probability $1/p$.
Since each winning direction was a primitive vector,
using the union bound, the probability that at least one of the $\vec u \cdot \vec v_i$ is divisible by $p$ is at most $n/p<1/2$.
So, there is a $\vec u' = (u_1',u_2',..,u_d') \in [p]^d$ such that none of $\vec u' \cdot \vec v_i$ is divisible by $p$.
If we now take $\vec r = (r_1,r_2,..,r_d)$ such that $r_j = u_j' + (pN)^{j-1}$, then the dot product with $\vec r$ is injective from $[N]^d$ to $\Z$ and
none of the $d_i = \vec r \cdot \vec v_i$ are divisible by $p$, since $\forall j \ r_j \equiv u_j' \mod p$.
We now apply Lemma \ref{prime} for $d_1,... , d_n$ to get $2n$ distinct numbers $x_1,x_2,...x_n,y_1,y_2,..,y_n$ such that $0 \le x_i,y_i < p$ and $x_i + d_i \equiv y_i \mod p$.
Our pairing strategy is, for every $x \equiv x_i \mod p$, $x$ is paired to $x+d_i$ and if $x \equiv y_i \mod p$, then $x$ is paired to $x-d_i$.
To see that this is a good pairing strategy, consider an arithmetic progression $a_1,..., a_m$ of $m=p+1$ numbers with difference, say, $d_i$. Since $p$ and $d_i$ are coprimes, one of the numbers $a_1,..., a_{m-1}$, say $a_j$, must be such that $a_j \equiv x_i \mod p$. Hence $a_j,a_{j+1}$ must be paired in our pairing strategy, showing both cannot be occupied by Maker.\hfill$\Box$\\
For completeness here we sketch how the compactness argument goes. We show that it is sufficient to show that a pairing strategy exists for every finite $[N]^d$ board. For this we use the following lemma.\footnote{We use the version stated in \cite{D}.}
\begin{lemma}\label{kil}\cite{KIL} (K\"onig's Infinity Lemma) Let $V_0,V_1,..$ be an infinite sequence of disjoint non-empty finite sets, and let $G$ be a graph on their union. Assume that every vertex $v$ in a set $V_N$ with $N\ge1$ has a neighbor $f(v)$ in $V_{N-1}$. Then $G$ contains an infinite path, $v_0v_1...$ with $v_N \in V_N$ for all $N$.
\end{lemma}
Given a pairing strategy for $[N_0]^d$, consider a smaller board $[N]^d$ where $N<N_0$. We can think of a pairing strategy as, essentially, a partition of $[N_0]^d$ into pairs and unpaired elements.\footnote{Note that a pairing strategy does not guarantee that every element is paired. It only states that every winning set has a pair. Hence there might be many unpaired elements in a pairing strategy.} We can construct a good pairing strategy for the smaller board by taking the restriction of these set of pairs to $[N]^d$ and leave the elements paired outside $[N]^d$ as unpaired elements. We call this as a restriction of the pairing strategy to the new board. As long as we do not change the length of the winning sets and the prescribed directions, any winning set in the $[N]^d$ board is also a winning set in the $[N_0]^d$ board and hence must have a pair from the restriction. Hence, the Breaker can block all winning pairs and the restriction of the pairing strategy is a valid strategy for Breaker for the smaller board.
We can now prove the following theorem,
\begin{theorem}\label{compact} Given a fixed set $S,\ |S|=n$, of winning directions, and positive integer $m$, if Breaker has a pairing strategy for all boards $[N]^d$
and length of winning sets equal to $m$, then Breaker also has a pairing strategy for the $\Z^d$ board.
\end{theorem}
We will apply K\"onig's Infinity Lemma to prove the theorem. Let $V_N$ be the set of all pairing strategies on the $\{-N,\ldots,N\}^d$ board with winning sets as defined in the theorem. We say a strategy in $V_{N-1}$ and a strategy in $V_N$ have an edge between them if the former is a restriction of the latter. It is easy to see that every vertex in $V_N$ does have an edge to its restriction in $V_{N-1}$. Hence, by the lemma, we must have an infinite path $v_0v_1...$. The union of all these pairing strategies gives a valid pairing strategy for the infinite game.
\section{Possible further improvements and remarks}
As we said before, if $m\le 2n$, then the second player cannot have a pairing strategy draw.
This can be seen as follows. On one hand, in any pairing strategy, from any $m$ consecutive points in a winning direction, there must be at least two points paired to each other in this direction.
On the other hand, there must be a winning direction in which at most $1/n$ of all points are matched to another in this direction.
If we pick a set of size $m-1$ uniformly randomly in this direction, then the expected number of points matched in this direction will be at most $(m-1)/n< 2$.
Thus, there is a set of size $m-1$ that contains only one such point.
Its matching point can now be avoided by extending this set to one way or the other, thereby giving us a winning set with no matched pair.
If $n=1$ or $2$, then a not too deep case analysis shows that the first player has a winning strategy if $m=2n$, even in the {\em strong game}, where the second player also wins if he occupies a winning set.
Moreover, the second player has a pairing strategy for $m=2n+1$ if $n=1$ or $2$, thus, in this case, the conjecture is tight.
However, for higher values, it seems that Breaker can always do better than just playing a pairing strategy, so we should not expect this strategy the best to achieve a draw. Quite tight bounds have been proved for Maker-Breaker games with {\em potential} based arguments, for the latest in generalization of Tic-Tac-Toe games, see \cite{KS2}.
Despite this, from a combinatorial point of view, it still remains an interesting question to determine the best pairing strategy. Unfortunately our proof can only give $2n+2$ (if $2n+1$ is a prime) which is still one bigger than the conjecture.
One could hope that maybe we could achieve a better bound using a stronger result than Lemma \ref{prime} (see for example the conjecture of Roland Bacher in \cite{PM}, whom we would like to thank for directing us to it \cite{Ba}), however, already for $n=3$, our method cannot work.
Consider the three directions $(1,0),(0,1),(1,1)$. Optimally, we would hope to map them to three numbers, $d_1,d_2,d_3$, all coprime to $6$, such that we can find $x_1,x_2,x_3,y_1,y_2,y_3$ all different modulo $6$ such that $x_i+d_i\equiv y_i \mod 6$.
But this is impossible since $d_3=d_1+d_2$, so we cannot even fulfill the condition that the differences have to be coprimes to $6$. But even if we forget about that condition, it would still be impossible to find a triple satisfying $d_3=d_1+d_2$.
If we consider a pairing strategy where the pair of
any grid point $\vec v$, depends only on $v \cdot r$, then the above argument shows that such a pairing strategy does not exist for the three vectors $(1,0),(0,1),(1,1)$.
However, it is not hard to find a suitable periodic pairing strategy for these three vectors. We would like to end with an equivalent formulation of Conjecture 1.
\begin{conjecture}[Kruczek and Sundberg, reformulated] Suppose we are given $n$ primitive vectors, $\vec v_i$ of $\Z_{2n}^{d}$ for $i\in [n]$. Is it always possible to find a partition of $\Z_{2n}^{d}$ into $\vec x_i^j,\vec y_i^j$ for $i\in [n], j\in [2n]$ such that $\vec x_i^j+\vec v_i=\vec y_i^j$ and $\vec x_i^j-\vec x_i^{j'}$ is not a multiple of $\vec v_i$ for $j\ne j'$?
\end{conjecture}
\chapter{Program code}
The following code is in Maple.
\begin{verbatim}
#For accessing log, ceil functions.
with(MTM);
#fmax is a procedure that computes the girth for which a graph on N
#vertices will have the largest supercyle.
#Here, mg denotes the maximum possible girth, max and g will have the
#values of the maximum size of the supercycle and the girth at which
#it occurs respectively. The procedure returns 2s-2, if this value is
#less than N, we can apply Lemma 2.6 and 2.8 to draw the graphs on N
#vertices.
fmax := proc (N) local g, mg, max, i, exp;
#Initializations
max := -1;
g := 0;
mg := 2*ceil(evalf(log2((1/3)*N+1)));
if mg < 3 then RETURN([N, 2*max-2, mg, g]) fi;
#Main search cycle.
for i from 3 while i <= mg do
exp := 2*ceil(evalf(log2((N+1)/i)))+i-1;
if max < exp then max := exp; g := i fi
end do;
RETURN([N, 2*max-2, mg, g])
end proc;
seq(fmax(i), i = 6 .. 42, 2);
[6,10,4,3], [8,12,4,4], [10,14,6,5], [12,16,6,6], [14,16,6,6],
[16,16,6,4], [18,16,6,4], [20,18,6,5], [22,20,8,8], [24,20,8,6],
[26,20,8,6], [28,22,8,7], [30,22,8,7], [32,24,8,8], [34,24,8,8],
[36,24,8,8], [38,24,8,8], [40,24,8,8], [42,24,8,8]
\end{verbatim}
\section*{\abstractname
\else
\small
\begin{center
{\ackname\vspace{-.1em}\vspace{\z@}
\end{center
\quotation
\fi}
{\if@twocolumn\else\endquotation\fi}
\fi
\makeatother
\addtolength{\baselineskip}{2pt} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0.2in}
\def\marrow{{\boldmath {\marginpar[\hfill$\rightarrow \rightarrow$]{$\leftarrow \leftarrow$}}}}
\def\dom#1{{\sc D\"om\"ot\"or: }{\marrow\sf #1}}
\def\pad#1{{\sc Padmini: }{\marrow\sf #1}}
\begin{document}
\large
\thispagestyle{empty}
\begin{doublespacing}
{\centering
OBSTACLES, SLOPES AND TIC-TAC-TOE: AN EXCURSION IN DISCRETE GEOMETRY AND COMBINATORIAL GAME THEORY
By
V S PADMINI MUKKAMALA
A dissertation submitted to the
Graduate School-New Brunswick
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Program in Mathematics
Written under the direction of
J\'anos Pach and Mario Szegedy
and approved by
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
New Brunswick, New Jersey
October, 2011
}
\end{doublespacing}
\cleardoublepage
\newpage
\thispagestyle{empty}
{\centering
\vspace{3cm}
To
Amma and Nanna
}
\newpage
\thispagestyle{empty}
\newpage
\pagenumbering{roman}
\pagestyle{plain}
\begin{doublespacing}
{\centering
OBSTACLES, SLOPES AND TIC-TAC-TOE: AN EXCURSION IN DISCRETE GEOMETRY AND COMBINATORIAL GAME THEORY
By
V S PADMINI MUKKAMALA
Dissertation Director: J\'anos Pach and Mario Szegedy
ABSTRACT
}
\end{doublespacing}
\medskip
A drawing of a graph is said to be a {\em straight-line drawing} if the vertices of $G$ are represented by distinct points in the plane and every edge is represented by a straight-line segment connecting the corresponding pair of vertices and not passing through any other vertex of $G$. The minimum number of slopes in a straight-line drawing of $G$ is called the slope number of $G$.
We show that every cubic graph can be drawn in the plane with straight-line edges using only the four basic slopes $\{0,\pi/4,\pi/2,-\pi/4\}$. We also prove that four slopes have this property if and only if we can draw $K_4$ with them.
Given a graph $G$, an {\em obstacle representation} of $G$ is a
set of points in the plane representing the vertices of $G$,
together with a set of obstacles (connected polygons) such that two vertices
of $G$ are joined by an edge if and only if the corresponding
points can be connected by a segment which avoids all obstacles.
The {\em obstacle number} of $G$ is the minimum number of
obstacles in an obstacle representation of $G$. We show that
there are graphs on $n$ vertices with obstacle number
$\Omega({n}/{\log n})$.
We show that there is an $m=2n+o(n)$, such that, in the Maker-Breaker game played on $\Z^d$ where Maker needs to put at least $m$ of his marks consecutively in one of $n$ given winning directions, Breaker can force a draw using a pairing strategy.
This improves the result of Kruczek and Sundberg who showed that such a pairing strategy exits if $m\ge 3n$.
A simple argument shows that $m$ has to be at least $2n+1$ if Breaker is only allowed to use a pairing strategy, thus the main term of our bound is optimal.
\newpage
\begin{acknowledgements}
I would like to thank my parents for always being a pillar of strength for me and supporting me through everything in life and being patient with me despite all my pitfalls. Any acknowledgment would fall short of conveying my gratefulness for having their guidance.
I would also like to thank my brother who has always been the one in whose footsteps I have walked. From school to IIT to Rutgers, he always guided and shaped every vital decision I made. I thank him for always being there.
I would like to thank Rado\v s Radoi\v ci\'c for initiating me into discrete geometry, Mario Szegedy for his valuable guidance as an advisor, and, Jeff Kahn, J\'ozsef Beck, Michel Saks, William Steiger, Doron Zeilberger, Van Vu for teaching me combinatorics and discrete geometry.
I would also like to thank J\'anos Pach for his patience and guidance as a mentor despite the difficulties I presented as a student, for always striving to encourage me into mathematical research with new problems, for trying to teach me to write papers, and above all, for bringing me to Switzerland where I met my husband.
I would also like to thank all my friends at Rutgers, CUNY and EPFL for making
my stay at all places most enjoyable.
I would like to thank Linda Asaro at the International Student Center, Rutgers, for being the most helpful advisor and for her punctuality with every request.
I would also like to thank Pat Barr, Maureen Clausen, Lynn Braun, Demetria Carpenter at Administration, Mathematics Department, for always being helpful.
Lastly, I would like to thank my husband, without whom this PhD would not have been possible and meeting whom would not have been possible without the PhD. His support, guidance and encouragement have shaped not just this PhD, but more aspects of me than I can describe. I thank him for being him and for being there for me.
\end{acknowledgements}
\newpage
\tableofcontents
\newpage
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{List of Figures}
\listoffigures
\newpage
\pagenumbering{arabic}
\pagestyle{plain}
\chapter*{Introduction}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Introduction}
\input{0_intro.tex}
\part{Combinatorial Geometry}
\newpage
\chapter{Slope number}
\input{1_1_slope_introduction.tex}
\input{1_2_subcubicjav.tex}
\input{1_3_paper_revised.tex}
\input{1_4_slope_new_final.tex}
\input{1_5_final_remarks.tex}
\newpage
\chapter{Obstacle number}
\input{2_1_obstacle_introduction.tex}
\input{2_2_obstacleconf.tex}
\input{2_3_obstaclejourn.tex}
\input{2_4_final_remarks.tex}
\newpage
\part{Combinatorial Games}
\newpage
\chapter{Tic-Tac-Toe}
\input{3_1_combinatorial_games_introduction.tex}
\input{3_2_tictactoe.tex}
\newpage
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
}
| 9,665
|
\section{Introduction}
Let $F_0 : M^n \rightarrow \mathbb R^m$ be an immersion of a
compact manifold of dimension $n\geq 2$ into Euclidean space. The
mean curvature flow with initial condition $F_0$ is a smooth
family of immersions $F:M\times [0,T) \rightarrow \mathbb R^m$ satisfying
\begin{equation}\label{MCF}
\frac{\partial}{\partial t} F(p,t) = H(p,t), \ p\in M, \, t\geq 0;
\quad F(\cdot,0)=F_0, \tag{MCF}
\end{equation}
where $H(p,t)$ is the mean curvature vector of the submanifold
$M_t=F(M,t)$ at $p$. It is well-known that (\ref{MCF}) is a
quasilinear parabolic system that is invariant under
reparametrizations of $M$ and isometries of the ambient space and
short-time existence and uniqueness is guaranteed, being
$T<\infty$ the maximal time of existence.
The first classical works in this topic studied the evolution of
hypersurfaces by their mean curvature. We emphasize Huisken's
paper \cite{Hu84} on the flow of convex surfaces into spheres,
proving that if the initial hypersurface is uniformly convex, then
the mean curvature flow converges to a round point in finite time.
That is, the shape of $M_t$ approaches the shape of a sphere very
rapidly and no singularities will occur before the hypersurfaces
$M_t$ shrink down to a single point after a finite time. Recently,
mean curvature flow of higher codimension submanifolds has also
received interest by many authors who have paid attention mainly
to graphical submanifolds and symplectic or Lagrangian
submanifolds. We recall that Huisken's monotonicity formula
\cite{Hu90}, relating the formation of singularities to
self-shrinking solutions of the mean curvature flow, also applies
in any codimension. Concretely, the so-called Type I singularities
forming in Euclidean space look like self-similar contracting
solutions after an appropriate rescaling procedure. According to
\cite{Sm11}, this type of singularities usually occur when there
exists some kind of pinching of the second fundamental form.
Andrews and Baker \cite{AB10} proved a convergence theorem for the
mean curvature flow of closed submanifolds satisfying suitable
pinching condition and showed that such submanifolds contract to
round points.
In this paper we are interested in the class of Lagrangian immersions in complex Euclidean space
$\mathbb C^n\!\equiv\!\mathbb R^{2n}$, which is a preserved class under the mean curvature flow. We notice that there do not exist
Lagrangian self-shrinking spheres (see \cite{CL14} or \cite{Sm11} and references therein) and, in addition, Smoczyk
showed that the class of smooth closed Lagrangian immersions in $\mathbb C^n $ is not $\delta$-pinchable for any $\delta$
(see \cite[Section 4.1]{Sm11}). The authors do not know any available result regarding convergence of compact
Lagrangians in $\mathbb C^n$. In fact, the following problem was posed by André Neves \cite[Question 7.4]{Ne10b} as a
Lagrangian analogue of Huisken's classical result \cite{Hu84} for the mean curvature flow of convex spheres:
\begin{quote}
{\it Find a condition on a Lagrangian torus in $\mathbb C^2$, which
implies that the Lagrangian mean curvature flow $(M_t)_{0<t<T}$
will become extinct at time $T$ and, after rescale, $M_t$
converges to the Clifford torus.}
\end{quote}
Our contribution to this problem is the following main result.
\begin{theoremL}\label{TheoremA}
Let $M_0$ be an embedded Lagrangian compact surface of $\mathbb C^2$ which is contained in some hypersphere $\mathbb S^3(R_0)$ of radius $R_0>0$. Then the mean curvature flow \eqref{MCF} with initial condition $M_0$ has a unique solution defined on a maximal interval $[0,T)$, $T\leq R_0^2/4$. In addition:
\begin{itemize}
\item[(a)] If $M_0$ divides $\mathbb S^3(R_0)$ in two connected components of equal volume, then $T=R_0^2/4$, the limit $M_T$ of the evolving surfaces $M_t$ when $t\to T$ is a point and, after rescaling the flow by multiplication by $1/\sqrt{R_0^2-4 t}$, the limit is a Clifford torus in $\mathbb S^3 \!:= \mathbb S^3(1)\subset \mathbb C ^2$.
\item[(b)] If $M_0$ divides $\mathbb S^3(R_0)$ in two connected components of different volumes (being $2 \pi A_0 R_0^3$ the lowest volume), then $T=A_0 R_0^2 /2\pi$, the limit $M_T$ of the evolving surfaces $M_t$ when $t\to T$ is a circle of radius $R_0 \sqrt{1-2 A_0/\pi}$ and, after rescaling the flow by multiplication by $\sqrt{A_0(R_0^2 - 4 t)/(A_0R_0^2-2\pi t)}$, the limit is a cylinder in $\mathbb R^3\subset \mathbb C^2$.
\end{itemize}
\end{theoremL}
In Proposition \ref{MHC} (see also \cite[Corollary 1]{We91}) we show that any compact Lagrangian surface of complex Euclidean plane contained in some hypersphere must be the preimage of a spherical closed curve by the corresponding Hopf fibration, providing in general an immersed torus that was called a Hopf torus by Pinkall in \cite{Pi85}. As we shall see in the proof of Theorem \ref{TheoremA}, $A_0$ coincides with the area enclosed by the spherical curve $\pi (M_0/R_0) $, projection of $(1/R_0) M_0 \subset \mathbb S^3$ on $\mathbb S^2(1/2)$ by the Hopf fibration $\pi:\mathbb S^3\rightarrow \mathbb S^2(1/2) $. The isometry type of the torus $M_0$ depends not only on the length of the spherical curve $\pi (M_0/R_0) $ but also on the enclosed area $A_0$. It was proved in \cite{Pi85} that a Hopf torus $M_0$ is a critical point of the Willmore functional if and only if its corresponding spherical curve is an elastic curve.
Part (a) of Theorem \ref{TheoremA} is our answer to the Neves question quoted before for a Lagrangian embedded torus $M_0$.
We point out that the hypotheses on $M_0$ established in Theorem \ref{TheoremA} are preserved by the mean curvature flow (see Lemma \ref{dAt}).
Thinking of the shape of the closed spherical elastic curves, $M_0$ could be a Willmore torus. We remark that the first two
authors provided in \cite{CL14} four rigidity results for the Clifford torus in the class of compact self-shrinkers for the Lagrangian
mean curvature flow.
All the singularities appearing in Theorem \ref{TheoremA} are of Type I (see Remark \ref{notsingI}). \subsection{The ideas behind the main results}
We now expose some ideas showing that the evolutions considered in Theorem \ref{TheoremA} are natural in some geometric
sense since they (and some other studied in \cite{GSSmZ07}, \cite{Ne07} and \cite{Ne10a}) can be regarded as evolutions
related with geometric flows of plane and spherical curves.
Let $\alpha_0:I_1\rightarrow \mathbb C^*$ be a regular plane curve and $\gamma_0:I_2 \rightarrow\mathbb S^2 (1/2) $
be a regular spherical curve in $\mathbb C^2$, where $I_1$ and $I_2$ are intervals in $\mathbb R$. Let
\[
F_0: I_1 \times I_2 \subseteq \mathbb R^2 \longrightarrow \mathbb C^2, \qquad F_0(x,y) = \alpha_0 (x) \tilde{\gamma}_0 (y),
\]
with $\tilde\gamma_0:I_2 \rightarrow\mathbb S^3\subset \mathbb C^2 $ a horizontal lift of $\gamma_0$ via the Hopf fibration
$\pi: \mathbb S^3 \rightarrow \mathbb S^2(1/2)$. We denote by $\langle \cdot , \cdot \rangle$ and $J$ the Euclidean metric and the complex structure in $\mathbb C ^2$ and consider simultaneously a one-parameter family of plane curves
\[
\alpha=\alpha(x,t) \in \mathbb C^*, \, t\geq 0, \ \mathrm{with \ }
\alpha(x,0)=\alpha_0(x), \, x\in I_1,
\]
and a one-parameter family of spherical curves
\[
\gamma=\gamma(y,t)\in \mathbb S^2(1/2), \, t\geq 0, \ \mathrm{with \ }
\gamma(y,0)=\gamma_0(y), \, y\in I_2,
\]
and define (see \cite{RU98}) the Lagrangians
\begin{equation}\label{Ft}
F=F(x,y,t)=\alpha(x,t)\tilde{\gamma}(y,t), \quad t\geq 0, \, (x,y)\in I_1\times I_2 \subseteq \mathbb R^2,
\end{equation}
where $\tilde{\gamma}=\tilde{\gamma}(y,t)\in\mathbb S^3\subset\mathbb{C}^2$ is a horizontal lift of $\gamma=\gamma(y,t)$ via the Hopf
fibration $\pi: \mathbb S^3 \rightarrow \mathbb S^2(1/2)$.
It is clear that $F(x,y,0)=F_0(x,y)$. Our goal is to analyse the possible evolutions of $\alpha$ and $\gamma$ in order
to $F$ be a solution of (\ref{MCF}). Using \cite{RU98} and the Lagrangian character of each $F_t:=F(\cdot,\cdot,t)$,
$t\geq 0$, it is not difficult to get that $F$ is a solution of (\ref{MCF}) if and only if the following two equations
(corresponding to the normal directions $J(F_t)_x$ and $J(F_t)_y$) are satisfied:
\begin{equation}\label{Fsolx}
\left\langle \frac{\partial \alpha}{\partial t}, i\alpha_x \right\rangle + \langle \alpha ,\alpha_x \rangle
\left\langle \frac{\partial \tilde{\gamma}}{\partial t}, J \tilde \gamma \right\rangle = |\alpha_x|\kappa_\alpha +
\frac{\langle \alpha_x ,i\alpha \rangle}{|\alpha|^2}
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}\label{Fsoly}
|\alpha|^2 \left\langle \frac{\partial \tilde{\gamma}}{\partial t}, J {\tilde \gamma_y}\right\rangle
=|{\tilde\gamma_y}| \kappa_{\tilde\gamma}.
\end{equation}
In formulae \eqref{Fsolx} and \eqref{Fsoly} and in the rest of this section, subscript $x$ (resp.\ $y$) means derivative respect to $x$ (resp.\ $y$) and $\kappa $ will always denote curvature of the corresponding curve along the paper.
Looking at (\ref{Fsoly}) we distinguish two complementary cases:
{\em Case (i):} there is no (normal) evolution for $\tilde{\gamma}=\tilde{\gamma}(y,t)$ (and hence for
$\gamma=\gamma(y,t)$) and so $\tilde \gamma$ (and $\gamma$) must be a static geodesic, say $$ \tilde{\gamma}(y,t)=(\cos y,
\sin y)\in\mathbb{C}^2, \, \forall t\geq 0 .$$
Then equation (\ref{Fsolx}) can be easily rewritten as
\[
\left( \frac{\partial \alpha}{\partial t} \right)^\bot =
\vec{\kappa}_\alpha - \frac{\alpha^\bot}{|\alpha|^2},
\]
where $\vec{\kappa}_\alpha$ is the curvature vector of $\alpha $
and $\alpha^\bot$ denotes the normal component of $\alpha$.
Putting this information in (\ref{Ft}) we arrive at the evolution
studied in \cite{GSSmZ07}, \cite{Ne07} and \cite{Ne10a}.
{\em Case (ii):} necessarily $|\alpha|$ only depends on time
variable $t$, say $R(t):=|\alpha|$. This means that the evolution
of $\alpha = \alpha(x,t)$ consists of concentric circles centered
at the origin and, up to reparametrizations, it can be given by
$\alpha(x,t)=R(t)e^{ix}$. Now (\ref{Fsolx}) translates into a
simple o.d.e.\ for $R(t)$, concretely $-R \, \mathrm{d}R/\mathrm{d}t = 2$, whose
general solution is $R(t)=\sqrt{R(0)^2-4t}$. Putting this in
(\ref{Ft}), we get that in this case $F$ can be written as
\begin{equation}\label{FtNEW}
F(x,y,t)=\sqrt{R_0^2-4t}\, e^{ix}\, \tilde{\gamma}(y,t), \quad 0\leq t < \frac{R_0^2}{4},
\end{equation}
with $R_0=R(0)$ and where $\tilde{\gamma}(y,t)$ satisfy now the equation, coming from (\ref{Fsoly}), given by
\begin{equation}\label{flowLegendre}
\left \langle \frac{\partial \tilde{\gamma}}{\partial t}, \frac{J {\tilde \gamma_y}}{|{\tilde \gamma_y}| }
\right\rangle
=\frac{\kappa_{\tilde \gamma}}{R_0^2-4t}.
\end{equation}
Using that the Hopf fibration $\pi$ is a Riemannian submersion, we rewrite (\ref{flowLegendre}) as
\begin{equation}\label{flowspherical}
\left\langle\frac{\partial \gamma}{\partial t} , \frac{\gamma \times \gamma_y}{| \gamma_y|} \right\rangle
=\frac{2\kappa_{\gamma}}{R_0^2-4t},
\end{equation}
where $\times $ denotes the cross product in $\mathbb R^3$.
We will check in Section \ref{TA} that (\ref{flowspherical}) is essentially the curve shortening flow in $\mathbb
S^2(1/2)$. The relation between this flow and the corresponding flow \eqref{FtNEW} of the initial Lagrangian surface will lead to different situations and their study in depth allows us to prove Theorem \ref{TheoremA} in Section \ref{TA}.
\bigskip
\noindent {\bf Acknowledgments:} The authors wish to thank A.~Neves, K.~Smoczyk and M.-T.~Wang for interesting conversations related to this paper.
The authors would like to thank the referee for the very careful
review and for providing a number of valuable comments and suggestions.
\section{Preliminaries}
\subsection{The geometry of Hopf tori in the Hopf fibration}\label{hopf}
Let $\mathbb S^3(R)$ be the $3$-sphere of radius $R$ in $\mathbb C^2\equiv \mathbb R^4$, let $\mathbb{S}^2(R/2)$ be the $2$-sphere of radius $R/2$ in $\mathbb R^3$, and let $\pi_R:\mathbb{S}^3(R)\rightarrow\mathbb{S}^2(R/2)$ be the Hopf fibration
\begin{align*}
\pi_R(z,w)=\frac{1}{2R}\left(2z\overline w,|z|^2-|w|^2\right),\qquad(z,w)\in\mathbb{S}^3(R)\subset\mathbb{C}^2.
\end{align*}
When $R=1$, we will omit the subindex $R$. We shall denote by $N$ the unit vector orthogonal to $\mathbb{S}^3(R)$ pointing inward. If $J$ is the natural complex structure of $\mathbb C^2$, then the fibers of the Hopf fibration are the integral curves of $JN$, which are geodesics of $\mathbb{S}^3(R)$. For every $p\in \mathbb S^3(R)$, the subspace $\mathcal H_p=\{JN_p\}^\bot$ of $T_p \mathbb S^3(R)$ orthogonal to $JN_p$ is called horizontal, and it is invariant under $J$. Moreover $\pi_{R*}$ restricted to $\mathcal H$ is an isometry and, through this isometry, $J$ induces on $\mathbb S^2(R/2)$ a complex structure that we shall denote again by $J$.
Let $P_R$ be a closed curve in $\mathbb S^2(R/2)$ which we will parametrize by $\gamma_R(v)$,
$v\in [0,2 \pi]$, where
$
\gamma_R:\mathbb S^1\equiv[0,2\pi]/\!\sim \longrightarrow \mathbb S^2(R/2)
$,
and define $M_R\subset\mathbb{S}^3(R)$ the Riemannian surface $\pi_R^{-1}(P_R)$ given by its position vector $F_R$ in
$\mathbb{S}^3(R)$;
we remark that $F_R : \mathbb S^1 \times \mathbb S^1 \longrightarrow \mathbb S^3(R)$. We have the following diagram:
\begin{equation*}
\xymatrix{{M_R\equiv\mathbb{S}^1 \times \mathbb{S}^1 }\ar[rr]^{F_R} \ar[d]_{\pi_R} &&\mathbb{S}^3(R)\ar[d]^{\pi_R}\ar@{^{(}->}[rr]&&\mathbb{C}^2\\
P_R\equiv \mathbb{S}^1 \ar[rr]^{\gamma_R}&&\mathbb{S}^2(R/2)&&
}
\end{equation*}
If $X$ is a vector field tangent to $P_R$ or $\mathbb S^2(R/2)$, then $X^*$ will denote its horizontal lift tangent to $M_R$ or $\mathbb S^3(R)$, respectively.
Given $x\in \mathbb S^2(R/2)$, if we can write $\gamma_R$ as the image of a curve $c(u)$ in $T_x\mathbb S^2(R/2)$ by the exponential map $\operatorname{exp}_x$, then we can parametrize $F_R$ as $F_R(\beta,u) = \operatorname{exp}_{e^{i\beta} q} c(u)^*$, with $\pi(q)=x$ and $c(u)^*$ the horizontal lift of $c(u)$ at $e^{i\beta}q$.
Given $X,Y$ vector fields tangent to $\mathbb S^2(R/2)$ we get that
\begin{align}
\pi_{R*}({\overline \nabla}_{X^*} Y^*) = {\widehat\nabla}_XY, \label{CDH}\end{align}
where ${\overline \nabla}$ and ${\widehat\nabla}$ denote the Riemannian connections of $\mathbb S^3(R)$ and $\mathbb S^2(R/2)$, respectively. Moreover, we shall denote by ${\widetilde \nabla}$ the covariant derivative (that is, the standard directional derivative) in $\mathbb C^2$.
Let us denote by $e_1 ={\gamma_R'(u)}/{|\gamma_R'(u)|}$, by $\vec{\kappa}_R$ the curvature vector of $\gamma_R$ in $\mathbb S^2(R/2)$, by $\sigma_R$ and $\overline \sigma_R$ the second fundamental forms of $M_R$ in $\mathbb C^2$ and $\mathbb S^3(R)$, respectively. $H_R$ and ${\overline H}_R$ will denote the respective mean curvatures. Moreover, $\widetilde\sigma$ will denote the second fundamental form of $\mathbb S^3(R)$ in $\mathbb C^2$.
One has that $\<{\overline \nabla}_{e_1^*} e_1^*, JN\> = - \<e_1^*, {\overline \nabla}_{e_1^*}JN\> = - \<e_1^*, {\widetilde \nabla}_{e_1^*}JN\> = \frac1R \<e_1^*, Je_1^*\> = 0$. That is, ${\overline \nabla}_{e_1^*} e_1^*$ is horizontal and, since it must be orthogonal to $e_1^*$, it is in the direction of $Je_1^*$.
As a consequence of this fact and \eqref{CDH} one has
\begin{align}
\vec{\kappa}_R = ({\widehat\nabla}_{e_1} e_1)^\bot = \pi_{R*} (({\overline \nabla}_{e_1^*} e_1^*)^{\bot}) = \pi_{R*} (\overline \sigma(e_1^*, e_1^*)).
\end{align}
That is, $\overline\sigma(e_1^*, e_1^*) = \vec{\kappa}_R^*$. Then, for the mean curvatures one has
\begin{align}
H_R = \sigma_R(e_1^*,e_1^*) + \sigma_R(JN,JN) &=\overline\sigma_R(e_1^*,e_1^*) + \widetilde\sigma_R(e_1^*,e_1^*) + \overline\sigma_R(JN,JN)+ \widetilde\sigma(JN,JN) \nonumber \\
&= \vec{\kappa}_R^* + \frac{2}{R} N = \frac1{R} \vec{\kappa}^* - \frac2{R} F, \label{HR}
\end{align}
where we have used, for the last equality, that under an homothety the curvature of a curve becomes divided by the magnitude of the homothety. Recall also that when we consider $R=1$ we do not write the subindex $R$. Moreover, we have chosen $N$ pointing inward, which gives $N=-F$.
\subsection{Spherical Lagrangian submanifolds}
In the complex Euclidean plane $\mathbb C^2$ we consider the bilinear
Hermitian product defined by
\[
(z,w)=z_1\bar{w}_1+z_2\bar{w}_2, \quad z,w\in\mathbb C^2.
\]
Then $\langle\, \, , \, \rangle = {\rm Re} (\,\, , \,)$ is the
Euclidean metric on $\mathbb C^2$ and $\omega = -{\rm Im} (\,,)$ is the
Kaehler two-form given by $\omega (\,\cdot\, ,\,\cdot\,)=\langle
J\cdot,\cdot\rangle$, where $J$ is the complex structure on
$\mathbb C^2$.
Let $F:M \rightarrow\mathbb C^2$ be an isometric immersion of a surface $M$ into $\mathbb C^2$. $F $ is said to be Lagrangian if
$F^* \omega = 0$. This is equivalent to the orthogonal decomposition $ T\mathbb C^2 =F_* TM \oplus
J F_* T M$, where $TM$ is the tangent bundle of $M$.
\begin{prop}\label{MHC}
Let $M$ be any compact Lagrangian surface of $\mathbb C^2$ contained in some hypersphere $\mathbb S^3(R)$, $R>0$. Then $M$ must be the preimage of a closed curve in $\mathbb S^2(R/2)$ by the Hopf fibration $\pi_R:\mathbb S^3(R) \rightarrow \mathbb S^2(R/2) $.
\end{prop}
\begin{proof}
Let $N$ be the unit vector normal to $\mathbb S^3(R)$ in $\mathbb C^2$. Then $JN$ is a vector field on $\mathbb S^3(R)$ whose integral curves are the fibres of the Hopf fibration $\pi_R$. Since $M$ is Lagrangian, the restriction of $JN$ to $M$ is a tangent vector field on $M$ and its integral curves are contained in $M$. In this way, the restriction of $\pi_R$ to $M$ is a Riemannian submersion on its image $\pi_R(M)=:C$ with the same fibres that the Hopf fibration. That is, $M = \pi_R^{-1}(C)$ for some closed curve $C\subset \mathbb S^2(R/2)$.
\end{proof}
\begin{nota}\label{param}
{\rm If $F_R$ denotes a Lagrangian immersion of $M$ into $\mathbb S^3(R)\subset \mathbb C^2$, then Proposition \ref{MHC} tells us that $F_R$ can be regarded as $F_R :\mathbb S^1 \times \mathbb S^1 \longrightarrow \mathbb S^3(R)$ and there exists a curve $\gamma_R:\mathbb S^1 \longrightarrow \mathbb S^2(R/2)$ such that $(\pi_R\circ F_R)(u,v) = \gamma_R(v)$ and $F_R(\mathbb S^1\times\{v_0\})$ is a fibre of the Hopf fibration for every $v_0\in \mathbb S^1$. That is, a Lagrangian spherical immersion of a compact surface is a Hopf torus and viceversa. There are many Lagrangian tori in $\mathbb{C}^2$ which are not Hopf tori; e.g., see~\cite[Section 3]{CL14}. }\end{nota}
\section{Proof of Theorem \ref{TheoremA}}\label{TA}
Let $M_t$ be a one-parameter family of Lagrangian surfaces of $\mathbb C^2$ contained in the spheres $\mathbb S^3(R(t))$ of radius $R(t)>0$. Using Proposition~\ref{MHC} and Remark~\ref{param}, this family can be parametrized in the following way:
\begin{align} \label{FRt}
F_{R(t)}(u,v,t) = R(t) F(u,v,t),
\end{align}
where $F(\cdot,\cdot,t):\mathbb S^1 \times \mathbb S^1 \longrightarrow \mathbb S^3$ is a family of Lagrangian immersions of a torus in $\mathbb C^2$ contained in the unit hypersphere, and there exists a family of curves $\gamma(\cdot,t):\mathbb S^1 \longrightarrow \mathbb S^2(1/2)$ such that $(\pi_{R(t)}\circ F_{R(t)})(u,v,t) = R(t) \gamma(v,t)$, which is equivalent to
\begin{align}\label{gammat}
(\pi\circ F)(u,v,t) = \gamma(v,t).
\end{align}
\begin{lema}\label{lema-conditions}
The family of Lagrangian immersions given in \eqref{FRt} satisfies the mean curvature flow equation \eqref{MCF} in $\mathbb C^2$ if and only if $R(t)=\sqrt{R_0^2-4t}$ and $F(\cdot,t)$ is the preimage by the Hopf fibration $\pi:\mathbb S^3 \longrightarrow \mathbb S^2(1/2)$ of a curve $\gamma(\cdot,{\overline t}(t))$ satisfying the mean curvature flow equation in the 2-sphere, with the change of parameter given by ${\overline t}=\frac{1}{4}\ln\frac{R_0^2}{R_0^2 - 4 t}$, where $R_0=R(0)$.
\end{lema}
\begin{proof}
The left side of \eqref{MCF} is obviously
\begin{equation}\label{parcialt}
\parcial{F_R}{t}(u,v,t) = R'(t)\ F(u,v,t) + R(t) \parcial{F}{t}(u,v,t).
\end{equation}
To compute the right side of \eqref{MCF}, we will use \eqref{HR} at each time $t$. Using \eqref{HR} and \eqref{parcialt}, the evolution equation $\partial F_R / \partial t = H_R$ becomes
\begin{align*}
R' F + R \parcial{F}{t} = \frac1R \vec{\kappa}_\gamma^* - \frac2R F.
\end{align*}
Since $|F|=1$, necessarily $\parcial{F}{t} $ is orthogonal to $F$, and so the above equation separates in two coupled ones:
\begin{align*}
\begin{cases}
R' = - \frac2R \\
R \parcial{F}{t} =\frac1R \vec{\kappa}_\gamma^*
\end{cases}
\end{align*}
Putting $R(0)=R_0$, the solution of the first equation is $R^2(t) = R_0^2 - 4 t$. Plugging this solution in the second one, we obtain that
\begin{equation}\label{dFat}
\parcial{F}{t} =\frac1{R_0^2 - 4 t} \vec{\kappa}_\gamma^*.
\end{equation}
Using \eqref{gammat}, the composition with $\pi_*$ of the above equation implies that
\begin{equation}\label{dgat}
\parcial{\gamma}{t} = \frac1{R_0^2 - 4 t} \vec{\kappa}_\gamma.
\end{equation}
This is not exactly the mean curvature flow for $\gamma(v,t)$; but we consider the change of parameter $t=t({\overline t})$ given by
\begin{equation}\label{ot}
{\overline t} = {\overline t} (t) = \int_0^t \frac1{R_0^2 - 4 s} ds = -\frac14 \ln \frac{R_0^2 - 4 t}{R_0^2} = \ln \(\frac{R_0^2}{R_0^2 - 4 t}\)^{1/4}.
\end{equation}
In this way, we arrive at
\begin{equation}\label{evolFR}
\parcial{\gamma}{{\overline t}} = \parcial{t}{{\overline t}}\frac1{R_0^2 - 4 t} \vec{\kappa}_\gamma = \vec{\kappa}_\gamma ,
\end{equation}
which is the mean curvature flow for $\gamma(u,t({\overline t}))$.
\end{proof}
Next we employ Lemma~\ref{lema-conditions} to prove the following result. In particular, we deduce that the spherical condition is preserved by the Lagrangian mean curvature flow.
\begin{teor}\label{TF}
Let $F_{R_0}$ be a Lagrangian immersion of a surface in $\mathbb C^2$, contained in the hypersphere $\mathbb S^3(R_0)$ of radius $R_0>0$. Then $F_{R_0}$ evolves under the mean curvature flow following the formula:
\begin{equation}\label{evexpFR}
F_{R_0}(\cdot,t) = \sqrt{R_0^2 - 4 t}\ F(\cdot, t),
\end{equation}
where $F(\cdot,t)$ is the preimage by the Hopf fibration $\pi:\mathbb S^3 \longrightarrow \mathbb S^2(1/2)$ of a curve $\gamma(\cdot,{\overline t}(t))$ satisfying the evolution equation \eqref{evolFR}, where ${\overline t}(t)$ is the function given in \eqref{ot}.
\end{teor}
\begin{proof}
Define $F_0=(1/R_0) F_{R_0}$, and $\gamma_0: \mathbb S^1 \longrightarrow \mathbb S^2(1/2)$ satisfying $\pi\circ F_0 = \gamma_0$ as in Remark \ref{param}. Let $\gamma (\cdot,\overline t):\mathbb S^1 \times [0,\overline T[\longrightarrow \mathbb S^2(1/2)$ be a solution of the curve shortening problem \eqref{evolFR} satisfying $\gamma(\cdot,0) = \gamma_0(\cdot)$. After the reparametrization of time given by \eqref{ot}, the family $\gamma(\cdot, t)$ is a solution of \eqref{dgat}. Then $F(\cdot,\cdot,t):\mathbb S^1 \times \mathbb S^1 \longrightarrow \mathbb S^3$ defined as the family of Lagrangian surfaces of $\mathbb C^2$ contained in $\mathbb S^3$ which are liftings of the Hopf fibration is a solution of \eqref{dFat} satisfying $F(\cdot,0)= F_0$, and $\sqrt{R_0^2 - 4 t} \ F(\cdot,t)$ is (by Lemma~\ref{lema-conditions}) a solution of the mean curvature flow equal to $F_{R_0}$ at $t=0$. By the uniqueness of the solution of the mean curvature flow with given initial condition, the statement of the theorem follows.
\end{proof}
In order to continue with the proof of Theorem \ref{TheoremA}, we need the following lemma.
\begin{lema}\label{dAt}
Let $\gamma_0$ be a closed simple curve in $\mathbb S^2(1/2)$ enclosing a domain with area $A_0\leq \pi/2 $.
If $A({\overline t})$ denotes the area enclosed by a solution $\gamma(\cdot,{\overline t})$ of \eqref{evolFR} with initial condition $\gamma(\cdot,0)=\gamma_0(\cdot)$, then $ A({\overline t}) = \pi/2 - \( \pi/2- A_0\) e^{4 {\overline t}}$, and the extinction time of $\gamma(\cdot,{\overline t})$ is given by $\tau = \ln\(\frac{ \pi}{ \pi - 2 A_0}\)^{1/4} \leq \infty$.
\end{lema}
\begin{proof}
It is well known that the rate at which the area $A({\overline t})$ decrease with time ${\overline t}$ is given by $\partial A / \partial {\overline t} = - \int_{\gamma} \kappa_\gamma \, \mathrm{d}s$, which implies using the Gauss-Bonnet formula that $A'({\overline t}) = 4 A({\overline t}) - 2\pi$, taking into account that $\gamma$ lies in a sphere of radius $1/2$. Solving the former equation, we obtain that $\ln \(2 \pi - 4 A({\overline t})\)^{1/4} = \ln\(2\pi - 4 A_0\)^{1/4} + {\overline t}$, and this proves the statement.
\end{proof}
\begin{coro}\label{33} Under the hypotheses of Theorem \ref{TF} and Lemma \ref{dAt}, there are only two possibilities for the evolution under the mean curvature flow of a Lagrangian embedding $F_{R_0}$ of a compact surface in $\mathbb C^2$:
\begin{itemize}
\item[(a)] If $F_{R_0}(\mathbb S^1\times\mathbb S^1)$ divides $\mathbb S^3(R_0)$ in two connected components of equal volume,
then $F_{R_0}(\cdot, t)$ is defined for $t\in[0,R_0^2 / 4 )$, the limit of $F_{R_0}(\cdot, t)$ when $t\to R_0^2 / 4$ is the center of $\mathbb S^3(R_0)$, and rescaling $t$ by ${\overline t}$ according to \eqref{ot} and $F_{R_0}(\cdot, t)$ by $\widetilde F_{R_0}(\cdot,t)= \frac1{\sqrt{R_0^2 - 4 t} }F_{R_0}(\cdot,t)$, then $\lim_{{\overline t}\to\infty} \widetilde F_{R_0}(\cdot,{\overline t})$ is the Clifford torus in $\mathbb S^3$.
\item[(b)] If $F_{R_0}(\mathbb S^1\times\mathbb S^1)$ divides $\mathbb S^3(R_0)$ in two connected components of different volumes,
then $F_{R_0}(\cdot, t)$ is defined for $t\in[0,T) $, $T=A_0 R_0^2/2\pi<R_0^2 / 4$, and the limit of $F_{R_0}(\cdot, t)$ when $t\to T$ is a circle of radius $\sqrt{R_0^2 - 4 T}=R_0 \sqrt{1-2\pi/A_0} >0$, where $A_0$ is the area enclosed by the curve $\gamma_0 (\cdot)=\gamma(\cdot,0) \subset \mathbb S^2(1/2)$.
\end{itemize}
\end{coro}
\begin{proof}
From Theorem \ref{TF} it follows that the flow $F_{R_0}(\cdot, t)$ given in \eqref{evexpFR} is defined in $[0,T )$, the intersection of the intervals where $\sqrt{R_0^2 - 4 t}$ and $\gamma(\cdot,{\overline t}(t))$ are defined.
On the one hand, this implies immediately that $T\le R_0^2 / 4$. On the other hand, $\gamma(\cdot,{\overline t})$ is well defined on $[0, \tau )$ (see Lemma \ref{dAt}). Using \eqref{ot}, we get that
\begin{equation}\label{tot}
t(\tau) = \frac{R_0^2}{4} \(1- e^{-4 \tau}\).
\end{equation}
It is well known for the curve shortening flow in the 2-sphere (see for instance \cite{Ga90} and also \cite{CZ01}) that there are only two possibilities:
\begin{itemize}
\item[(a)] $\tau = \infty$ and $\lim_{{\overline t}\to\infty}\gamma(\cdot,{\overline t})$ is a geodesic of $\mathbb S^2(1/2)$.
This case corresponds to $A_0=\pi /2$. Then it follows from \eqref{tot} that $t(\infty) = R_0^2 /4$ and so $\lim_{t\to R_0^2/4} \gamma(\cdot, {\overline t}(t)) $ is a geodesic in $\mathbb S^2(1/2)$. Thus, the limit of the preimage $F(\cdot,t)$ when $t\to R_0^2 /4$ is the preimage of a geodesic in $\mathbb S^2(1/2)$, which is the Clifford torus in $\mathbb S^3$. Therefore, rescaling $t$ to get ${\overline t}$ and $F_{R_0}(\cdot,t)$ to $\widetilde F_{R_0}(\cdot,t)= \frac1{\sqrt{R_0^2 - 4 t} }F_{R_0}(\cdot,t)$, we obtain that
\[
\widetilde F_{R_0}(\cdot,{\overline t}) := \widetilde F_{R_0}(\cdot,t({\overline t}))= F(\cdot,t({\overline t}))
\]
and, as we have just deduced, $\lim_{{\overline t}\to\infty} F(\cdot,t({\overline t}))$ is the Clifford torus in $\mathbb S^3$.
\item[(b)] $\tau <\infty$ and $\lim_{{\overline t}\to\tau}\gamma(\cdot,{\overline t})$ is a point of $\mathbb S^2(1/2)$.
This case corresponds to $A_0<\pi /2$. Using Lemma~\ref{dAt} and \eqref{tot}, we have that $T=t(\tau)=A_0 R_0^2/2\pi < R_0^2 / 4 $. Moreover, the limit when $t\to T$ of $\gamma(\cdot,{\overline t}(t))$ is a point of $\mathbb S^2(1/2)$, whose preimage is a circle of radius $1$ in $\mathbb S^3$. Thus $\lim_{t\to T} F_{R_0}(\cdot,t)$ is a circle of radius $\sqrt{R_0^2 - 4 T} >0$ in $\mathbb S^3(\sqrt{R_0^2 - 4 T})$. \qedhere
\end{itemize}
\end{proof}
In the case (a) of Corollary~\ref{33} we have used the total space to rescale. However, in the case (b) we will use the base space to rescale. A natural rescaling for the curve $\gamma$ in $\mathbb S^2(1/2)$ shrinking to a point $x\in \mathbb S^2(1/2)$ is to consider the 2-sphere in $\mathbb R^3$ and to multiply $\gamma-x$ by a function of ${\overline t}$ such that the area enclosed by the rescaled curves be constant. According to Lemma \ref{dAt}, this rescaling is given by
\begin{equation}\label{rescG}
\widetilde\gamma(\cdot,{\overline t}) -x = \sqrt{\frac{A_0}{\pi/2 - \( \pi/2- A_0\) e^{4 {\overline t}}}} \(\gamma(\cdot,t({\overline t})) - x\).
\end{equation}
Now a well known result on the curve shortening flow in a surface (see \cite{Zh98}) implies that the limit of the rescaling \eqref{rescG} when ${\overline t}\to \tau$ (that is, $t\to T$) is a planar circle centered at $x$ of radius $\sqrt{A_0/\pi}$.
Hence, taking into account the formula given in \eqref{ot}, for the Lagrangian surface $F_{R_0}(\cdot, t)$ we will use the rescaling
\begin{align}\label{rescF}
\widetilde F_{R_0}(\cdot,t) - R(t)q= \sqrt{\frac{A_0}{\pi/2 - \( \pi/2- A_0\) \(\frac{R_0^2}{R_0^2 - 4 t}\)}} \(F_{R_0}(\cdot, t) - R(t) q\)
\end{align}
where $R(t)=\sqrt{R_0^2-4 t}$ and $q$ is a point in the limit circle of $F$ when $t\to T$. Notice that $ \pi(q)= x$ and that the rescaling factor in \eqref{rescF} coincides with that in \eqref{rescG} when we consider the relation \eqref{ot}.
\begin{prop}\label{limfib}
When $T<R_0^2/4$,
the limit of the rescaling \eqref{rescF} when $t\to T$ is a cylinder passing through $\sqrt{R_0^2-4 T} q$, which is the product of a circle of radius $\sqrt{(R_0^2-4 T)A_0/\pi} $ and a line.
\end{prop}
\begin{proof}
Let us denote
\begin{equation}\label{lambda}
\lambda\equiv\lambda(t) := \sqrt{\frac{A_0}{\pi/2 - \( \pi/2- A_0 \) \(\frac{R_0^2}{R_0^2 - 4 t}\)}}.
\end{equation}
We remark that $\lambda \to \infty$ when $t\to T= A_0 R_0^2 /2 \pi$ and recall that $R(t)= \sqrt{R_0^2- 4 t}$.
The rescalings $\widetilde F_{R_0}$ and $\widetilde \gamma_{R_0}:= R(t) \widetilde \gamma$, of $F_{R_0}$ and $\gamma_{R_0}:= R(t) \gamma$ respectively (see equations \eqref{rescF} and \eqref{rescG}), are just the restrictions to $F_{R_0}$ and $\gamma_{R_0}$ of the maps
\begin{align*}
\mu_t &: \mathbb C^2 \longrightarrow \mathbb C^2 ; \quad \mu_t(z) = R(t) q+ \lambda (z-R(t) q), \quad \text{ and } \\
\nu_t&: \mathbb R^3 \longrightarrow \mathbb R^3 ; \quad \nu_t(w) = R(t) x + \lambda \left(w- R(t) x\right),
\end{align*}
which transform spheres in the following way:
\begin{align*}
\mu_t(\mathbb S^3_{R(t)}) = {\mathbb S^3}\! \left((1-\lambda) R(t) q, \lambda R(t) \right), \text{ and }\nu_t(\mathbb S^2_{R(t)/2}) = {\mathbb S^2}\! \left((1-\lambda) R(t) x, \lambda R(t)/2 \right),
\end{align*}
where $\mathbb S^m(y,r)$ indicates a sphere in $\mathbb R^{m+1}$ of radius $r$ and center $y$. Then the map
\begin{align*}
\widetilde{\pi_t} &= \nu_t \circ \pi_{R(t)} \circ {\mu_t}^{-1} : {\mathbb S^3}\! \left((1-\lambda) R(t) q, \lambda R(t) \right) \longrightarrow
{\mathbb S^2}\! \left((1-\lambda) R(t) x, \lambda R(t)/2 \right)
\end{align*}
is a Hopf fibration which, for every $z\in \mathbb S^3 \subset\mathbb C^2$, takes the geodesic circle $(1-\lambda) R(t) q + \lambda \ R(t)e^{i \beta}z \in \mathbb S^3((1-\lambda) R(t) q, \lambda R(t))$ into the point $(1-\lambda) R(t)x + \lambda R(t) \pi(e^{i\beta} z)\in \mathbb S^2((1-\lambda) R(t)x, \lambda R(t)/2)$. Moreover, $\widetilde \pi_t \circ\widetilde F_{R_0}(\cdot,t) = \nu_t\circ \pi_{R(t)}\circ \mu_t^{-1} \circ \widetilde F_{R_0}(\cdot,t) = \nu_t\circ \pi_{R(t)} \circ F_{R_0}(\cdot,t) = \nu_t \circ \gamma_{R_0}(\cdot,t) = \widetilde \gamma_{R_0}(\cdot,t)$. Moreover, since $\widetilde F_{R_0}(\cdot,t)$ is a Lagrangian submanifold of $\mathbb C^2$, Proposition~\ref{MHC} applies to the Hopf map $\widetilde \pi_t$ and so $\widetilde F_{R_0}(\cdot,t)$ is the preimage of $\widetilde \gamma_{R_0}(\cdot, t)$ by $\widetilde \pi_t$.
Let $\{e_1,e_2\}$ be an orthonormal basis of $T_{R(t) x} \mathbb S^2((1-\lambda) R(t)x, \lambda \ R(t)/2)$, and let $\{e_1^*,e_2^*\}$ be its corresponding lifting to the fiber on $R(t)x$ in $\mathbb S^3((1-\lambda) R(t) q, \lambda \ R(t))$. Since $\widetilde \gamma_{R_0}(\cdot, t)$ converges to a circle with center at $R(T) x$ and radius $R(T) \sqrt{A_0/\pi}$, when $t$ is near $T$, $\widetilde \gamma_{R_0}(\cdot, t)$ becomes convex near its limit, and can be parametrized in the form
\begin{align*}
\widetilde \gamma_{R_0}(\varphi, t) &= \operatorname{exp}_{R(t)x} r(\varphi,t) (\cos \varphi \ e_1 + \sin\varphi \ e_2) \nonumber \\
&= (1-\lambda ) R(t) x + \frac\lambda{2} R(t) \left(2x \cos \frac{r(\varphi,t)}{\lambda R(t)} + (\cos \varphi e_1 + \sin\varphi e_2) \sin \frac{r(\varphi,t)}{\lambda R(t)}\right)
\end{align*}
with $\lim_{t\to T}r(\varphi,t) = R(T) \sqrt{A_0/\pi}$, where $\operatorname{exp}$ denotes the exponential map in $\mathbb S^2((1-\lambda) R(t)x, \lambda R(t)/2)$.
As a consequence, since $\widetilde F_{R_0}(\cdot,t)$ is the preimage of $\widetilde \gamma_{R_0}(\cdot, t)$ by $\widetilde\pi_t$, it can be parametrized (as was recalled in section \ref{hopf}) by
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}\label{torot}
\widetilde F_{R_0}(\varphi, s ,t) &= \operatorname{exp}_{(1-\lambda)R(t)q + e^{i(s/(\lambda R(t)))} \lambda R(t) q} r(\varphi,t) (\cos \varphi e_1^* + \sin\varphi e_2^*) \\
&= (1-\lambda ) R(t) q + \lambda R(t) \left(\left(q \cos \frac{s}{\lambda R(t)} + Jq \sin \frac{s}{\lambda R(t)}\right) \cos \frac{r(\varphi,t)}{\lambda R(t)} \right. \\
& \left.\qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad + (\cos \varphi e_1^* + \sin\varphi e_2^*) \sin \frac{r(\varphi,t)}{\lambda R(t)}\right),
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
where $s$ is the arclength of the curve $(1-\lambda)R(t)q + e^{i(s/(\lambda R(t)))} \lambda R(t) q$.
Now, taking the limit in \eqref{torot} when $t\to T$ (which implies $\lambda\to \infty$), we obtain the cylinder
\begin{align*}
\widetilde F_{R_0}(\varphi, s ,T) &= R(T) q + s Jq + (\cos \varphi e_1^* + \sin\varphi e_2^*) R(T) \sqrt{A_0/\pi},
\end{align*}
which is the cylinder indicated in the statement of the Proposition. \end{proof}
\begin{nota}\label{resSN}
{\rm We observe that the rescaling \eqref{rescF} is not exactly the standard one given in \cite{Hu84}. Nevertheless, they only differ in the product by a bounded function and consequently they are equivalent. Thus the blow up will be again a cylinder in $\mathbb R^3\subset \mathbb C^2$ }.
\end{nota}
\begin{nota}\label{notsingI}
{\rm All the singularities appearing in Theorem \ref{TheoremA} are Type I singularities.
In fact, following Section 2 and using Theorem~\ref{TF}, it is not difficult to check that the second fundamental form $\sigma$ of the evolution \eqref{evexpFR} is given by
\begin{align} \label{sigka} | \sigma|^2 = \frac{4+\kappa_\gamma^2}{R_0^2-4t}, \qquad t\in [0,T).
\end{align}
In case (a), we have that $T=R_0^2/4$ and we know that $\kappa_\gamma$ is bounded by some constant $L$; then we get that $(T-t)|\sigma|^2 = 1+\kappa_\gamma^2/4 \le 1+L/4 $, which implies the condition of being a Type I singularity.
In case (b), we have that $T=t(\tau) = A_0 R_0^2 /2 \pi < R_0^2 /4$ and we know that $\gamma$ develops a Type I singularity. So there exists a constant $C$ such that $(\tau - {\overline t})\kappa_\gamma^2 \leq C$. Using that $A_0<\pi/2$ and \eqref{ot}, we get that
$$(T-t)|\sigma|^2 < 1+ \frac{(T-t)\kappa_\gamma^2}{R_0^2-4t}= 1+\frac{1-e^{4({\overline t}-\tau)}}{4}\kappa_\gamma^2 .$$
If we define $G({\overline t})=\bigl(1-e^{4({\overline t}-\tau)}\bigr)/4-(\tau - {\overline t})$, it is easy to check that $G'({\overline t})>0$ and so $G({\overline t})<G(\tau)=0$. Hence we conclude that $(T-t)|\sigma|^2 < 1+(\tau - {\overline t})\kappa_\gamma^2 \leq 1+C$,
that shows that the behaviour of $|\sigma|$ in case (b) is determined by the one of $|\kappa_\gamma|$, which corresponds to a Type I singularity.}
\end{nota}
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
}
| 3,011
|
Q: Top margin displaying as 18px but not set in css I'm having some trouble isolating where, exactly, a p element's margin is set in the various css files our project uses. A margin rule does not appear in the css list of the element inspector in developer tools (F12) of either IE or Chrome (although Chrome does of course include a chart at the bottom of the css rules list telling me that 18px of top and bottom margin is being applied from SOMEwhere).
I have just used 'Grep' to search all the files in the project for the strings: "margin: 18px", "margin-top: 18px", "margin:18px" and "margin-top:18px". There were no matches.
My question is - what OTHER way is there to set a margin? Can it be set as a by-product of some other property? A stupid suggestion, I know, but I'm not sure what else to think.
And I have checked and re-checked the css list in the element inspector and a margin rule is not displayed - even though Chrome tells me, in that chart only, that margin is set somehow.
Any new knowledge, well appreciated, thanks.
EDIT
Just to be clear - when I talk about checking the 'css list of the element inspector in the developer tools', I mean I have checked the element in the F12 developer tools in both IE and Chrome.
And sorry to be evasive, but the project is much too large to demonstrate in a js fiddle.
A: The CSS 2.1 specification has an default style sheet for HTML 4. It's just informative and not normative so browsers may use it but do not have to.
Another resource could be the webdeveloper tools of the browsers. Most can show you the cascade of rules that were applied to a particular element. An example: Firefox and Safari (WebKit) seem to use margin: 1em 0px for p elements.
A: Browsers always have a "safe zone" build into them. You can override this through CSS with a simple "rule sheet".
html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0;
outline: 0;
font-weight: inherit;
font-style: inherit;
font-size: 100%;
font-family: inherit;
vertical-align: baseline;
}
:focus {
outline: 0;
}
body {
line-height: 1;
color: black;
background: white;
}
ol, ul {
list-style: none;
I'm hoping this "reset" helps you out!
A: Browsers have some built in CSS rules that you'll want to override to make sure you have essentially a 'blank canvas' to build upon. A good and widely used reset CSS is Eric Meyer's CSS Reset - copy the contents of the reset CSS into a new reset.css file and include this before you include your project's custom CSS.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 4,001
|
Q: Find a good set of weights to represent a point as convex combination of other points Given are a number of control points $c_i$ and a point $p$ (all in cartesian 3D space). $i$ may be anywhere between 8 and roughly 200. The point $p$ can be written as a convex combination of $c_i$:
\begin{equation}
p = \sum_i w_i c_i
\end{equation}
given the constraints that $\sum w_i = 1$ and $0 \leq w_i \leq 1$ (for all $i$).
I would like to find a set of weights $w_i$. Since I suppose there are infinitely many solutions to this, I would like to find an intuitive solution (whatever that means, exactly) - maybe one that keeps the weights as evenly distributed as possible.
How would I find those weights?
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 8,682
|
Q: get last user logon time without AD I'm trying to create a script that can get the user profiles that haven't logged on a specific computer within 30 days NOT using active directory but my script didn't work. I am using Powershell version 3. This is my code:
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)" new enable=yes
$ComputerList = Get-Content C:\temp\Computers1.txt
$myDomain = Get-Content C:\temp\Domain.txt
$csvFile = 'C:\temp\Profiles.csv'
# Create new .csv output file
New-Item $csvFile -type file -force
# Output the field header-line to the CSV file
"HOST,PROFILE" | Add-Content $csvFile
# Loop over the list of computers from the input file
foreach ($Computer in $ComputerList) {
# see if ping test succeeds for this computer
if (Test-Connection $Computer -Count 3 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) {
$ComputerFQDN = $Computer + $myDomain
$Profiles = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_UserProfile -Computer $ComputerFQDN | Where{$_.LocalPath -notlike "*$env:SystemRoot*"}
foreach ($profile in $profiles) {
try {
$objSID = New-Object System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier($profile.LocalPath) | Where {((Get-Date)-$_.lastwritetime).days -ge 30}
#| Where-Object {$_.LastLogonDate -le $CurrentDate.AddDays(-60)}
$objuser = $objsid.Translate([System.Security.Principal.NTAccount])
$objusername = $objuser.value
} catch {
$objusername = $profile.LocalPath
}
switch($profile.status){
1 { $profileType="Temporary" }
2 { $profileType="Roaming" }
4 { $profileType="Mandatory" }
8 { $profileType="Corrupted" }
default { $profileType = "LOCAL" }
}
$User = $objUser.Value
#output profile detail for this host
"$($Computer.toUpper()), $($objusername)" | Add-Content $csvFile
}
} else {
#output failure message for this host
"$($Computer.toUpper()), PING TEST FAILED" | Add-Content $csvFile
}
#LOOP
}
I tried to change the -ge to -le in the line $objSID = New-Object System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier($profile.LocalPath) | Where {((Get-Date)-$_.lastwritetime).days -ge 30}, as well as changing the range after it but it still gave me the same list of computers regardless of my changes.
A: There are a few problems with the script, most notable is that your use of Where-Object is testing an object (SID) that doesn't know anything about dates.
I would break it down a little differently. I would write a function to catch all the stuff I need to do to attempt to figure out the last logon. That's my goes in my stack of utility functions in case I need it again.
Then I have something to use that function which deals with implementing the logic for the immediate requirement.
So you end up with this. It's a bit long, see what you think.
function Get-LastLogon {
[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(ValueFromPipeline = $true)]
[String]$ComputerName = $env:COMPUTERNAME
)
process {
Get-WmiObject Win32_UserProfile -ComputerName $ComputerName -Filter "Special='FALSE'" | ForEach-Object {
# Attempt to get the UserAccount using WMI
$userAccount = Get-WmiObject Win32_UserAccount -Filter "SID='$($_.SID)'" -ComputerName $ComputerName
# To satisfy WMI all single \ in a path must be escaped.
# Prefer to use NTUser.dat for last modification
$path = (Join-Path $_.LocalPath 'ntuser.dat') -replace '\\', '\\'
$cimObject = Get-WmiObject CIM_DataFile -Filter "Name='$path'" -ComputerName $ComputerName
if ($null -eq $cimObject) {
# Fall back to the directory
$path = $_.LocalPath -replace '\\', '\\'
$cimObject = Get-WmiObject CIM_Directory -Filter "Name='$path'" -ComputerName $ComputerName
}
$lastModified = $null
if ($null -ne $cimObject) {
$lastModified = [System.Management.ManagementDateTimeConverter]::ToDateTime($cimObject.LastModified)
}
# See if LastUseTime is more useful.
$lastUsed = $null
if ($null -ne $_.LastUseTime) {
$lastUsed = [System.Management.ManagementDateTimeConverter]::ToDateTime($_.LastUseTime)
}
# Profile type
$profileType = switch ($_.Status) {
1 { "Temporary" }
2 { "Roaming" }
4 { "Mandatory" }
8 { "Corrupted" }
0 { "LOCAL" }
}
[PSCustomObject]@{
ComputerName = $ComputerName
Username = $userAccount.Caption
LastChanged = $lastModified
LastUsed = $lastUsed
SID = $_.SID
Path = $_.LocalPath
ProfileType = $profileType
}
}
}
}
$myDomain = Get-Content C:\temp\Domain.txt
Get-Content C:\temp\Computers1.txt | ForEach-Object {
$ComputerName = $_ + $myDomain
if (Test-Connection $ComputerName -Quiet -Count 3) {
Get-LastLogon -ComputerName $ComputerName | Select-Object *, @{Name='Status';Expression={ 'OK' }} |
Where-Object { $_.LastChanged -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-30) }
} else {
# Normalise the output so we don't lose columns in the export
$ComputerName | Select-Object @{Name='ComputerName';e={ $ComputerName }},
Username, LastChanged, LastUsed, SID, Path, ProfileType, @{Name='Status';Expression={ 'PING FAILED' }}
}
} | Export-Csv 'C:\temp\Profiles.csv' -NoTypeInformation
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 4,516
|
import logging
from django.forms import widgets, MultipleChoiceField
from django.utils.safestring import mark_safe
from django.utils.translation import gettext_lazy as _
from cms.plugin_pool import plugin_pool
from cmsplugin_cascade.bootstrap4.grid import Breakpoint
from cmsplugin_cascade.bootstrap4.utils import get_picture_elements, IMAGE_RESIZE_OPTIONS, IMAGE_SHAPE_CHOICES
from cmsplugin_cascade.bootstrap4.fields import BootstrapMultiSizeField
from cmsplugin_cascade.image import ImageFormMixin, ImagePropertyMixin
from cmsplugin_cascade.link.config import LinkPluginBase, LinkFormMixin
from cmsplugin_cascade.link.plugin_base import LinkElementMixin
logger = logging.getLogger('cascade.bootstrap4')
class BootstrapPictureFormMixin(ImageFormMixin):
responsive_heights = BootstrapMultiSizeField(
label=_("Adapt Picture Heights"),
required=False,
require_all_fields=False,
allowed_units=['px', '%'],
initial='100%',
help_text=_("Heights of picture in percent or pixels for distinct Bootstrap's breakpoints."),
)
responsive_zoom = BootstrapMultiSizeField(
label=_("Adapt Picture Zoom"),
required=False,
require_all_fields=False,
allowed_units=['%'],
initial=['0%', '0%', '0%', '0%', '0%'],
help_text=_("Magnification of picture in percent for distinct Bootstrap's breakpoints."),
)
resize_options = MultipleChoiceField(
label=_("Resize Options"),
choices=IMAGE_RESIZE_OPTIONS,
widget=widgets.CheckboxSelectMultiple,
initial=['subject_location', 'high_resolution'],
help_text = _("Options to use when resizing the image."),
)
image_shapes = MultipleChoiceField(
label=_("Image Shapes"),
choices=IMAGE_SHAPE_CHOICES,
widget=widgets.CheckboxSelectMultiple,
initial=['img-fluid']
)
class Meta:
entangled_fields = {'glossary': ['responsive_heights', 'responsive_zoom', 'resize_options', 'image_shapes']}
class BootstrapPicturePlugin(LinkPluginBase):
name = _("Picture")
module = 'Bootstrap'
parent_classes = ['BootstrapColumnPlugin', 'SimpleWrapperPlugin']
require_parent = True
allow_children = False
raw_id_fields = LinkPluginBase.raw_id_fields + ['image_file']
model_mixins = (ImagePropertyMixin, LinkElementMixin,)
admin_preview = False
ring_plugin = 'PicturePlugin'
form = type('BootstrapPictureForm', (LinkFormMixin, BootstrapPictureFormMixin), {'require_link': False})
render_template = 'cascade/bootstrap4/linked-picture.html'
default_css_class = 'img-fluid'
default_css_attributes = ['image_shapes']
html_tag_attributes = {'image_title': 'title', 'alt_tag': 'tag'}
html_tag_attributes.update(LinkPluginBase.html_tag_attributes)
class Media:
js = ['admin/js/jquery.init.js', 'cascade/js/admin/pictureplugin.js']
def render(self, context, instance, placeholder):
# image shall be rendered in a responsive context using the picture element
context = self.super(BootstrapPicturePlugin, self).render(context, instance, placeholder)
try:
elements = get_picture_elements(instance)
except Exception as exc:
logger.warning("Unable generate picture elements. Reason: {}".format(exc))
else:
context.update({
'instance': instance,
'is_fluid': True,
'placeholder': placeholder,
'elements': elements,
})
return context
@classmethod
def get_css_classes(cls, obj):
css_classes = cls.super(BootstrapPicturePlugin, cls).get_css_classes(obj)
css_class = obj.glossary.get('css_class')
if css_class:
css_classes.append(css_class)
return css_classes
@classmethod
def get_identifier(cls, obj):
try:
content = str(obj.image)
except AttributeError:
content = _("No Picture")
return mark_safe(content)
@classmethod
def sanitize_model(cls, obj):
sanitized = False
parent = obj.parent
if parent:
while parent.plugin_type != 'BootstrapColumnPlugin':
parent = parent.parent
grid_column = parent.get_bound_plugin().get_grid_instance()
obj.glossary.setdefault('media_queries', {})
for bp in Breakpoint:
obj.glossary['media_queries'].setdefault(bp.name, {})
width = round(grid_column.get_bound(bp).max)
if obj.glossary['media_queries'][bp.name].get('width') != width:
obj.glossary['media_queries'][bp.name]['width'] = width
sanitized = True
if obj.glossary['media_queries'][bp.name].get('media') != bp.media_query:
obj.glossary['media_queries'][bp.name]['media'] = bp.media_query
sanitized = True
else:
logger.warning("PicturePlugin(pk={}) has no ColumnPlugin as ancestor.".format(obj.pk))
return
return sanitized
plugin_pool.register_plugin(BootstrapPicturePlugin)
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 9,398
|
As a Top Award Winning Century 21 Team we are committed to utilizing our vast knowledge and experience of Barrie and the surrounding areas to make your home buying or selling experience a smooth and prosperous one. We feel as our clients you deserve the best. Individually and as a team we are committed to you, our client.
Get your HOME EVALUATION now.
Our site is unparalleled. It provides all the information you need for successful home buying or selling. SAVE YOUR OWN SEARCH.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
}
| 8,822
|
Q: What are ways to unit test Rest API clients - i.e. testing that the right Rest requests are sent At work we're developing a service that sits between two other services. We expose a Rest API which is called by some service -- the request is processed by some logic and then, according to the logic, HTTP requests will be sent out another service.
There're plenty of resources on the internet on how to best test API endpoints you provide. I, on the other hand want to test what API requests are sent out, without sending them to the actual service.
I guess I could always set up an entire server skeleton on localhost:8080 that just records what it receives but this feels kinda dirty. Testing the Rest API we provide for external services (we use akka-http to do that) is pretty comfortable to test with akka-http-testkit which is excellent. I was just wondering if there is any comparably comfortable to use tooling to test what Http reqeusts go out.
A: Functional Programming "Tooling"
The easiest way I've found to test these scenarios is to use plain-old functional programming principles in your design. You can embed your Route creation within a higher order function. This higher order function will take in the function which queries the downstream service:
type ComputedData = ???
val computeData : HttpRequest => ComputedData = ???
def intermediateRoute(downstreamService : ComputedData => Future[HttpResponse]) : Route =
extractRequest { request =>
val computedData : ComputedData = computeData(request)
complete(downstreamService(computedData))
}
This higher order function can now be used in Production:
val queryDownStreamService : ComputedData => Future[HttpResponse] = ???
val productionRoute : Route = intermediateRoute(queryDownStreamService)
Or, it can be used in unit-testing to ensure the logic is correct:
val testComputedData : ComputedData => Boolean = ???
val testResponse : HttpResponse = ???
val testService : ComputedData => Future[HttpResponse] = (computedData) => {
assert(testComputedData(computedData))
Success(testResponse)
}
val testRoute = intermediateRoute(testService)
Get("/test") ~> testRoute ~> check {
response should be testResponse
}
A: We do it the way you call dirty, though I don't think it's dirty.
we have a base trait that starts/shuts down the server (we use http4s and scalatest)
trait EmbeddedServer extends BeforeAndAfterAll with Http4sDsl[IO] {
self: Suite =>
private var server: Server[IO] = _
protected var lastRequest: Request[IO] = _
private def captureRequest: HttpService[IO] = Kleisli { req: Request[IO] =>
lastRequest = req
service(req)
}
override protected def beforeAll(): Unit = {
server = BlazeBuilder[IO]
.bindAny()
.mountService(captureRequest, "/")
.start
.unsafeRunSync()
super.beforeAll()
}
override protected def afterAll(): Unit = {
super.afterAll()
server.shutdownNow()
}
def address: InetSocketAddress = server.address
def rootURI: String = s"http:/$address"
def service: HttpService[IO]
}
then we mix it in our client spec
something along these lines
class SomeRequesterSpec extends WordSpec with EmbeddedServer {
override def service: HttpService[IO] = HttpService[IO] {
case GET -> Root / "failure" => ServiceUnavailable()
case GET -> Root / "success" => Ok(SuccessBody)
case GET -> Root / "partial-success" => Ok(PartialSuccessBody)
case GET -> Root / "malformed" => Ok(MalformedBody)
case GET -> Root / "empty" => Ok(EmptyResponse)
}
//... you specs go here
}
and in you specs you call your mocked server with your client
using s"$rootURI/success" or s"$rootURI/failure" endpoints and check that it handles responses correctly.
Also lastRequest var always has last request issues, so you can run assertions against it, like
lastRequest.headers should contain(`Accept-Encoding`(ContentCoding.gzip))
This approach works very well for us and we can test that our clients handle all sorts of outputs from servers as well as all manipulations with request they do
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 9,258
|
The fact that you live in a small room does not mean that you have to feel cramped. In this article, we are going to be looking at some easy steps you can take to make your room look bigger.
Packing your small room filled with small furniture is only going to make it appear smaller. On the other hand, using few bigger furniture is going to make your room look bigger. Instead of trying to fill your room with chairs, coffee table and sofa, try using a using a large ottoman and a single side chair.
Ensure that everything has its place. Get rid of everything that doesn't seem to fit in. Carefully arrange books and newspapers instead of allowing them to lie around on your chairs and tables.
One thing you need to have in mind is that the smallest clutter can affect the overall outlook of your room.
A good color is likely going to improve the appearance of your room. The type of color you use to paint your room is either going to make it bigger or smaller. If you want to make your room bigger, it is wise that you use light colors.
Also, you need to avoid using heavy fabric like wool, velvets and use lightweight fabric like cotton and linen.
Good lighting is an important element in any room. Using natural light to light up your room is often the best. If your room doesn't have much natural light, you have to do all you can to maximize the little you have. Hang a mirror on the wall facing your window. This will make more natural light to reflect into your room.
These are just like furniture. It is always best to use a few larger pieces. Using a lot of smaller artwork is going to make your room appear smaller.
Using furniture with elaborate designs and other accessories like tassels and other details is going to make your room look smaller. Keeping thing simple is an excellent way to make your room appear bigger.
Making a small room appear bigger is not an easy business. But if you apply the tips in this article, your room is going to look spacious. One thing you need to keep in mind when making your room look bigger is that-less is more.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
}
| 8,536
|
Q: Android default email app, not sending links properly The default android application for sending emails is not sending Links ("a href=") properly. When I try to send an email I can see the links highlighted but they are gone by the time the recipient gets them.
Intent openInChooser;
Intent sharingIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);
sharingIntent.setType("text/plain");
sharingIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT, subject);
sharingIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, body);
openInChooser = Intent.createChooser(sharingIntent, context.getResources().getString(R.string.share_app));
context.startActivity(openInChooser);
Changing "text/plain" to "text/html" does not help.
Also, if I select "gmail" as the email client, the links get to the recipient well formated.
Any ideas why?. I know the default email app is able to send links because I forwarded some and they got through.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 5,990
|
came from the distant obverse.
felt the human in me, being crushed.
flinged my hair hither and tither.
in this dark mystical night.
the door stood open with a loud creak.
The mystery still haunts, questions still remain unanswered; more to be unravelled in the Part – 4 . Keep reading!
Mesmerising and for sure deep and mysterious words. Kept me spellbounded. Waiting for Part 4 dear friend. Great post.
This is turning out to be a fabulous series. So well written.
Thankyou so much, part 4 is up now. Hope you like it.
Mystique…… the mysterious mystery continues……..can't wait…..
Love the flow of the poem.
Thankyou so much. Glad you like it. Part 4 is up already.
Scary and venerable thing, it is!
Hope the Part 4 (up already) stands up to your expectations. Thankyou so much.
Glad to hear that. Thankyou so much.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
}
| 9,000
|
Q: Trigger socket.emit from exported module I am trying to follow the instructions given by Patrick Roberts on this page:
How can i export socket.io into other modules in nodejs?
in my consumer.js when I call socket.emit('message') I get an error back:
"Cannot read property 'emit' of null"
Why is emit not available to me?
Here is my code:
io.js file (in a middleware directory)
var socketIO = require('socket.io');
var io = null;
exports.io = function() {
return io;
};
exports.initialize = function(server) {
io = socketIO(server);
io.on('connection', (socket) => {
console.log('user connected')
socket.emit('newMessage');
socket.on('hello', (msg) => {
console.log('message: ' + msg);
});
socket.on('disconnect', () => {
console.log('user disconnected');
});
});
};
In app.js I am requiring the io file with:
var io = require('./middleware/io').initialize(server);
In my consumer.js I have the following:
var socket = require('../middleware/io').io();
and then from within a function I am calling:
socket.emit('message')
The emits coming from within the io.js file are working- its the ones I am trying to use in consumer.js that are not.
A: This line of code:
var io = require('./middleware/io').initialize(server);
loads your module, calls the .initialize(server) method on the module and then assigns the return value from .initialize(server) to your io variable. But, your .initialize() method does return anything so therefore, your io variable will be undefined.
You could fix that my adding a return value to the .initialize() method:
exports.initialize = function(server) {
io = socketIO(server);
io.on('connection', (socket) => {
console.log('user connected')
socket.emit('newMessage');
socket.on('hello', (msg) => {
console.log('message: ' + msg);
});
socket.on('disconnect', () => {
console.log('user disconnected');
});
});
// return the socket.io instance so caller can use it
return io;
};
Or, alternatively, you could change this:
var io = require('./middleware/io').initialize(server);
to this:
var ioModule = require('./middleware/io');
ioModule.initialize(server);
var io = ioModule.io();
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 5,332
|
Gefährliche Freundschaft ist ein deutscher, kriminologischer Fernsehfilm von Bodo Fürneisen aus dem Jahr 1982. Er erschien als 82. Folge der Reihe Der Staatsanwalt hat das Wort.
Handlung
Filmhandlung
Nach Jahren in denen Renate mit ihrem Sohn Mario allein gelebt und ihn allein groß gezogen hat, ist mit Rainer ein neuer Mann in ihr Leben getreten. Es kommt zu Konflikten zwischen Mario und Rainer. Seine Mutter war für Mario bisher Mittelpunkt seines Lebens und umgekehrt verhielt es sich genauso. Mario findet sich mit der neuen Situation nicht zurecht.
Hinzu kommen Probleme einer ersten Liebe. Mario fühlt sich zu Anke hingezogen, die ihrerseits auch Ralf gegenüber nicht abgeneigt ist. Ralf ist der Sohn von Jutta, einer Arbeitskollegin von Renate. Auch sie hat nach einer Scheidung lange Zeit allein mit ihrem Sohn gelebt. Das Verhältnis zwischen Mutter Jutta und Sohn Ralf ist allerdings zerrüttet, Ralf ist aus dem Hause der Mutter bereits ausgezogen und wohnt in der Gartenlaube. Mario und Ralf kennen sich und Mario hat eigentlich keine gute Meinung von Ralf.
Zudem ist Ralf auf die schiefe Bahn geraten und hat sich als Kopf einer Dreier-Bande zu der auch Tommi Fischer und Harry Wolf gehören auf den Diebstahl von Moped-, Motorrad- und Auto-Zubehörteilen spezialisiert. Häufig werden die Fahrzeuge dabei auch beschädigt. Tommi allerdings will auf der Bande auszusteigen. Ralf zwingt ihn jedoch mit der Drohung, ihn "auffliegen" zu lassen, weiter mitzumachen. Harry, der jüngste von allen, ist hingegen aufgrund seiner Jugendlichkeit noch derart unreif, dass er Ralf beinahe hörig ist.
Aus der emotionalen Krisensituation heraus sucht Mario Kontakt zu Ralf und seiner Bande. Ralf sieht die Chance, mittelfristig Tommi durch Mario zu ersetzen und stiftet ihn an, bei einem der nächsten Diebeszüge "Schmiere zu stehen". Mario macht bereitwillig mit. Auch Tommi überblickt die Lage und warnt Mario, sich nicht auf Ralf einzulassen. Doch Mario beteiligt sich als "Eckensteher" auch am nächsten Diebstahl.
Zwischenzeitlich ist Ralfs Mutter, die von dem ungesetzlichen Treiben ihres Sohnes mehr geahnt, als gewusst hat, an dem Punkt angekommen, an dem sie den einzigen Ausweg darin sieht, ihren Sohn bei der Polizei anzuzeigen. Diese nimmt Ralf, Tommi und Harry schließlich auf frischer Tat fest. Mario kann zunächst fliehen. Er trifft jedoch noch in der Nähe des Tatortes auf seine Mutter und ihren Freund. Mit beiden begibt er sich am nächsten Morgen zur Volkspolizei und legt ein umfangreiches Geständnis ab.
Rechtliche Bewertung
Mario Reinhard hatte sich der Beihilfe zum Diebstahl persönlichen Eigentum schuldig gemacht. In seinem Falle machte der Staatsanwalt mit Blick auf die eingetretenen Folgen und geringe Schwere der Schuld von der – nach DDR-Strafrecht gegebenen – Möglichkeit Gebrauch, die Strafsache einem "gesellschaftlichen Gericht", sprich der zuständigen Schiedskommission zu übergeben. Die Schiedskommission sprach Mario Reinhard eine Rüge aus und verpflichtete ihn außerdem, vor seiner Klasse zu seiner Straftat Stellung zu nehmen.
Alle übrigen Tatbeteiligten mussten sich wegen verbrecherischen Diebstahls vor Gericht verantworten: Insgesamt konnten ihnen 43 Diebstähle mit einer Gesamtbeute von über 12.000 Mark der DDR nachgewiesen werden. Hinzu kam der von ihnen bei der Demontage der Teile an den Fahrzeugen verursachte Sachschaden.
Ralf Warnke wurde wegen verbrecherischen Diebstahls zum Nachteil persönlichen Eigentums, vorsätzlicher Sachbeschädigung und Nötigung zu einer Freiheitsstrafe von drei Jahren und sechs Monaten verurteilt. Tommi Fischer wurde wegen verbrecherischen Diebstahls zum Nachteil persönlichen Eigentums und Sachbeschädigung zu einer Freiheitsstrafe von zwei Jahren und drei Monaten verurteilt. Harry Wolf wurde wegen verbrecherischen Diebstahls zum Nachteil persönlichen Eigentums und Sachbeschädigung zu einer Freiheitsstrafe von zwei Jahren verurteilt. Alle Angeklagten wurde zudem zum Ersatz des von ihnen verursachen Schadens verurteilt.
Produktion
Gefährliche Freundschaft entstand 1982 beim Fernsehen der DDR im Bereich "Unterhaltende Dramatik – Hauptabteilung: Polizeiruf/Staatsanwalt". Das Szenarium schrieb Bodo Fürneisen, Dramaturgin war Jutta Schütz, den Kommentar verfasste und sprach Peter Przybylski.
Weblinks
Filmtitel 1982
DDR-Film
Gefahrliche Freundschaft
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
}
| 2,522
|
Q: Silverlight Navigation Between Multiple Projects This may be simple but we continue to struggle with this.
We are using Silverlight and MVVM and let's say we have two silverlight class libraries each with one view and view model.
If we have a button on each view that says go to the other view, how do we setup navigation to show the other view/view model without creating circular references?
A: Since you're using MVVM, the proper was is to use the event aggregator. Each view model could trigger a "NavigationRequested" event, and then the top level should listen for that event and navigate accordingly. As a simple example:
private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
{
IEventPublisher publisher = new EventPublisher();
var viewModel = new ViewModel(publisher);
var view1 = new View1 { DataContext = viewModel };
var view2 = new View2 { DataContext = viewModel };
this.RootVisual = view1;
view1.DataContext = viewModel;
publisher.Get<NavigationRequested>()
.ObserveOnDispatcher()
.Select(item => item.ViewName)
.Subscribe(name => RootVisual = name == "View1" ? view1 : view2);
this.RootVisual = view1;
}
Note that the syntax I'm using above is from this event aggregator that uses the RX extensions, but the same idea should apply regardless of which MVVM framework, if any, you're using.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 6,384
|
Johan Kleingeld (* 10. Juni 1971) ist ein ehemaliger südafrikanischer Badmintonspieler.
Karriere
Kleingeld ist eine der herausragendsten Persönlichkeiten im südafrikanischen Badmintonsport in den 1990er und 2000er Jahren. Er gewann insgesamt 18 nationale Titel und war international unter anderem bei den Afrikameisterschaften, den Botswana International und den South Africa International erfolgreich.
Sportliche Erfolge
Badmintonspieler (Südafrika)
Teilnehmer an den Afrikaspielen (Südafrika)
Afrikameister (Badminton)
Südafrikanischer Meister (Badminton)
Südafrikaner
Geboren 1971
Mann
Teilnehmer an den Commonwealth Games (Südafrika)
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
}
| 6,436
|
\section{Introduction}
In the QCD sum rules, we construct the quark (or quark-gluon or gluon) currents to interpolate the hadrons with the same quantum numbers, then introduce the two-point correlation functions and accomplish the operator product expansion in the deep Euclidean space, the perturbative contributions are embodied in the Wilson's coefficients, while the nonperturbative contributions are absorbed in the vacuum condensates. We have to resort to non-zero vacuum expectation values for the normal-ordered quark-gluon operators to describe the hadron properties in a satisfactory way.
Except for the quark condensates $\langle\bar{q}q\rangle$ with $q=u$, $d$, which indicate spontaneous breaking of the Chiral symmetry through the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner relation
$f^2_{\pi}m^2_{\pi}=-2(m_u+m_d)\langle\bar{q} q\rangle$ \cite{GMOR}, where the $f_\pi$ is the decay constant of the pion, other vacuum condensates, such as the $\langle\bar{q} g_s\sigma G q\rangle$,
$\langle\bar{q} q\bar{q} q\rangle$, $\cdots$ are just parameters introduced by hand to describe the nonperturbative QCD vacuum,
we can parameterize the non-perturbative properties in one way or the other.
There are a large number of four-quark condensates which can have a nonzero vacuum expectation, such as the $\langle \bar{q} q\bar{q}q\rangle$, $\langle \bar{q} i\gamma_5 q\bar{q}i\gamma_5q\rangle$, $\langle \bar{q} \gamma_{\mu}q\bar{q}\gamma^{\mu}q\rangle$,
$\langle \bar{q} \gamma_{\mu}t^a q\bar{q}\gamma^{\mu}t^aq\rangle$, $\langle \bar{q} \gamma_{\mu}\gamma_5t^a q\bar{q}\gamma^{\mu}\gamma_5t^aq\rangle$, etc, where $t^a=\frac{\lambda^a}{2}$, the $\lambda^a$ is the Gell-Mann matrix.
Up to now, none of those four-quark vacuum condensates are well constrained or understood in any meaningful way. The commonly adopted method
is the so-called vacuum saturation (or factorization) approximation, we insert a complete set of intermediate states between two $\bar{q}$ and $q$ quarks
and assume the vacuum contribution dominates the sum of all the intermediate states, and obtain
the squared Chiral condensate $\langle0|:\bar{q} q:|0\rangle^2$,
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle0|:\bar{q}_{\alpha}^{i} q_{\beta}^{j}\bar{q}_{\lambda}^{m} q_{\tau}^{n}:|0\rangle
&=&\frac{1}{16N_c^2}\langle0|:\bar{q} q:|0\rangle^2
\left(\delta_{ij}\delta_{mn}\delta_{\alpha\beta}\delta_{\lambda\tau}-\delta_{in}\delta_{jm}\delta_{\alpha\tau}\delta_{\beta\lambda} \right)\, ,
\end{eqnarray}
where the $i$, $j$, $m$ and $n$ are color indexes, the $\alpha$, $\beta$, $\lambda$ and $\tau$ are Dirac spinor indexes.
In the original works, Shifman, Vainshtein and Zakharov took
the vacuum saturation hypothesis according to two reasons \cite{SVZ79-1,SVZ79-2}, one reason is the rather large value of the quark (or Chiral) condensate $\langle\bar{q}q\rangle$, the other is the duality between the quark and physical states, which implies that counting both the quark and
physical states may well become a double counting because they reproduce each other \cite{SVZ79-1,SVZ79-2}. In additional, according to the arguments of Shifman, Vainshtein and Zakharov and Ioffe \cite{SVZ79-1,SVZ79-2,Ioffe-SB}, the accuracy of factorization hypothesis is of order
$\frac{1}{N_c^2}$, the vacuum saturation (or factorization) works well in the large $N_c$ limit $\frac{1}{N_c^2}\sim 0$ \cite{Novikov--shifman}, in reality,
$N_c = 3$, $\frac{1}{N_c^2}\sim 10\%$.
We can introduce a parameter $\kappa$ to take into account the violation of the vacuum saturation (or factorization) approximation \cite{Narison-kappa},
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle0|:\bar{q} q:|0\rangle^2 &\to& \kappa\, \langle0|:\bar{q} q:|0\rangle^2\, ,
\end{eqnarray}
the value $\kappa=1$ stands for the vacuum saturation approximation, while the value $\kappa>1$ parameterizes its violation. A number of values have been
obtained, which depend on the studied channels. The existing estimations range from $\kappa=1$ \cite{Ioffe-Book} to $2\sim3$ \cite{Narison-Book} and even up to 6 \cite{Review-kappa-kappa}.
In the QCD sum rules for the traditional mesons, we usually carry out the operator product expansion up to the vacuum condensates of dimension $6$,
the four-quark condensate $\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2$ is always companied with the strong fine-structure constant $\alpha_s(\mu)$, the net effect is greatly depressed,
and plays a minor important role,
the deviation from the value $\kappa=1$ cannot make much difference, although the value $\kappa>1$ can lead to better QCD sum rules in some cases \cite{Review-kappa-kappa}.
While in the QCD sum rules for the hidden-charm (or hidden-bottom) tetraquark (molecular) states, we usually carry out the operator product expansion up to the vacuum condensates of dimension $10$, the vacuum condensate $\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2$ plays a very important role, the derivations from $\kappa=1$ make much diffidence on the predictions \cite{WZG-CTP-DvDvDv}.
In the present work, we choose the hidden-charm axialvector and vector four-quark currents as an example to examine the validity of the vacuum saturation (or factorization) approximation in details.
The article is arranged in the form: we obtain the QCD sum rules for the axialvector and vector tetraquark states in section 2; in section 3, we present the numerical results and discussions; section 4 is reserved for our conclusion.
\section{QCD sum rules for the hidden-charm tetraquark states }
Let us write down the correlation functions $\Pi_{\mu\nu}(p)$ in the QCD sum rules firstly,
\begin{eqnarray}
\Pi_{\mu\nu}(p)&=&i\int d^4x e^{ip \cdot x} \langle0|T\left\{J_\mu(x)J_\nu^{\dagger}(0)\right\}|0\rangle \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
where $J_\mu(x)=J_\mu^A(x)$ and $J_\mu^V(x)$,
\begin{eqnarray}
J_\mu^A(x)&=&\varepsilon^{ijk}\varepsilon^{imn}u^{Tj}(x)C\gamma_5c^k(x) \bar{d}^m(x)\gamma_\mu C \bar{c}^{Tn}(x)\, ,\nonumber\\
J_\mu^V(x)&=&\varepsilon^{ijk}\varepsilon^{imn}u^{Tj}(x)Cc^k(x) \bar{d}^m(x)\gamma_\mu C \bar{c}^{Tn}(x)\, ,
\end{eqnarray}
where the $i$, $j$, $k$, $m$ and $n$ are color indexes, the charge conjugation matrix $C=i\gamma^2\gamma^0$.
The simple four-quark currents $J_\mu^A(x)$ and $J_\mu^V(x)$, which lead to simple analytical expressions of the QCD sum rules, have both negative and positive charge-conjugation components. Now we write down the two components explicitly,
$\sqrt{2}J_\mu^A(x)=J^{SA}_{-,\mu}(x)+J^{SA}_{+,\mu}(x)$,
$\sqrt{2}J_\mu^V(x)= J^{PA}_{-,\mu}(x)+J^{PA}_{+,\mu}(x)$,
where
\begin{eqnarray}
J^{SA}_{-,\mu}(x)&=&\frac{\varepsilon^{ijk}\varepsilon^{imn}}{\sqrt{2}}\Big[u^{Tj}(x)C\gamma_5c^k(x) \bar{d}^m(x)\gamma_\mu C \bar{c}^{Tn}(x)-u^{Tj}(x)C\gamma_\mu c^k(x)\bar{d}^m(x)\gamma_5C \bar{c}^{Tn}(x) \Big] \, ,\nonumber\\
J^{SA}_{+,\mu}(x)&=&\frac{\varepsilon^{ijk}\varepsilon^{imn}}{\sqrt{2}}\Big[u^{Tj}(x)C\gamma_5c^k(x) \bar{d}^m(x)\gamma_\mu C \bar{c}^{Tn}(x)+u^{Tj}(x)C\gamma_\mu c^k(x)\bar{d}^m(x)\gamma_5C \bar{c}^{Tn}(x) \Big] \, , \nonumber \\
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
J^{PA}_{-,\mu}(x)&=&\frac{\varepsilon^{ijk}\varepsilon^{imn}}{\sqrt{2}}\Big[u^{Tj}(x)Cc^k(x) \bar{d}^m(x)\gamma_\mu C \bar{c}^{Tn}(x)-u^{Tj}(x)C\gamma_\mu c^k(x)\bar{d}^m(x)C \bar{c}^{Tn}(x) \Big] \, ,\nonumber\\
J^{PA}_{+,\mu}(x)&=&\frac{\varepsilon^{ijk}\varepsilon^{imn}}{\sqrt{2}}\Big[u^{Tj}(x)Cc^k(x) \bar{d}^m(x)\gamma_\mu C \bar{c}^{Tn}(x)+u^{Tj}(x)C\gamma_\mu c^k(x)\bar{d}^m(x)C \bar{c}^{Tn}(x) \Big] \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
and the superscripts $S$, $A$ and $P$ represent the scalar, axialvector and pseudoscalar (anti)diquark operators, respectively. The axialvector currents $J^{SA}_{+,\mu}(x)$ and $J^{SA}_{-,\mu}(x)$ couple potentially to the hidden-charm tetraquark states with the $J^{PC}=1^{++}$ and $1^{+-}$ respectively which have almost degenerated masses but slightly different pole residues \cite{WZG-HT-PRD,WZG-PRD-hidden-charm}, while the vector currents $J^{PA}_{+,\mu}(x)$ and $J^{PA}_{-,\mu}(x)$ couple potentially to the hidden-charm tetraquark states with the $J^{PC}=1^{-+}$ and $1^{--}$ respectively which also have almost degenerated masses
but slightly different pole residues \cite{Wang-tetra-formula,WZG-4260-4360-4660}. In the present work, we will not distinguish the charge-conjugation, and choose the simple four-quark currents $J_\mu^A(x)$ and $J_\mu^V(x)$, which couple potentially to the axialvector and vector hidden-charm tetraquark states with the $J^P=1^+$ and $1^-$, respectively, as we are only interested in the tetraquark masses.
The axialvector current $J^A_\mu(x)$ is of the $C\gamma_5\otimes \gamma_\mu C $ type, while the vector current $J^V_\mu(x)$ is of the $C\otimes \gamma_\mu C $ type,
the relative P-wave is tacitly or implicitly embodied in the pseudoscalar diquark. On the other hand, we can construct the $C\gamma_5\otimes \gamma_5\gamma_\mu C $ type vector current, where the relative P-wave is tacitly or implicitly embodied in the vector diquark \cite{WZG-4260-4360-4660}, or introduce a relative P-wave between the diquark and antidiquark explicitly, and construct the
\begin{eqnarray}
&&C\gamma_5 \otimes \stackrel{\leftrightarrow}{\partial}_\mu\otimes\gamma_5 C \, ,\nonumber\\
&&C\gamma_\alpha \otimes \stackrel{\leftrightarrow}{\partial}_\mu\otimes\gamma^\alpha C \, ,\nonumber\\
&&C\gamma_\mu \otimes \stackrel{\leftrightarrow}{\partial}_\alpha\otimes\gamma^\alpha C +C\gamma^\alpha \otimes \stackrel{\leftrightarrow}{\partial}_\alpha\otimes\gamma_\mu C \, ,\nonumber\\
&&C\gamma_5 \otimes \stackrel{\leftrightarrow}{\partial}_\mu\otimes\gamma_\nu C+C\gamma_\nu \otimes \stackrel{\leftrightarrow}{\partial}_\mu\otimes\gamma_5 C-C\gamma_5 \otimes \stackrel{\leftrightarrow}{\partial}_\nu\otimes\gamma_\mu C-C\gamma_\mu \otimes \stackrel{\leftrightarrow}{\partial}_\nu\otimes\gamma_5 C \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
type vector currents, where $\stackrel{\leftrightarrow}{\partial}_\mu=\overrightarrow{\partial}_\mu-\overleftarrow{\partial}_\mu$ \cite{WZG-Y4260-vector-1,WZG-Y4260-vector-2}. As the analytical expressions of the QCD spectral densities for those currents are lengthy and do not have simple relations with that for the $C\gamma_5\otimes \gamma_\mu C $ type current. We prefer the currents $J^A_\mu(x)$ and $J^V_\mu(x)$, because they lead to the QCD spectral densities which have simple relations with each other.
At the hadron side, we isolate the contributions of the ground state hidden-charm tetraquark states $Z_c$,
\begin{eqnarray}
\Pi_{\mu\nu}(p)&=&\frac{\lambda_{Z}^2}{M_{Z}^2-p^2}\left(-g_{\mu\nu} +\frac{p_\mu p_\nu}{p^2}\right) +\cdots \, \, , \nonumber\\
&=&\Pi(p^2)\left(-g_{\mu\nu} +\frac{p_\mu p_\nu}{p^2}\right) +\cdots \, \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
where the $M_Z$ and $\lambda_Z$ are masses and pole residues of the hidden-charm tetraquark states $Z_c$, respectively, the $\lambda_{Z}$ are defined by $ \langle 0|J_\mu(0)|Z_c(p)\rangle=\lambda_{Z} \,\varepsilon_\mu$,
the $\varepsilon_\mu$ are the polarization vectors of the axialvector and vector tetraquark states. We resort to the component $\Pi(p^2)$ to investigate the axialvector and vector tetraquark states.
We accomplish the operator product expansion up to the vacuum condensates of dimension-10 consistently, which are the vacuum expectations of the quark-gluon operators of the order $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s^k)$ with $k\leq1$. In calculations, we assume vacuum saturation for the higher dimensional vacuum condensates and factorize the higher dimensional vacuum condensates into the product of the lower ones. Then we write the correlation functions $\Pi(p^2)$ in the form,
\begin{eqnarray}
\Pi(p^2)&=&\int_{4m_c^2}^{\infty} ds \frac{\rho_{QCD}(s)}{s-p^2}\, ,
\end{eqnarray}
through dispersion relation, where the $\rho_{QCD}$ are the spectral densities at the quark-gluon level.
We implement the quark-hadron duality below the continuum thresholds $s_0$ and accomplish Borel transform with respect to
the variable $P^2=-p^2$ to obtain the QCD sum rules,
\begin{eqnarray}\label{QCDSR}
\lambda^2_{Z}\, \exp\left(-\frac{M^2_{Z}}{T^2}\right)= \int_{4m_c^2}^{s_0} ds\, \rho_{QCD}(s) \, \exp\left(-\frac{s}{T^2}\right) \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
where the $T^2$ are the Borel parameters, $\rho_{QCD}(s)=\rho_A(s)$ and $\rho_V(s)$, $\rho_A(s)=\sum\limits_{i}\rho^A_{i}(s)$, $\rho_V(s)=\sum\limits_{i}\rho^V_{i}(s)$ with $i=0$, $3$, $4$, $5$, $6$, $7$, $8$ and $10$,
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^A_0(s)&=& \frac{1}{1024\pi^6} \int dydz
\,{y}{z}(1-y-z)^2 \left(s-\overline{m}_c^2\right)^3(5s-\bar{m}_c^2) \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^A_3(s)&=& -\frac{{m}_c\langle\bar{q}q\rangle}{32\pi^4} \int dydz
\,{y}(1-y-z) \left(s-\overline{m}_c^2\right)(7s-3\overline{m}_c^2) \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^A_4(s)&=& -\frac{ {m}_c^2}{384\pi^4}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dydz\,\frac{z(1-y-z)^2}{y^2}(2s-\overline{m}_c^2) \nonumber\\
&& +\frac{ 1}{384\pi^4}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dydz\,z(1-y-z)s(s-\overline{m}_c^2)\, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^A_5(s)&=& \frac{{m}_c\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle}{64\pi^4} \int dydz
\,y(5s-3\overline{m}_c^2) \nonumber\\
&& -\frac{{m}_c\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle}{64\pi^4} \int dydz
\,\frac{z(1-y-z)}{y}(2s-\overline{m}_c^2) \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^A_6(s)&=& \frac{{m}_c^2\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2}{12\pi^2} \int dy \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^A_7(s)&=&\frac{{m}_c^3\langle\bar{q}q\rangle}{288\pi^2}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dydz
\, \frac{(1-y-z)(y+z)}{y^3}\left(1+\frac{2s}{T^2}\right) \delta\left(s-\overline{m}_c^2\right) \nonumber\\
&& -\frac{{m}_c\langle\bar{q}q\rangle}{96\pi^2}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dydz
\, \frac{z(1-y-z)}{y^2}\left[3+2s\,\delta\left(s-\overline{m}_c^2\right)\right]\nonumber\\
&& -\frac{{m}_c\langle\bar{q}q\rangle}{576\pi^2}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dydz
\,\left[3+2s\,\delta\left(s-\overline{m}_c^2\right)\right]\nonumber\\
&& -\frac{{m}_c\langle\bar{q}q\rangle}{576\pi^2}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dy
\,y\left[3+2s\,\delta\left(s-\widetilde{m}_c^2\right)\right] \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^A_8(s)&=&-\frac{{m}_c^2\langle\bar{q}q\rangle\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle}{24\pi^2}\int dy
\,\left(1+\frac{s}{T^2}\right) \delta\left(s-\widetilde{m}_c^2\right) \nonumber\\
&& +\frac{{m}_c^2\langle\bar{q}q\rangle\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle}{48\pi^2}\rangle \int dy
\,\frac{1}{y}\delta\left(s-\widetilde{m}_c^2\right) \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^A_{10}(s)&=&\frac{{m}_c^2\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle^2}{192\pi^2T^6}\int dy \,s^2\, \delta\left(s-\widetilde{m}_c^2\right) \nonumber\\
&&-\frac{{m}_c^2\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle^2}{192\pi^2T^4}\int dy
\,\frac{s}{y} \delta\left(s-\widetilde{m}_c^2\right) \nonumber\\
&& -\frac{{m}_c^4\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2}{108T^4}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dy
\,\frac{1}{y^3} \delta\left(s-\widetilde{m}_c^2\right) \nonumber\\
&& +\frac{{m}_c^2\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2}{36T^2}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dy
\,\frac{1}{y^2} \delta\left(s-\widetilde{m}_c^2\right) \nonumber\\
&& +\frac{{m}_c^2\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2}{216T^6}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dy
\, s^2\, \delta\left(s-\widetilde{m}_c^2\right) \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^V_0(s)&=& \rho^A_0(s) \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^V_3(s)&=& -\frac{{m}_c\langle\bar{q}q\rangle}{32\pi^4} \int dydz
\,{y}(1-y-z) \left(s-\overline{m}_c^2\right)^2 \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^V_4(s)&=& \rho^A_4(s)\, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^V_5(s)&=& \frac{{m}_c\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle}{64\pi^4} \int dydz
\,y(s-\overline{m}_c^2) \nonumber\\
&& +\frac{{m}_c\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle}{64\pi^4} \int dydz
\,\frac{z(1-y-z)}{y}(2s-\overline{m}_c^2) \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^V_6(s)&=& -\rho^A_6(s) \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^V_7(s)&=&\frac{{m}_c^3\langle\bar{q}q\rangle}{288\pi^2}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dydz
\, \frac{(1-y-z)(y+z)}{y^3} \delta\left(s-\overline{m}_c^2\right) \nonumber\\
&& -\frac{{m}_c\langle\bar{q}q\rangle}{96\pi^2}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dydz
\, \frac{z(1-y-z)}{y^2}\nonumber\\
&& -\frac{{m}_c\langle\bar{q}q\rangle}{576\pi^2}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dydz
\,\left[9+4s\delta\left(s-\overline{m}_c^2\right)\right]\nonumber\\
&& -\frac{{m}_c\langle\bar{q}q\rangle}{576\pi^2}\langle\frac{\alpha_{s}{G}{G}}{\pi}\rangle \int dy
\,y \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^V_8(s)&=&-\rho^A_8(s)\, ,
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho^V_{10}(s)&=&-\rho^A_{10}(s) \, ,
\end{eqnarray}
here $y_{f}=\frac{1+\sqrt{1-4m_c^2/s}}{2}$,
$y_{i}=\frac{1-\sqrt{1-4m_c^2/s}}{2}$, $z_{i}=\frac{y
m_c^2}{y s -m_c^2}$, $\overline{m}_c^2=\frac{(y+z)m_c^2}{yz}$,
$ \widetilde{m}_c^2=\frac{m_c^2}{y(1-y)}$, $\int dydz=\int_{y_i}^{y_f}dy \int_{z_i}^{1-y}dz $ and $\int dy=\int_{y_i}^{y_f}dy $.
When the $\delta$ functions $\delta\left(s-\overline{m}_c^2\right)$ and $\delta\left(s-\widetilde{m}_c^2\right)$ appear,
$\int_{y_i}^{y_f}dy \to \int_{0}^{1}dy$, $\int_{z_i}^{1-y}dz \to \int_{0}^{1-y}dz$.
From the analytical expressions of the spectral densities $\rho_{10}^{A/V}(s)$ involving the vacuum condensates of dimension $10$, the highest dimensional vacuum condensates, we can see explicitly that the $\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle^2$ and $ \langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2 \langle\frac{\alpha_{s}GG}{\pi}\rangle$ are companied with the inverted Borel parameters $\frac{1}{T^2}$, $\frac{1}{T^4}$ or $\frac{1}{T^6}$, their contributions are greatly amplified at the small values of the $T^2$, and they play a great important role in determining the lowest values of the Borel parameters. In the spectral densities $\rho_{8}^{A/V}(s)$, some terms involving the vacuum condensate $\langle\bar{q}q\rangle\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle$ are companied with the inverted Borel parameter $\frac{1}{T^2}$ besides the small numerical denominators, and their contributions are also amplified at the small values of the $T^2$ and also play a great important role in determining the lowest values of the Borel parameters.
In the spectral density $\rho_{7}^{A}(s)$, there exists a term companied with the inverted Borel parameter $\frac{1}{T^2}$, while in the spectral density $\rho_{7}^{V}(s)$, there exists no term companied with the inverted Borel parameter $\frac{1}{T^2}$ at all. Even in the case of small Borel parameters,
the contributions of the vacuum condensate $ \langle\bar{q}q\rangle \langle\frac{\alpha_{s}GG}{\pi}\rangle$ are very small in all the QCD sum rules for the hidden-charm tetraquark (molecular) states due to the small value of the $ \langle\bar{q}q\rangle \langle\frac{\alpha_{s}GG}{\pi}\rangle$ and the associated large numerical denominators \cite{WZG-CTP-DvDvDv,WZG-HT-PRD,WZG-PRD-hidden-charm,Wang-tetra-formula,WZG-4260-4360-4660}, the vacuum condensate $ \langle\bar{q}q\rangle \langle\frac{\alpha_{s}GG}{\pi}\rangle$ plays a tiny role both in and out the Borel windows. While in the spectral densities $\rho_{6}^{A/V}(s)$,
the contributions of the vacuum condensate $ \langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2$ are greatly enhanced due to the associated small numerical denominators. For the conventional mesons, the vacuum condensate $ \langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2$ is always companied with the strong fine-structure constant $\alpha_s(\mu)$ and its contribution is greatly suppressed, and the conventional mesons are not the ideal channels to explore the non-factorizable effects \cite{Review-kappa-kappa}.
All in all, the higher dimensional vacuum condensates $\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2$,
$\langle\bar{q}q\rangle\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle$,
$\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle^2$ and $ \langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2 \langle\frac{\alpha_{s}GG}{\pi}\rangle$ play an important role in determining the Borel windows, their positive or negative contributions, say $\rho^V_6(s)=-\rho^A_6(s)$, $\rho^V_8(s)=-\rho^A_8(s)$ and $\rho^V_{10}(s)=-\rho^A_{10}(s)$, have great influences
on the convergent behaviors of the operator product expansion and the pole contributions. We can take account of the non-factorizable effects by introducing a parameter $\kappa$,
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2 &\to & \kappa\, \langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2\, , \nonumber\\
\langle\bar{q}q\rangle\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle &\to & \kappa\, \langle\bar{q}q\rangle\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle\, , \nonumber\\
\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle^2 &\to & \kappa\, \langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle^2\, , \nonumber\\
\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2 \langle\frac{\alpha_{s}GG}{\pi}\rangle &\to & \kappa\, \langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2 \langle\frac{\alpha_{s}GG}{\pi}\rangle\, .
\end{eqnarray}
We should bear in mind that the parameter $\kappa$ associated with the vacuum condensates of dimensions $6$, $8$ and $10$ is not necessary to have the same value. The four-quark vacuum condensate $\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2$ serves as a milestone for the hidden-charm (or hidden-bottom) tetraquark (molecular) states \cite{WZG-CTP-DvDvDv,WZG-HT-PRD,WZG-PRD-hidden-charm,Wang-tetra-formula,WZG-4260-4360-4660}, the dominant influence of the higher dimensional vacuum condensates comes from the vacuum condensate $\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2$ near the Borel windows, the Borel windows are sensitive to the coefficient $\kappa$ associated with the $\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2$.
In the present work, we take account of the non-factorizable effects of the vacuum condensates $\langle\bar{q}q\rangle\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle$,
$\langle\bar{q}g_{s}\sigma Gq\rangle^2$ and $\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2 \langle\frac{\alpha_{s}GG}{\pi}\rangle$ for a more robust estimation, as they are also acquired via the vacuum saturation after all, and we will simplify the analysis and set all the parameters $\kappa$ to have the same values.
We differentiate Eq.\eqref{QCDSR} with respect to $\tau=\frac{1}{T^2}$, and eliminate the
pole residues $\lambda_{Z}$ to obtain the QCD sum rules for the tetraquark masses,
\begin{eqnarray}
M^2_{Z}= \frac{-\frac{d}{d \tau }\int_{4m_c^2}^{s_0} ds\,\rho_{QCD}(s)\,e^{-\tau s}}{\int_{4m_c^2}^{s_0} ds \, \rho_{QCD}(s)\, e^{-\tau s}}\, .
\end{eqnarray}
\section{Numerical results and discussions}
We adopt two sets of input parameters at the QCD side to explore the hidden-charm tetraquark states. \\ \\
{\bf Set I}
We choose the standard values of the vacuum condensates
$\langle\bar{q}q \rangle=-(0.24\pm 0.01\, \rm{GeV})^3$, $\langle\bar{q}g_s\sigma G q \rangle=m_0^2\langle \bar{q}q \rangle$,
$m_0^2=(0.8 \pm 0.1)\,\rm{GeV}^2$, $\langle \frac{\alpha_s
GG}{\pi}\rangle=0.012\pm0.004\,\rm{GeV}^4$ at the energy scale $\mu=1\, \rm{GeV}$
\cite{SVZ79-1,SVZ79-2,PRT85,Ioffe-NPB-1981,Ioffe-mixcondensate,ColangeloReview}, and take the $\overline{MS}$ mass of the charm quark from the Particle Data Group, $m_{c}(m_c)=(1.275\pm0.025)\,\rm{GeV}$ \cite{PDG}.
In addition, we take account of the energy-scale dependence of all the input parameters \cite{Narison-mix},
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle\bar{q}q \rangle(\mu)&=&\langle\bar{q}q\rangle({\rm 1 GeV})\left[\frac{\alpha_{s}({\rm 1 GeV})}{\alpha_{s}(\mu)}\right]^{\frac{12}{33-2n_f}}\, , \nonumber\\
\langle\bar{q}g_s \sigma Gq \rangle(\mu)&=&\langle\bar{q}g_s \sigma Gq \rangle({\rm 1 GeV})\left[\frac{\alpha_{s}({\rm 1 GeV})}{\alpha_{s}(\mu)}\right]^{\frac{2}{33-2n_f}}\, ,\nonumber\\
m_c(\mu)&=&m_c(m_c)\left[\frac{\alpha_{s}(\mu)}{\alpha_{s}(m_c)}\right]^{\frac{12}{33-2n_f}} \, ,\nonumber\\
\alpha_s(\mu)&=&\frac{1}{b_0t}\left[1-\frac{b_1}{b_0^2}\frac{\log t}{t} +\frac{b_1^2(\log^2{t}-\log{t}-1)+b_0b_2}{b_0^4t^2}\right]\, ,
\end{eqnarray}
where $t=\log \frac{\mu^2}{\Lambda^2}$, $b_0=\frac{33-2n_f}{12\pi}$, $b_1=\frac{153-19n_f}{24\pi^2}$, $b_2=\frac{2857-\frac{5033}{9}n_f+\frac{325}{27}n_f^2}{128\pi^3}$, $\Lambda=213\,\rm{MeV}$, $296\,\rm{MeV}$ and $339\,\rm{MeV}$ for the quark flavor numbers $n_f=5$, $4$ and $3$, respectively \cite{PDG}.
In the present work, we explore the hidden-charm tetraquark states and choose $n_f=4$, then evolve all the
input parameters to some typical energy scales $\mu$ to extract the tetraquark masses. The value $\langle \frac{\alpha_s
GG}{\pi}\rangle=0.012\pm0.004\,\rm{GeV}^4$ is still frequently used in the current QCD sum rules analysis, as no significant progress in its determination
has ever been made and proven to be more reliable. \\ \\
{\bf Set II}
We choose the updated parameters obtained by S. Narison, including the mass of the charm quark and the gluon condensate, $m_{c}(m_c)=(1.266\pm0.006)\,\rm{GeV}$ and $\langle \frac{\alpha_s
GG}{\pi}\rangle=0.021\pm0.001\,\rm{GeV}^4$ \cite{Narison-2101}, while the energy scales of the vacuum condensates are set to be $\mu=1\,\rm{GeV}$.
For the parameter Set I, we take the energy scale formula $\mu=\sqrt{M^2_{X/Y/Z}-(2{\mathbb{M}}_c)^2}$ with the effective $c$-quark mass, ${\mathbb{M}}_c=1.82\,\rm{GeV}$, to obtain the suitable energy scales of the QCD spectral densities \cite{Wang-tetra-formula,WZG-EPJC-1.82}.
We can rewrite the energy scale formula in the form,
\begin{eqnarray}\label{formula-Regge}
M^2_{X/Y/Z}&=&\mu^2+{\rm Constants}\, ,
\end{eqnarray}
where the Constants have the value $4{\mathbb{M}}_c^2$ and are fitted by the QCD sum rules, the predicted tetraquark masses and the pertinent energy scales of the QCD spectral densities have a Regge-trajectory-like relation \cite{WZG-CTP-DvDvDv}.
We usually consult the experimental data on the mass gaps between the ground states and first radial excited states to adjust the continuum threshold parameters $s_0$ to exclude the possible contaminations from the continuum states. Although the tetraquark states have not been experimentally established yet, there are several excellent candidates, such as the $Z_c(3900)$, $Z_c(4020)$, $Z_c(4430)$, etc.
According to the possible quantum numbers, decay modes and mass gaps, in the scenarios of tetraquark states, we can tentatively assign the $X(3915)$ and $X(4500)$ as the 1S and 2S hidden-charm tetraquark states with the $J^{PC}=0^{++}$ \cite{X4140-tetraquark-Lebed,X3915-X4500-EPJC-WZG}, assign
the $Z_c(3900)$ and $Z_c(4430)$ as the 1S and 2S hidden-charm tetraquark states with the $J^{PC}=1^{+-}$, respectively \cite{Maiani-Z4430-1405,Nielsen-1401,WangZG-Z4430-CTP}, assign the $Z_c(4020)$ and $Z_c(4600)$ as the 1S and 2S hidden-charm tetraquark states with the $J^{PC}=1^{+-}$, respectively \cite{ChenHX-Z4600-A,WangZG-axial-Z4600}, and assign the $X(4140)$ and $X(4685)$ the 1S and 2S hidden-charm tetraquark states with the $J^{PC}=1^{++}$, respectively \cite{WZG-Di-X4140-EPJC,WZG-X4140-X4685}. The energy gaps between the ground states (1S) and first radial excited states (2S) are about $0.57\sim 0.59 \,\rm{GeV}$. In the present work, we can take the continuum threshold parameters as $\sqrt{s_0}=M_Z+0.4\sim0.6\,\rm{GeV}$, where the $M_Z$ are the ground state masses of the hidden-charm tetraquark states.
Direct calculations based on the QCD sum rules indicate that the $C\gamma_5\otimes \gamma_\mu C\pm C\gamma_\mu\otimes \gamma_5 C$ type hidden-charm tetraquark states $c\bar{c}u\bar{d}$ with the $J^{PC}=1^{++}$ and $1^{+-}$ respectively have almost degenerated masses \cite{WZG-HT-PRD,WZG-PRD-hidden-charm}, while the $C\otimes \gamma_\mu C\pm C\gamma_\mu\otimes C$ type hidden-charm tetraquark states $c\bar{c}u\bar{d}$ with the $J^{PC}=1^{-+}$ and $1^{--}$ respectively have
almost degenerated masses or slightly different masses
\cite{Wang-tetra-formula,WZG-4260-4360-4660}. In the present work, we do not distinguish the charge conjugation, and take it for granted that the $C\gamma_5\otimes \gamma_\mu C$ type tetraquark state has a mass about $3.9\,\rm{GeV}$, just like the $Z_c(3900)$, and tentatively choose the continuum threshold parameter as $\sqrt{s_0}=4.4\,\rm{GeV}$ as a guide to optimize the parameters.
In 2019, the LHCb collaboration explored the $m(J/\psi \pi^-)$ versus $m(K^+\pi^-)$ plane in the decays $B^0\to J/\psi K^+\pi^-$, and observed two possible structures near $m(J/\psi \pi^-)=4200 \,\rm{MeV}$ and $4600\,\rm{MeV}$, respectively \cite{LHCb-Z4600}. The structure near $m(J/\psi \pi^-)=4600 \,\rm{MeV}$ is in very good agreement with our predicted mass of the $C\otimes \gamma_\mu C- C\gamma_\mu\otimes C$ type tetraquark state with the $J^{PC}=1^{--}$ \cite{WZG-4260-4360-4660}.
In Ref.\cite{WZG-Vector-4600}, we assign the $Z_c(4600)$ to be the 1S vector tetraquark state tentatively and study its two-body strong decays with the QCD sum rules based on solid quark-hadron duality, and obtain the total decay width $144.8^{+50.6}_{-33.9}\,{\rm{MeV}}$, which is reasonable for the tetraquark state.
In the scenario of tetraquark states, there are two possible assignments for the $Z_c(4600)$, one is the first radial excited state of the $Z_c(4020)$ with the $J^{PC}=1^{+-}$ \cite{ChenHX-Z4600-A,WangZG-axial-Z4600}, the other is the 1S vector tetraquark state with the $J^{PC}=1^{--}$ \cite{WZG-Vector-4600}, more experimental data are still needed to obtain a more reliable assignment. At the present time, we take it for granted that the $C\otimes \gamma_\mu C$ type tetraquark state has a mass about $4.6\,\rm{GeV}$, and choose the continuum threshold parameter as $\sqrt{s_0}=5.1\,\rm{GeV}$ as a guide to optimize the parameters.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{OPE-A-1.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{OPE-A-2.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{OPE-V-1.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{OPE-V-2.EPS}
\caption{ The absolute contributions of the vacuum condensates, where the A and V denote the axialvector and vector tetraquark states, respectively, the I and II denote the parameters Set I and Set II, respectively. }\label{OPE-AV}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{OPE-A-1-2.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{OPE-V-1-2.EPS}
\caption{ The absolute contributions of the vacuum condensates for $\kappa=1$, where the A and V denote the axialvector and vector tetraquark states, respectively, the I and II denote the parameters Set I and Set II, respectively. }\label{OPE-AV-k1}
\end{figure}
In Fig.\ref{OPE-AV}, we plot the absolute values of the contributions of the vacuum condensates in the operator product expansion with the parameters ($\sqrt{s_0}=4.4\,\rm{GeV}$, $T^2=2.9\,\rm{GeV}^2$) and ($5.1\,\rm{GeV}$, $3.9\,\rm{GeV}^2$) for the axialvector and vector hidden-charm tetraquark states, respectively. In both cases, the contributions of the vacuum condensates of dimension $6$ serve as a milestone. Although the operator product expansion converges for all the values $\kappa=1$, $2$, $\cdots$, $5$, the convergent behavior becomes worse with increase of the values of the $\kappa$. A good convergent behavior of the operator product expansion requires a small value of the $\kappa$.
In Fig.\ref{OPE-AV-k1}, we plot the absolute values of the contributions of the vacuum condensates in the operator product expansion with the value $\kappa=1$ as an example to examine the influences of the parameters Set I and Set II. From the figure, we can see that the parameter Set I leads to a slightly better convergent behavior compared to the parameter Set II.
In the QCD sum rules for the hidden-charm (or hidden-bottom) tetraquark (molecular) states, we adopt the spectral densities $\rho_{QCD}(s)\Theta(s-s_0)$ to represent the contributions of the higher resonances and continuum states, where $\Theta(s)=1$ for $s>0$, else $\Theta(s)=0$ \cite{WZG-CTP-DvDvDv,WZG-HT-PRD,WZG-PRD-hidden-charm,Wang-tetra-formula,WZG-4260-4360-4660}. Such approximations cannot ensure the largest contributions come from the perturbative terms, sometimes the contributions of the vacuum condensates of dimensions of $3$, $5$ or $6$ are even larger than the contributions of the perturbative terms, for example, in the present case for the axialvector hidden-charm tetraquark state, $D(3)\gg D(0)$ and $|D(5)|\approx D(0)$. In all the QCD sum rules, the vacuum condensates $\langle\bar{q}q\rangle^2$ with $q=u$, $d$, $s$ serve a milestone in judging the convergent behaviors of the operator product expansion \cite{WZG-CTP-DvDvDv,WZG-HT-PRD,WZG-PRD-hidden-charm,Wang-tetra-formula,WZG-4260-4360-4660}, we require the hierarchies $|D(6)|>|D(8)|>|D(10)|$ and $|D(10)|\leq 1\%$ or $\ll 1\%$.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{Pole-A-1.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{Pole-A-2.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{Pole-V-1.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{Pole-V-2.EPS}
\caption{ The pole contributions with variations of the Borel parameters, where the A and V denote the axialvector and vector tetraquark states, respectively, the I and II denote the parameters Set I and Set II, respectively. }\label{pole-AV}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{Pole-A-1-2.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{Pole-V-1-2.EPS}
\caption{ The pole contributions with variations of the Borel parameters for $\kappa=1$, where the A and V denote the axialvector and vector tetraquark states, respectively, the I and II denote the parameters Set I and Set II, respectively. }\label{pole-AV-k1}
\end{figure}
In Fig.\ref{pole-AV}, we plot the pole contributions with the parameters ($\sqrt{s_0}=4.4\,\rm{GeV}$, $T^2=2.9\,\rm{GeV}^2$) and ($5.1\,\rm{GeV}$, $3.9\,\rm{GeV}^2$) for the axialvector and vector hidden-charm tetraquark states, respectively. From the figure, we can see that in the case of the axialvector tetraquark state, the pole contributions increase monotonically with increase of the values of the $\kappa$, while in the case of the vector tetraquark state, the pole contributions decrease monotonically with increase of the values of the $\kappa$, the pole contributions play an important role in examining the values of the $\kappa$. However, the pole contributions alone cannot optimize the parameter $\kappa$.
In Fig.\ref{pole-AV-k1}, we plot the pole contributions with the value $\kappa=1$ as an example to examine the influences of the parameters Set I and Set II. From the figure, we can see that the parameter Set I leads to a slightly (much) larger pole contribution compared to the parameter Set II for the axialvector (vector) tetraquark state, the pole contributions in the vector tetraquark channels also play an important role in examining the parameters Set I and Set II.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{mass-kapa-A-1.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{mass-kapa-A-2.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{mass-kapa-V-1.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{mass-kapa-V-2.EPS}
\caption{ The tetraquark masses with variations of the Borel parameters, where the A and V denote the axialvector and vector tetraquark states, respectively, the I and II denote the parameters Set I and Set II, respectively. }\label{mass-AV}
\end{figure}
In Fig.\ref{mass-AV}, we plot the predicted masses via the Borel parameters with the continuum threshold parameters $\sqrt{s_0}=4.4\,\rm{GeV}$ and $5.1\,\rm{GeV}$ for the axialvector and vector hidden-charm tetraquark states, respectively. From the figure, we can see that in the case of the axialvector tetraquark state, the predicted masses decrease monotonically and slowly with increase of the values of the $\kappa$, while in the case of the vector tetraquark state, the predicted masses increase monotonically and quickly with increase of the values of the $\kappa$, furthermore, in the case of the vector tetraquark state, we cannot obtain flat Borel platforms with increase of the values of the $\kappa$. We can obtain the conclusion tentatively that the vector channel is much better to determine the value of the $\kappa$ compared to the axialvector channel.
Moreover, from the Fig.\ref{mass-AV}, we can see that the parameter Set II leads to a slightly (much) larger predicted masses compared to the parameter Set I for the axialvector (vector) tetraquark state, the predicted masses in the vector channel also play an important role in examining the parameters Set I and Set II.
According to above analysis, we search for the best Borel parameters $T^2$ and continuum threshold parameters $s_0$ via trial and error to satisfy the two fundamental criteria of the QCD sum rules for the typical values $\kappa=1$, $2$, $3$, $4$ and $5$. The resulting Borel parameters, continuum threshold parameters, energy scales, pole contributions are shown plainly in Table \ref{Borel-mass-pole}. In calculations, we choose the same pole contributions $(40-60)\%$ in all the channels and the central values are larger than (or equal) $50\%$, the pole dominance criterion is well satisfied. On the other hand, the contributions of the higher dimensional vacuum condensates satisfy the relation $|D(6)|\gg |D(8)|\gg |D(10)|$ for all the values of the $\kappa$, the operator product expansion converges very well. As the two fundamental criteria of the QCD sum rules are all satisfied, we expect to make reliable predictions.
Now we take account of all uncertainties of the input parameters, and obtain the values of the masses and pole residues of
the axialvector and vector hidden-charm tetraquark states, which are shown plainly in Fig.\ref{mass-AV-UN} and Table \ref{Borel-mass-pole}.
In Fig.\ref{mass-AV-UN}, we plot the predicted masses with variations of the Borel parameters at much larger ranges than the Borel windows. From the figure, we can see explicitly that there appear very flat platforms in the Borel windows, the uncertainties come from the Borel parameters are rather small, the predictions are reasonable and reliable.
In Fig.\ref{mass-AV-kappa}, we plot the central values of the tetraquark masses with variations of the parameter $\kappa$. From Table \ref{Borel-mass-pole} and Fig.\ref{mass-AV-kappa}, we can see that for the axialvector tetraquark state, the predicted mass decreases monotonically and slowly with increase of the parameter $\kappa$, smaller tetraquark mass favors larger value of the $\kappa$. Compared to the parameter Set I, the predicted mass decreases slightly quicker for the parameter Set II. The axialvector channel is not the best channel to distinguish the parameters Set I and Set II, only by precisely measuring the mass of the axialvector tetraquark state, we can obtain powerful constraint on the input parameters, for example, if the ground state has a mass about $3.9\,\rm{GeV}$, the preferred parameters are (Set I, $\kappa=1$) and (Set II, $\kappa=2$).
For the vector tetraquark state, the predicted mass increases monotonically and quickly with increase of the parameter $\kappa$, larger tetraquark mass favors larger value of the $\kappa$, furthermore, the parameter Set II leads to much larger predicted mass compared to the parameter Set I, the vector channel is the best channel to distinguish the input parameters. For example, if the ground state vector tetraquark state has a mass about $4.6\,\rm{GeV}$, which happens to coincide with the mass of the $Y(4660)$ or $Z_c(4600)$ (in the isospin limit), the preferred parameters are (Set I, $\kappa=1$). On the other hand, if it has mass about $5.4\,\rm{GeV}$, the preferred parameters are (Set II, $\kappa=5$).
We can confronted the predictions in Table \ref{Borel-mass-pole} to the experimental data in the future to select the best parameters.
\begin{table}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|}\hline\hline
$J^P$ &$T^2(\rm{GeV}^2)$ &$\sqrt{s_0}(\rm{GeV})$ &$\mu(\rm{GeV})$ &pole & &$\kappa$ &$M_{Z}(\rm{GeV})$ &$\lambda_{Z}(10^{-2}\rm{GeV}^5)$\\ \hline
$1^{+}$ &$2.7-3.1$ &$4.4\pm0.1$ &$1.4$ &$(40-63)\%$ &Set I &$1 $ &$3.91\pm0.08$ &$2.11\pm 0.34$ \\ \hline
$1^{+}$ &$2.8-3.2$ &$4.4\pm0.1$ &$1.3$ &$(39-61)\%$ &Set I &$2 $ &$3.88\pm0.08$ &$2.01\pm 0.32$ \\ \hline
$1^{+}$ &$2.9-3.3$ &$4.4\pm0.1$ &$1.3$ &$(40-61)\%$ &Set I &$3 $ &$3.85\pm0.09$ &$2.05\pm 0.31$ \\ \hline
$1^{+}$ &$2.9-3.3$ &$4.4\pm0.1$ &$1.2$ &$(40-61)\%$ &Set I &$4 $ &$3.85\pm0.09$ &$1.97\pm 0.28$ \\ \hline
$1^{+}$ &$3.0-3.4$ &$4.4\pm0.1$ &$1.2$ &$(40-60)\%$ &Set I &$5 $ &$3.83\pm0.09$ &$2.02\pm 0.28$ \\ \hline
$1^{+}$ &$2.8-3.2$ &$4.5\pm0.1$ & &$(39-61)\%$ &Set II &$1 $ &$4.02\pm0.08$ &$2.24\pm 0.34$ \\ \hline
$1^{+}$ &$2.7-3.1$ &$4.4\pm0.1$ & &$(40-62)\%$ &Set II &$2 $ &$3.90\pm0.08$ &$1.95\pm 0.29$ \\ \hline
$1^{+}$ &$2.8-3.2$ &$4.4\pm0.1$ & &$(40-62)\%$ &Set II &$3 $ &$3.87\pm0.08$ &$1.98\pm 0.28$ \\ \hline
$1^{+}$ &$2.9-3.3$ &$4.4\pm0.1$ & &$(40-61)\%$ &Set II &$4 $ &$3.84\pm0.08$ &$2.01\pm 0.28$ \\ \hline
$1^{+}$ &$3.0-3.4$ &$4.4\pm0.1$ & &$(40-60)\%$ &Set II &$5 $ &$3.81\pm0.09$ &$2.05\pm 0.28$ \\ \hline
$1^{-}$ &$3.6-4.2$ &$5.1\pm0.1$ &$2.8$ &$(40-62)\%$ &Set I &$1 $ &$4.62\pm0.08$ &$6.69\pm 0.81$ \\ \hline
$1^{-}$ &$4.0-4.6$ &$5.3\pm0.1$ &$3.1$ &$(41-61)\%$ &Set I &$2 $ &$4.81\pm0.09$ &$9.14\pm 1.10$ \\ \hline
$1^{-}$ &$4.3-4.9$ &$5.4\pm0.1$ &$3.3$ &$(40-59)\%$ &Set I &$3 $ &$4.92\pm0.09$ &$10.8\pm 1.30$ \\ \hline
$1^{-}$ &$4.5-5.1$ &$5.5\pm0.1$ &$3.4$ &$(41-59)\%$ &Set I &$4 $ &$5.02\pm0.10$ &$12.4\pm 1.50$ \\ \hline
$1^{-}$ &$4.6-5.4$ &$5.6\pm0.1$ &$3.6$ &$(40-61)\%$ &Set I &$5 $ &$5.11\pm0.10$ &$14.1\pm 1.60$ \\ \hline
$1^{-}$ &$3.7-4.3$ &$5.4\pm0.1$ & &$(40-62)\%$ &Set II &$1 $ &$4.91\pm0.07$ &$6.65\pm 0.83$ \\ \hline
$1^{-}$ &$4.1-4.7$ &$5.6\pm0.1$ & &$(41-61)\%$ &Set II &$2 $ &$5.10\pm0.07$ &$8.86\pm 0.99$ \\ \hline
$1^{-}$ &$4.3-4.9$ &$5.7\pm0.1$ & &$(41-61)\%$ &Set II &$3 $ &$5.22\pm0.08$ &$10.3\pm 1.20$ \\ \hline
$1^{-}$ &$4.5-5.2$ &$5.8\pm0.1$ & &$(40-60)\%$ &Set II &$4 $ &$5.32\pm0.09$ &$11.8\pm 1.40$ \\ \hline
$1^{-}$ &$4.6-5.4$ &$5.9\pm0.1$ & &$(41-62)\%$ &Set II &$5 $ &$5.41\pm0.09$ &$13.4\pm 1.50$ \\ \hline
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{ The Borel parameters, continuum threshold parameters, energy scales, pole contributions, parameter $\kappa$, masses and pole residues for the tetraquark states. }\label{Borel-mass-pole}
\end{table}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{mass-A-1-k1.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{mass-A-1-k2.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{mass-A-2-k2.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{mass-V-1-k1.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{mass-V-1-k2.EPS}
\includegraphics[totalheight=6cm,width=7cm]{mass-V-2-k2.EPS}
\caption{ The tetraquark masses with variations of the Borel parameters, where the A and V denote the axialvector and vector tetraquark states, respectively, the I and II denote the parameters Set I and Set II, respectively. }\label{mass-AV-UN}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[totalheight=8cm,width=10cm]{mass-A-V-kappa.EPS}
\caption{ The tetraquark masses with variations of the value of the $\kappa$, where the A and V denote the axialvector and vector tetraquark states, respectively, the I and II denote the parameters Set I and Set II, respectively. }\label{mass-AV-kappa}
\end{figure}
\section{Conclusion}
In the QCD sum rules for the tetraquark (molecular) states, the higher dimensional vacuum condensates play an important role in extracting the tetraquark masses.
In the present work, we construct the $C\gamma_5\otimes \gamma_\mu C$ type and $C\otimes \gamma_\mu C$ type four-quark currents to investigate the
tetraquark states via the QCD sum rules so as to examine the vacuum saturation or factorization approximation for the higher dimensional vacuum condensates. We carry out the operator product expansion up to the vacuum condensates of dimension-10 consistently, and introduce a parameter $\kappa$ to parameterize the derivation from the vacuum saturation or factorization approximation, and choose two sets parameters to examine the tetraquark masses. In calculations, we observe that smaller value of the $\kappa$ leads to better convergent behavior in the operator product expansion.
For the axialvector tetraquark state, the predicted masses decrease monotonically and slowly with increase of the parameter $\kappa$, larger value of the $\kappa$ leads to smaller tetraquark mass, both the parameters Set I and Set II can lead to a tetraquark mass about $3.9\,\rm{GeV}$, the axialvector channel is not the best channel to distinguish the parameters Set I and Set II. For the vector tetraquark state, the predicted masses increase monotonically and quickly with increase of the parameter $\kappa$, larger value of the $\kappa$ leads to larger tetraquark mass, moreover, the parameter Set II leads to much larger predicted tetraquark mass compared to the parameter Set I, the vector channel is the best channel to distinguish the value of the $\kappa$ and the parameters Set I and Set II.
If the $Z_c(3900)$ can be assigned to be the lowest axialvector hidden-charm tetraquark state, the preferred parameters are (Set I, $\kappa=1\sim2$) or (Set II, $\kappa=2\sim3$). On the other hand, if the lowest axialvector hidden-charm tetraquark state has a mass about $3.8\,\rm{GeV}$, the preferred parameters are (Set I or Set II, $\kappa= 5$).
At the vector sector, if the $Y(4660)$ can be assigned to be the vector hidden-charm tetraquark state with an implicit P-wave in the (anti)diquark, the preferred parameters are (Set I, $\kappa=1$); else, if such a vector hidden-charm tetraquark configuration has a mass about $4.8\,\rm{GeV}$, the favored parameters are (Set I, $\kappa=2$). We can confronted the predictions in Table \ref{Borel-mass-pole} to the experimental data in the future to select the best parameters, or put powerful constraints on the input parameters.
\section*{Acknowledgements}
This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation, Grant Number 12175068.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
}
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{"url":"https:\/\/www.gamedev.net\/forums\/topic\/455186-adding-people-to-a-game\/","text":"# adding people to a game?\n\nThis topic is 3875 days old which is more than the 365 day threshold we allow for new replies. Please post a new topic.\n\n## Recommended Posts\n\nOk, I'm making a First Person Shooter as a \"learn as you go\" type of thing. I was wondering, how do I add monsters\/people\/etc into the game? Would I code each monster with its position into the game, or would I use a level editor to add them. considering that there are going to be a lot of monsters, I figured that there was a way to do it using some level editor. If I do use a level editor to do that, what is a good one that I can use and easily load it into the game with the Irrlicht Engine? Before I was using 3d world studio, and before that gtkRadiant. I didn't really like gtkradiant because your sort of restricted with the games that it was originally made for. I seemed to get along with 3d world studio alright, but I wasn't sure if it had the capabilities I need to add people into the game. Thanks. All help is greatly appreciated.\n\n##### Share on other sites\n3D world studio does support entities, even lets you create your own classes of entities, its probably the best level editor I've tried, the downside is that it's not free and has a single author, Josh, who well... lets say doesn't pay that much attention to his customers suggestions and bug reports.Also I think he was going to raise the price way high for the 6.0 version... I should check the site and see what happened, I am supposed to be able to get it for less if its out since I own 5.x.\n\nYou can also look for free (as in beer) alternatives like Hammer (link) or Torque Constructor (link).\n\nYou already know of the free (as in speech) gtkRadiant, and then there is QuArK (link).\n\nJust one last thing, editors don't just magically create the \"people\" into the level, what they do is save information about entities (like position, model file to use, texture file, etc), how you handle that information inside your engine is up to you.\n\n##### Share on other sites\nOh thank you a lot. I really appreciate it. So I basically have it like this, lets say for my monsters. I have 10 different types of monsters (each with its own class), each derived from a monster base class. I can use 3d World Studio to position my monsters and there textures etc, then I would code in there behaviors.\n\nThis is going to be off topic but I was wondering what the best way to code simple AI behaviors would be. Should I just use a bunch of if statements to check if certain things are true then have have my monsters play a set animation frame and do the behavior for each if? Like: If monster position is within 20 feet of player position == true AND visible to player == true then charge at player.\n\nThanks again.\n\np.s. I'm using C++\n\n##### Share on other sites\nQuote:\n Original post by cemediasThis is going to be off topic but I was wondering what the best way to code simple AI behaviors would be. Should I just use a bunch of if statements to check if certain things are true then have have my monsters play a set animation frame and do the behavior for each if? Like: If monster position is within 20 feet of player position == true AND visible to player == true then charge at player.\n\nQuick comment. It looks like you're writing things like that because you're under the impression that you would have to include the \"== true\" in actual source code. This is not the case, and in fact it is a bad idea to do so: it is extra typing with no meaning. It adds a place where you could make a mistake (such as putting \"= true\" instead), and makes things less clear.\n\nIn real life, you would say \"if the monster's position is within 20 feet of the player\". You would not say \"if it is true that the monster's position is within 20 feet of the player\". Code should be treated similarly.\n\n##### Share on other sites\nQuote:\n Original post by cemediasThis is going to be off topic but I was wondering what the best way to code simple AI behaviors would be. Should I just use a bunch of if statements to check if certain things are true then have have my monsters play a set animation frame and do the behavior for each if? Like: If monster position is within 20 feet of player position == true AND visible to player == true then charge at player.Thanks again.p.s. I'm using C++\n\nZahlman is right, use if(visible) or if(!visible) rather than if(visible==true) and if(visible==false) where possible.\n\nThat said, yes, but its a bit more complex than that, you should use states (IE: idle, running, walking, eating, chase, flee, etc) but you have to set those states with if statements based on the variables you mentioned.\n\n##### Share on other sites\nThanks. I've never made a game this complex before so I wasn't sure how to do this. I have a few more questions. First, how do I access the classes I implement into my level using 3d world studio? Will I be able to use them automatically after I load the level into memory? And second, I've never coded AI before, so I was wondering how it would be best to organize the code. If anyone knows of any tutorials that would help, that would be greatly appreciated. I don't want to do anything too complex, I just want the basic actions as stated: like if the player comes close to an enemy, the enemy will attack. Things like that. I've searched for AI tutorials on the net but they all seem very complex.\n\nThanks again.\n\nP.S: That was the impression that I was under. I know that I'm capable of making this game, I've already made a demo that uses most of the features I want in my game. The only thing I'm really having trouble with is the AI. I don't want my game to become a failure just because I can't program the AI. Like I said in my first post, I'm trying to use this project to further my knowledge.\n\nEDIT: Would it be a good idea to start a new thread and ask these questions?\n\n[Edited by - cemedias on July 11, 2007 11:00:42 PM]\n\n##### Share on other sites\nQuote:\n Original post by cemediasThanks. I've never made a game this complex before so I wasn't sure how to do this. I have a few more questions. First, how do I access the classes I implement into my level using 3d world studio? Will I be able to use them automatically after I load the level into memory?\n\nWell, you have to write level loading code into your engine, I have no idea what format you're using for your levels, but regardless of which one you use, it is all really up to you, the level file contains data, how you process that data is your responsibility.\n\nFor example lets say you have an entity which is meany1 an entity of class meany, it is located at position x,y,z, uses model meany.obj and texture meany.png (I wont add rotation information not to make it any more complex).\n\nThat information is in the level file, on your loader code, you should know first that the information belongs to a meany, that its name is meany1, and that you should set your transformation so a polygon mesh loaded from meany.obj and textured with meany.png shows in position x,y,z.\n\nSince a meany is something thats not static, that would be the \"start\" position, and the loader should also add things like initial HP, and state (IE:idle or patrol), from then on, the AI takes over.\n\nbut all this is stuff YOU have to program, unless you're using something like 3d game studio, Torque, some other premade engine, or moding an existing game like Half Life 2, Doom 3 or Quake, you have to code it yourself. There is no built in CreateMonster() in C++.\n\nThat said, once you get the values from the level editor, you could have a class like:\n\nclass meany{public:meany(float* position,float* rotation,float* scale,std::string& model,std::string& texture){}}\n\nand then do new meany([values read from level go here]), but you still have to fill that constructor and all the other methods a meany entity will need.\n\nIf you're going to use the 3dws file format for your levels, the specification is on the help file... what are you using by the way? X files and Direct3D? I am not sure if entities get exported or how to X files.\n\nQuote:\n Original post by cemediasAnd second, I've never coded AI before, so I was wondering how it would be best to organize the code. If anyone knows of any tutorials that would help, that would be greatly appreciated. I don't want to do anything too complex, I just want the basic actions as stated: like if the player comes close to an enemy, the enemy will attack. Things like that. I've searched for AI tutorials on the net but they all seem very complex.Thanks again.\n\nI'd use a state variable and a state function, something like:\n\nenum States{IDLE=0,PATROL,SEARCHING,FIRE};class entity{public:entity(){state=IDLE;};void DoAI(){switch(state){case IDLE:DoIdle();break;case PATROL:DoPatrol();break;case SEARCHING:DoSearch();break;case FIRE:DoFire();break;}}protected:States state;virtual void DoIdle();virtual void DoPatrol();virtual void DoSearch();virtual void DoFire();}\n\nof course state changes inside of the functions, for example DoIdle would check for nearby enemies each time and if there are any in close range, it would switch to fire (which may require a target), or maybe if it stays idle for too long, it may switch to patrol, or if firing and the target gets out of range, switch to search, etc.\n\nQuote:\n Original post by cemediasP.S: That was the impression that I was under. I know that I'm capable of making this game, I've already made a demo that uses most of the features I want in my game. The only thing I'm really having trouble with is the AI. I don't want my game to become a failure just because I can't program the AI. Like I said in my first post, I'm trying to use this project to further my knowledge.EDIT: Would it be a good idea to start a new thread and ask these questions?\n\nI think you're overestimating the simplicity of a FPS, I am not saying its impossible for one person to write one, but its not the same as codding pong or tetris.\n\nIf you have a new question, hopefully a little more detailed, then start a new thread, if the question is a follow up to the original topic title, then don't.\n\n##### Share on other sites\nThanks for the reply, it really has helped. I appreciate it.\n\nWell, I'm using the Irrlicht Engine for my game, and as of now I'll be loading my entities as .x files.\n\nI guess technically I haven't been making the actual game yet. Right now I've been working on making a tech-demo to test all of the features in the engine and everything that I want to be in the game, in a small level I've been designing. It has been difficult doing all of the graphics design and programming for the game by myself, but I guess it's my only choice. Nobody that lives anywhere near me is as computer literate as I am (gift and a curse hehe). I'm loading my levels as .b3d files also.\n\nThe Irrlicht Engine has a function to load my models with the format that I'm using, but I don't believe the loader can do some of the things you stated, like the HP and state. I guess I will have to write my own loader function.\n\nThanks to you, I now understand what I need to do with my States for my AI. I can't express how much I appreciate it. I'm still a little iffy on how I'm going to write my level loader code. So from what I understand my level loader should handle the classes that I use for my entities, right?\n\nI think I understand this a lot better now. Still, if anyone has any tips on level loader code, that would be helpful. Another thing, is the .x file a good format to use to load my entities with? And b3d for my levels? I suppose that since I'm going to need to write my own level loader I could just use the .3dws format, considering that it's documented and I wont lose any information that I originally put into the level in the editor. I was just using b3d because it was the only format that my engine loaded that supported the lightmaps.\n\nAny more tips or ideas would be helpful. Thanks again!\n\n##### Share on other sites\nI made a new thread to discuss this: \"making my own level loader, tips?\"","date":"2018-02-19 12:42:28","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.21930931508541107, \"perplexity\": 969.6356481312695}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.3, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2018-09\/segments\/1518891812584.40\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20180219111908-20180219131908-00458.warc.gz\"}"}
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{"url":"https:\/\/www.gradesaver.com\/textbooks\/math\/algebra\/algebra-1-common-core-15th-edition\/chapter-8-polynomials-and-factoring-8-4-multiplying-soecial-cases-practice-and-problem-solving-exercises-page-508\/32","text":"## Algebra 1: Common Core (15th Edition)\n\n$6399$\n$79\\cdot 81=$ ...write as a product of a sum and a difference. $=(80+1)(80-1)$ ...use $(a+b)(a-b)=a^{2}-b^{2}$. $=80^{2}-1^{2}$ ...simplify powers. $=6400-1$ ...simplify. =$6399$","date":"2021-05-10 08:15:00","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.5906915664672852, \"perplexity\": 13792.206966966354}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-21\/segments\/1620243989115.2\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210510064318-20210510094318-00279.warc.gz\"}"}
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Q: memory reserving and committing I am reading < Windows via C/C++ > and here's some quotation.
When a process is created and given
its address space, the bulk of this
usable address space is free, or
unallocated. To use portions of this
address space, you must allocate
regions within it by calling
VirtualAlloc. The act of allocating a
region is called reserving.
To use a reserved region of address
space, you must allocate physical
storage and then map this storage to
the reserved region. This process is
called committing physical storage.
After you have reserved a region, you
need to commit physical storage to the
region before you can access the
memory addresses contained within it.
The system allocates physical storage
committed to a region from the
system's paging file.
Here are a couple of questions:
*
*Why do we need to follow the reserve-comit paradigm when using memory? i.e. Why do we need to follow this 2-step paradigm instead of allocating some physical memory directly and use it?
*If the the physical storage committed to a region is allocated from the system's paging file, why do we need the RAM (sounds ridiculous)? In my opinion, an address space region should be mapped to RAM (through the paging mechanism), and the RAM pages should be backed by the paging file.
Maybe this question could be answered by explaing the following 2 aspects:
*
*What does reserving do?
*What does committing do?
Update - 1 2:48 PM 11/23/2010
It is the following quotation from < Windows via C/C++ 5th edition > that makes me puzzled.
...It is best to think of physical
storage as data stored in a paging
file on a disk drive. So when an
application commits physical storage
to a region of address space by
calling the VirtualAlloc function,
space is actually allocated from a
file on the hard disk.
After you have reserved a region, you
need to commit physical storage to the
region before you can access the
memory addresses contained within it.
The system allocates physical storage committed to a region from the
system's paging file.
So, where is the RAM? What if I configure my machine to have no page file?
A: The whole point of reserving pages is to ensure that contiguous address space is available for some task. For example, we want the stack to able to grow to 1MB, but we don't want to commit all of that memory because it won't actually be used yet. So we reserve 1MB of pages, but commit a small amount, like 64kB. By setting up a guard page at the end of the committed region, we can detect when we need to commit more memory.
Committing memory is the act of mapping some kind of storage to a page. This can be located in physical RAM, where it is part of the working set, or in the pagefile. It can also be mapped in or private memory. NtAllocateVirtualMemory/VirtualAlloc can reserve and commit at the same time, for convenience.
EDIT for updated question: When you commit pages, that is charged against the process pagefile quota / system-wide commitment limit. This limit is determined by the amount of physical RAM available and the size of the pagefile. This doesn't actually mean the pages are stored in, or written to the pagefile. They may be if memory is low, but otherwise pages are mostly kept in physical memory.
A: *
*You don't actually have to follow 2-stage reserve/commit allocation scheme.
The point is that VirtualAlloc and VirtualFree may do several things. And sometimes it's really useful to do so. You don't have to however.
*Committed memory region is the one for which the system allocates physical storage.
You don't have to worry about where exactly it's allocated: RAM or page file. This should be transparent to you (unless you're writing a kernel-mode device driver). Moreover, most of the memory pages can be swapped out to the page file and loaded into RAM on-demand.
It's just some committed memory pages don't require binding with the page file, because they're already bound to another physical storage. Memory-mapped files are the example of this.
In normal scenario when you commit a memory pages, use it for some time period and free it - most likely it won't reach the page file at all.
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EVOLUTION - THE TRANSITIONAL FOSSILS
Evolution of life
Animals >
Vertebrates >
Jawless vertebrates
Chimaeras
Bichirs and reedfish
Sturgeons and paddlefishes
Teleostei
Holostei
Lobe-finned fishes
Tetrapods >
Eutheria
Metatheria
Rhynchocephalia
Palaeognathae
Crocodylia
Caudata
Gymnophiona
Dipnoi
Coelacanthimorpha
Land plants >
Lycophytes
Summary
The following figure is a summarized phylogenetic tree for the Cladistia (the bichirs and reedfish), showing that the stem line of the taxon and its ancestor stem line (i.e. stem-Actinopterygii and stem-Euteleostomi) are documented by transitional fossils. As will be seen below, the red star shown below represents multiple transitional fossils.
The major transitions represented by the above tree are the development of characteristics that distinguish (1) the Euteleostomi from the Chondrichthyes, (2) the Actinopterygii from the Sarcopterygii and (3) the Cladistia from the Actinopteri. The main differences are as follows:
In contrast to the Euteleostomi (also known as the Osteichthyes), the Chondrichthyes have a predominantly cartilaginous skeleton, but that skeleton is calcified in the form of chains of tiny apatite crystals covering the surface of the cartilage. Bone is also present in the scales of chondrichthyans (Merck, 2019a). There is also a significant difference with respect to their skulls; the Euteleostomi have large, differentiated skull bones, whereas the skulls of the cartilaginous chondrichthyans bear numerous small bones or tiny scales (Friedman and Brazeau, 2013). For fuller description of these features, see Merck (2019a).
The Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes) and the Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fishes) differ mainly in their dorsal fins (only one in the case of the Actinopterygii; two in the Sarcopterygii), the structure of the braincase, and the manner in which the fins are connected to the main skeleton (in the Actinopterygii the fins articulate directly with the main skeleton whereas in the Sarcopterygii the fins are connected via a humerus bone). Additional information can be found in Merck (2019b).
The Cladistia and the Actinopteri are distinguished by the nature of some of their cranial bones and by the existence of a dorsal fin divided into a series of finlets. Additional differences are described in Merck (2019b).
The cladistians (class Cladistei (synonym Cladistia), superclass Actinopterygii) are represented at the present time by the bichirs and the reedfish (otherwise known as the ropefish or the snakefish), which comprise the family Polypteridae. This family contains only two genera, as shown in the phylogenetic tree below:
The crown group of the Cladistia, represented above by the black dot, comprises all living bichirs and reedfish, together with all extinct species descended from the last common ancestor of all bichirs and reedfish. Given that very few of these extinct species are known, we will not consider evolutionary transitions within the crown-Cladistia.
Below we will consider the evolution of the stem lines of the cladistians and of the higher-order clades to which they belong, the Actinopterygii and the Euteleostomi. These stem lines are depicted as red, blue and magenta lines respectively in the above phylogenetic tree.
This tree is summarized in the context of geological time in the figure below:
This time tree is constrained by fossils that will be discussed below. It indicates that the successive divisions of the gnathostomes that resulted in the Cladistia took place between the middle of the Ordovician and the middle of the Carboniferous, a period of around 110 million years. Note that the cladistian stem line appeared much later than the stem-Actinopteri; this difference is represented by a ghost lineage of at least 79 million years.
We will now consider the evolution of the cladistians in three stages:
The stem-Euteleostomi (bony vertebrates)
The stem-Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes)
The stem-Cladistia
The stem group of the bony vertebrates
Conventionally, the bony vertebrates (Euteleostomi) have been distinguished from the bony fishes, or Osteichthyes. The difference is that the term Euteleostomi is applied to the entire sister clade of the Chondrichthyes (see phylogenetic tree on the Vertebrates page), while the Osteichthyes are fishes and thus exclude the tetrapods. However, it is now common in current literature (e.g. Betancur-R et al, 2017) to include the tetrapods in the Osteichthyes and thus to consider the two terms as synonymous. To avoid confusion, we will use the term Euteleostomi here.
The euteleostome stem line is represented, albeit somewhat sparsely, in the fossil record. A recent tree showing the phylogenetic relationships of the stem-group fossils is shown below:
The oldest known member of the stem-Euteleostomi is Andreolepis hedei, described from the Gogs locality near Lau (SE Gotland, Sweden), from the mid-Silurian (middle Ludlow) Upper Hemse Beds (Märss, 2001; Zhu et al, 2009)). No public-domain image is available for Andreolepis, but two of the other stem-Euteleostomi, together with the earliest-known member of the crown group, are illustrated below (for a larger image, click on image):
Names in red indicate that the fossil is younger than the oldest known crown-group fossil.
* after name indicates that the image represents a life restoration.
The number of images available is clearly insufficient to illustrate any evolutionary changes within the stem group, but an example of the stem group can be compared with the earliest known crown-group euteleostome, Guiyu oneiros, which is a stem-group sarcopterygian from the mid-Silurian (Late Ludlow) Kuanti Formation at a locality near Xiaoxiang Reservoir, Qujing, Yunnan, China (Zhu et al, 2009; Choo et al, 2017).
The stem group of the euteleostomes developed mainly during the later part of the Silurian, as shown below:
According to the data presented above, no more than about a million years elapsed between the appearance of the stem-Euteleostomi and that of the crown group. However, given that no stem-group fossils are known to be clearly older than the crown group, the possibility exists that older representatives of the stem group will be found.
The stem group of the ray-finned fishes
The stem-Actinopterygii are well represented in the fossil record. Here is a fairly recent interpretation of the phylogeny of the stem group:
The oldest known member of the stem-Actinopterygii is Meemannia eos, described from the middle part of the Xitun Formation, of Early Devonian (Late Lochkovian) age, at a locality close to Xitun village in the suburb of Qujing, Yunnan, southwestern China (Zhu et al, 2010; Giles et al, 2017). No images of this species are available in the public domain. However, other fossils of the stem group, for which public domain images are available, are shown below together with a specimen of the genus Platysomus, which contains the earliest known member of the crown-Actinopterygii (click on image for a larger view):
The images shown above are numbered in order from most basal towards the crown group, but no obvious trends can be seen.
The earliest known crown-group actinopterygian is Platysomus superbus, a member of either the Stem-Chondrostei (Giles et al, 2017) or the stem-Neopterygii (Argyriou et al, 2018), described from the Early Carboniferous (Visean) Glencartholm Volcanic Beds Formation at Glencartholm in Eskdale, Scotland (Dineley and Metcalf, 1999). No public-domain image of this species is available, but an image of a member of the same genus is shown above.
The stem group of the Actinopterygians developed from the early Devonian to the early Carboniferous, as shown below:
As indicated above, the stem-to-crown transition for the actinopterygians could have lasted as long as 74 million years. However, many of the stem-group fossils do not occur within that time interval, but appear after the crown group. These fossils represent descendants of ancestors that would have separated from the stem line during or before the Early Carboniferous.
The stem group of the Cladistia
The stem-Cladistia are rather sparsely represented in the fossil record. The phylogenetic tree shown below represents a combination of two published phylogenies:
Two species of the same age represent the oldest known stem-Cladistia:
Beishanichthys brevicaudalis, found in the Early Triassic (Olenekian) Hongyanjing Formation at Quarry 3 in the Beishan Hills, Subei County, Gansu Province, northern China (Xu and Gao, 2011; Giles et al, 2017);
Evenkia eunotoptera, described from Early Triassic sediments in the Tunguska Coal basin, Yenisei, Siberia (Berg, 1941; Giles et al, 2017).
No public-domain images are available for either of the above species, nor for any of the other stem-Cladistia shown in the above phylogenetic tree.
The oldest known member of the crown-Cladistia is Polypterus sp., found in the Middle Eocene New Idam Unit at Dur At-Talah, in the Sirt Basin, southeastern Libya (Otero et al, 2015). Photographs of some elements of the fossil are shown below:
All of the known stem-Cladistia are of Triassic age, as illustrated below:
The above figure indicates that the time between the origin of the cladistian stem group and the initiation of the crown group could have been as long as 211 million years. However, the 150 million year gap between the youngest known stem cladistians and the crown group suggests the possibility that older fossils of the crown group (or younger members of the stem group) remain to be found.
Image credits - Cladistia
Header (Polypterus delhezi) By ばぶじ~, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Lophosteus superbus By Geoscience Collections of Estonia, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
'Ligulalepis' (2a and 2b) From Open Access article by Clement et al (2018), Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Guiyu oneiros By Nobu Tamura under Creative Commons 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Cheirolepis trailli (4a) By Ghedoghedo [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
Cheirolepis trailli (4b) By Nobu Tamura under a Creative Commons 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license
Cheirolepis canadensis By Placoderm2 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
Howqualepis rostridens By Timothy Holland, Copyright Museums Victoria / CC BY (Licensed as Attribution 4.0 International)
Mimipiscis bartrami By Gretarsson [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
Boreosomus gillioti By Ghedoghedo [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
Pteronisculus sp. By FunkMonk [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
Cyranorhis bergeraci By Ryan Somma [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]
Australosomus merlei By Emőke Dénes, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Amphicentrum granulosum By James St. John, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Saurichthys sp. (13a) By Ghedoghedo, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Saurichthys sp. (13b) By Bildflut [CC0]
Platysomus sp. By Ghedoghedo, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Polypterus sp. From Open Access article by Otero et al, 2015, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
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{"url":"http:\/\/gmatclub.com\/forum\/60-percent-of-movie-theatres-in-town-x-have-3-screens-or-l-147354.html?kudos=1","text":"Find all School-related info fast with the new School-Specific MBA Forum\n\n It is currently 09 Feb 2016, 04:02\n\n### GMAT Club Daily Prep\n\n#### Thank you for using the timer - this advanced tool can estimate your performance and suggest more practice questions. We have subscribed you to Daily Prep Questions via email.\n\nCustomized\nfor You\n\nwe will pick new questions that match your level based on your Timer History\n\nTrack\n\nevery week, we\u2019ll send you an estimated GMAT score based on your performance\n\nPractice\nPays\n\nwe will pick new questions that match your level based on your Timer History\n\n# Events & Promotions\n\n###### Events & Promotions in June\nOpen Detailed Calendar\n\n# 60 percent of movie theatres in Town X have 3 screens or l\n\nAuthor Message\nTAGS:\nManager\nJoined: 09 Feb 2013\nPosts: 120\nFollowers: 1\n\nKudos [?]: 550 [0], given: 17\n\n60 percent of movie theatres in Town X have 3 screens or l\u00a0[#permalink] \u00a015 Feb 2013, 11:25\n2\nThis post was\nBOOKMARKED\n00:00\n\nDifficulty:\n\n45% (medium)\n\nQuestion Stats:\n\n73% (02:50) correct 27% (02:16) wrong based on 91 sessions\n60 percent of movie theatres in Town X have 3 screens or less. 20% of those theatres sell an average of more than $300 worth of popcorn per showing. 56 percent of all the movie theatres in Town X sell$300 or less of popcorn per showing. What percent of all the stores on the street have 4 or more screens and sell an average of more than $300 worth of popcorn per day? A. 12 B. 18 C. 32 D. 40 E. 44 [Reveal] Spoiler: OA _________________ Kudos will encourage many others, like me. Good Questions also deserve few KUDOS. Moderator Joined: 02 Jul 2012 Posts: 1230 Location: India Concentration: Strategy GMAT 1: 740 Q49 V42 GPA: 3.8 WE: Engineering (Energy and Utilities) Followers: 100 Kudos [?]: 1066 [2] , given: 116 Re: 60 percent of movie theatres in Town X have 3 screens or l [#permalink] 15 Feb 2013, 21:29 2 This post received KUDOS 1 This post was BOOKMARKED emmak wrote: 60 percent of movie theatres in Town X have 3 screens or less. 20% of those theatres sell an average of more than$300 worth of popcorn per showing. 56 percent of all the movie theatres in Town X sell $300 or less of popcorn per showing. What percent of all the stores on the street have 4 or more screens and sell an average of more than$300 worth of popcorn per day?\n\nA. 12\nB. 18\nC. 32\nD. 40\nE. 44\n\nAnswer is C. Data given are in black and data inferred are in red.\nAttachments\n\nuntitled.JPG [ 14.66 KiB | Viewed 1428 times ]\n\n_________________\n\nDid you find this post helpful?... Please let me know through the Kudos button.\n\nThanks To The Almighty - My GMAT Debrief\n\nGMAT Reading Comprehension: 7 Most Common Passage Types\n\nDirector\nStatus:\nJoined: 24 Jul 2011\nPosts: 787\nGMAT 1: 780 Q51 V48\nGRE 1: 1540 Q800 V740\nFollowers: 99\n\nKudos [?]: 409 [1] , given: 15\n\nRe: 60 percent of movie theatres in Town X have 3 screens or l\u00a0[#permalink] \u00a015 Feb 2013, 20:44\n1\nKUDOS\nLets take numbers here.\nAssume that the total number of movie theaters in the town = 100\n\nThen number of movie theaters with 3 screens or less = 60\n=> Number of movie theaters with 4 screens or more = 40\nMovie theaters with 3 screens or less selling popcorn at more than $300 = 20% of 60 = 12 Number of movie theaters selling popcorn at$300 or less = 56\n=> Number of movie theaters selling popcorn at more than $300 = 100-56 = 44 Of these 44 theaters, 12 are those with 3 screens or less Therefore 32 (44-12) must be those with four screens or more C is the answer _________________ GyanOne | Top MBA Rankings and MBA Admissions Blog Premium MBA Essay Review|Best MBA Interview Preparation|Exclusive GMAT coaching Get a FREE Detailed MBA Profile Evaluation | Call us now +91 98998 31738 GMAT Club Legend Joined: 09 Sep 2013 Posts: 8184 Followers: 416 Kudos [?]: 111 [0], given: 0 Re: 60 percent of movie theatres in Town X have 3 screens or l [#permalink] 14 Mar 2014, 00:32 Hello from the GMAT Club BumpBot! Thanks to another GMAT Club member, I have just discovered this valuable topic, yet it had no discussion for over a year. I am now bumping it up - doing my job. I think you may find it valuable (esp those replies with Kudos). Want to see all other topics I dig out? Follow me (click follow button on profile). You will receive a summary of all topics I bump in your profile area as well as via email. _________________ GMAT Club Legend Joined: 09 Sep 2013 Posts: 8184 Followers: 416 Kudos [?]: 111 [0], given: 0 Re: 60 percent of movie theatres in Town X have 3 screens or l [#permalink] 06 Jan 2016, 11:23 Hello from the GMAT Club BumpBot! Thanks to another GMAT Club member, I have just discovered this valuable topic, yet it had no discussion for over a year. I am now bumping it up - doing my job. I think you may find it valuable (esp those replies with Kudos). Want to see all other topics I dig out? Follow me (click follow button on profile). You will receive a summary of all topics I bump in your profile area as well as via email. _________________ Manager Joined: 20 Aug 2015 Posts: 235 Location: India GMAT 1: 760 Q50 V42 Followers: 5 Kudos [?]: 69 [0], given: 5 Re: 60 percent of movie theatres in Town X have 3 screens or l [#permalink] 07 Jan 2016, 00:56 Expert's post emmak wrote: 60 percent of movie theatres in Town X have 3 screens or less. 20% of those theatres sell an average of more than$300 worth of popcorn per showing. 56 percent of all the movie theatres in Town X sell $300 or less of popcorn per showing. What percent of all the stores on the street have 4 or more screens and sell an average of more than$300 worth of popcorn per day?\n\nA. 12\nB. 18\nC. 32\nD. 40\nE. 44\n\nAssume the total theaters to be 100x (We assume this to avoid unitary method or decimals)\n\nGiven:\n60x have 3 screens or less\nHence, 40x have 4 screens or more\n\n20% of 60x sell more than $300 popcorn = 12x theaters. 56% of all sell less than$300 popcorn = 56x theaters. Hence 44x sell more than $300 popcorn. Required: Percentage of theaters with 4 or more screens and more than$300 popcorn sale?\nOf the 44x theaters that sell more than $300 popcorn, 12 have 3 screens of less Total theaters with 4 or more screens and ore than$300 sale = 32x\n\nPercentage = 32x\/100x * 100 = 32%\nOption C\n_________________\n\nReach out to us at bondwithus@gmatify.com\n\nRe: 60 percent of movie theatres in Town X have 3 screens or l \u00a0 [#permalink] 07 Jan 2016, 00:56\nSimilar topics Replies Last post\nSimilar\nTopics:\n18 In Town X, 64 percent of the population are employed, and 48 19 13 Dec 2012, 09:24\n8 At the beginning of 2010, 60% of the population of Town X 6 16 Dec 2011, 03:51\n5 In Town X, 64 percent of the population are employed, and 48 percent 8 07 May 2011, 06:25\n6 In Town X, 64 percent of the population are employed, and 48 17 16 Nov 2009, 15:25\n110 Seed mixture X is 40 percent ryegrass and 60 percent 30 26 Feb 2008, 18:46\nDisplay posts from previous: Sort by","date":"2016-02-09 12:02:36","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.1735895872116089, \"perplexity\": 7583.9623305670075}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2016-07\/segments\/1454701157075.54\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20160205193917-00186-ip-10-236-182-209.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"}
| null | null |
Q: How i can scrape the other tabs? Im trying to webscrape Sportium odds with Bs4
The problem is that bs4 only catches soccer odds tab and i want the odds from all the sports, i hope someone can help me with this problem.
here's my code:
url="https://sports.sportium.es/es/apuestasparahoy"
try:
page = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
except:
print("An error occured.")
soup = BeautifulSoup(page, "html.parser")
A: The page loads data dynamically via Javascript/Ajax. But if you open Firefox/Chrome developer tools, you will see where and how the page is making requests.
This example will print data from every tab:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
main_url = 'https://sports.sportium.es/es/apuestasparahoy'
url = 'https://sports.sportium.es/web_nr'
frag = BeautifulSoup(requests.get(main_url).text, 'html.parser').select_one('.fragment.inplay.expander[data-frag_desc][data-src_code="UPCOMING"]')['data-frag_desc']
data = {
"key":"CMS.web.cms_handlers.update_fragments",
"frag": frag,
"play_mode":"F",
}
soup = BeautifulSoup(requests.post(url, data=data).json()[0], 'html.parser')
sports = {'FOOT':'Football',
'BASK':'Basketball',
'BASE':'Baseballl',
'CRIC':'Cricket',
'DART':'Darts',
'ESPS':'E-Sports',
'AMFO':'American Football',
'ICEH':'Ice Hockey',
'VOLL':'Volleyball'}
for div in soup.select('div[id^="upcoming-tab"]'):
print('Sport :', sports[div['id'].replace('upcoming-tab-', '')])
for tr in div.select('tr'):
print(tr.get_text(separator='|', strip=True).split('|')[1:])
print('-' * 80)
Prints:
Sport : Football
['23:00', '22 Dic', 'Humble Lions', '6/5', '2.20', '+120', 'X', '9/5', '2.80', '+180', 'Harbour View', '9/4', '3.25', '+225', '+34', 'st']
['00:30', '23 Dic', 'Blooming Santa Cruz', '4/11', '1.36', '-275', 'X', '7/2', '4.60', '+350', 'Guabira Montero', '11/2', '6.50', '+550', '+40', 'st']
['01:00', '23 Dic', 'Mount Pleasant FA', '4/6', '1.66', '-150', 'X', '9/4', '3.25', '+225', 'Cavalier', '7/2', '4.50', '+350', '+35', 'st']
['02:00', '23 Dic', 'Arnett Gardens', '5/6', '1.83', '-120', 'X', '21/10', '3.10', '+210', 'Dunbeholden FC', '3/1', '4.00', '+300', '+35', 'st']
['17:00', '23 Dic', 'PAOK', '2/9', '1.22', '-450', 'X', '17/4', '5.25', '+425', 'Atromitos Athinon', '11/1', '12.00', '+1100', '+38', 'st']
['17:00', '23 Dic', 'Giresunspor', '10/11', '1.90', '-110', 'X', '21/10', '3.10', '+210', 'Altinordu', '13/5', '3.60', '+260', '+33', 'st']
['18:00', '23 Dic', 'Atiker Konyaspor 1922', '17/10', '2.70', '+170', 'X', '2/1', '3.00', '+200', 'Trabzonspor', '7/5', '2.40', '+140', '+151', 'st']
['18:00', '23 Dic', 'Denizlispor', '23/10', '3.30', '+230', 'X', '21/10', '3.10', '+210', 'Alanyaspor', '21/20', '2.05', '+105', '+130', 'st']
['20:45', '23 Dic', 'Blackburn', '4/5', '1.80', '-125', 'X', '5/2', '3.50', '+250', 'Wigan', '10/3', '4.40', '+333', '+152', 'st']
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sport : Basketball
['23:00', '22 Dic', 'TCU', '13/20', '1.65', '-154', 'Xavier', '21/20', '2.05', '+105', '+3']
['23:00', '22 Dic', 'San Jose State', '13/10', '2.30', '+130', 'Cal Riverside', '8/15', '1.53', '-188', '+3']
['23:00', '22 Dic', 'Boise State', '8/11', '1.72', '-138', 'Georgia Tech', '19/20', '1.95', '-106', '+3']
['23:00', '22 Dic', 'Fuerza Regia de Monterrey', '1/10', '1.10', '-1000', 'Correcaminos UAT Victoria', '5/1', '6.00', '+500', '+7', 'st']
... and so on.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 5,371
|
Portland, Oregon – October 4, 2011 – Opal Kelly, a leading producer of powerful FPGA modules that provide essential device-to-computer interconnect using PCI Express or USB 2.0, today announced the Shuttle LX1 (XEM6006), the industry's first low-cost, standards-based evaluation board platform with a rich evaluation environment. Based on the Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA and the FMC (Vita 57), Opal Kelly claims Shuttle LX1 as the world's smallest FMC carrier at only 69mm x 50mm. As a third-party, standards-based platform, the Shuttle LX1 can save semiconductor companies months of engineering time and substantial production expense while significantly improving the customer experience and evaluation capability.
The Shuttle LX1 is a smart evaluation platform that serves as the foundation for any semiconductor that benefits from having a PC interface during evaluation. It uses the Xilinx Spartan-6 LX16 with USB 2.0, and FMC, an open standard for FPGA mezzanine connectivity for flexible I/O devices. The powerful FrontPanelTM SDK, Opal Kelly's easy-to-use software interface to hardware, provides a rich evaluation environment enabling customers to evaluate the semiconductor for their specific requirements.
The Shuttle LX1 dramatically improves both evaluation board capability and simplifies the design approach for semiconductor manufacturers. Previously, semiconductor manufacturers provided simple evaluation boards as reference designs for their prospective customers. These stand-alone evaluation boards required customers to use sophisticated and expensive equipment to test the boards, on a very limited set of criteria, providing little insight into the capability or applicability of the chip for the customer's specific needs. The Shuttle LX1 adds tremendous value to the evaluation process of devices, such as ADCs, DACs, SERDES, communications, and interface devices. With the Shuttle LX1, customers can fully engage a device, within a more practical environment and interface, without extra test equipment.
The Shuttle LX1 was designed as a small, low-cost FMC carrier to serve as a standards-based foundation for evaluation modules that benefit from a rich evaluation environment. With the Shuttle LX1, semiconductor manufacturers can develop hardware and software that showcase the full range of device capabilities to their FAEs (field application engineers) and customers. Although developed with semiconductor evaluation in mind, the Shuttle LX1 is a general-purpose FMC-LPC carrier module that is suitable for a wide range of applications.
The Shuttle LX1 will be available in October and may be purchased from the Opal Kelly online store. The price is $199.95 per unit in quantity 100+. For higher volumes, please contact Opal Kelly at sales@opalkelly.com.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
}
| 3,522
|
Dill Records was a small punk rock/ska record label based out of Monte Sereno, California, that put out CDs/records from 1989-1998. The name is an allusion to initially the label's only band, Skankin' Pickle. The record label was started by Mike Park, a.k.a. Bruce Lee of Skankin' Pickle. The first other band with a release on Dill Records was the Tantra Monsters (Dill 006) in 1994. After the breakup of Skankin' Pickle, Mike Park continued releasing records, beginning the label Asian Man Records in 1996. Asian Man and Dill Records coexisted until 1998. Asian Man re-released many albums originally released by Dill Records, as all releases are now out of print and Dill Records is no longer in operation.
A partial Dill Records discography:
American record labels
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
}
| 9,588
|
{"url":"https:\/\/support.bioconductor.org\/p\/112115\/","text":"Question: GO.db: searching for \"top\" GO term for list of terms\n0\n17 months ago by\nTB180\nTB180 wrote:\n\nDear all,\n\nI am currently working with a list of GO terms linked to gene ID's.\n\nFor completeness like so, but then for 100s of genes:\n\nGENE1 GO:xxxx GO:xxxxx GO:xxxxx\n\nBecause I want to group my genes into 'biological-logical' groups like: development, digestion, metabolition etc. I was thinking to get the relevant GO term to do so: the GO term just below 'biological process', e.g.: GO:0008152.\n\nIs there a way with the GO.db package to do so? I have been trying the following:\n\n> get(\"GO:0006508\", GOBPANCESTOR)\n\nBut than I get all ancestor terms, is there a way to get only the '2nd from the top'?\n\nI guess I am not the first person who want to group genes based on very broad biological processes, I do not want to reinvent the wheel so if there is another -better- way, please let me know!\n\ngo go.db \u2022 350 views\nmodified 17 months ago by James W. MacDonald52k \u2022 written 17 months ago by TB180\nAnswer: GO.db: searching for \"top\" GO term for list of terms\n1\n17 months ago by\nUnited States\nJames W. MacDonald52k wrote:\n\nI don't know if there is an easy way to do this using the existing infrastructure. There might be, but this is a bit different from the usual use case, so maybe not. But you can get what you want from a direct query to the underlying database. Let's say we want all the direct offspring for the GO term you mention (GO:0006508).\n\n> library(GO.db)\n> con <- GO_dbconn()\n> library(DBI)\n## we need to map GO term to database ID\n> dbGetQuery(con, \"select _id from go_term where go_id='GO:0006508';\")\n_id\n1 5442\n\n> dbGetQuery(con, \"select go_id, term from go_term inner join go_bp_parents using(_id) where _parent_id='5442';\")\ngo_id term\n1 GO:0016485 protein processing\n2 GO:0051603 proteolysis involved in cellular protein catabolic process\n3 GO:0030162 regulation of proteolysis\n4 GO:0033619 membrane protein proteolysis\n5 GO:0035897 proteolysis in other organism\n6 GO:0045861 negative regulation of proteolysis\n7 GO:0045862 positive regulation of proteolysis\n8 GO:0070646 protein modification by small protein removal\n9 GO:0097264 self proteolysis\n\nAnd those GO terms should be the direct child terms for GO:0006508, which is 'Proteolysis'.","date":"2020-01-17 17:27:04","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.41643014550209045, \"perplexity\": 7007.295739819403}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2020-05\/segments\/1579250589861.0\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20200117152059-20200117180059-00258.warc.gz\"}"}
| null | null |
\section{Introduction}
Let $\mathscr{H}_{2g-2}$ be the locus of compact Riemann surfaces (smooth projective algebraic curves) of genus $g>1$ with a
fixed abelian differential vanishing at a point to order $2g-2$. In a remarkable work Kontsevich--Zorich \cite[Thm. 1]{KZ03}
showed that $\mathscr{H}_{2g-2}$ has exactly three irreducible components, namely the locus
$\mathscr{H}_{2g-2}^{\mathrm{hyp}}$ of hyperelliptic points, the even $\mathscr{H}_{2g-2}^{\mathrm{even}}$ and the odd
$\mathscr{H}_{2g-2}^{\mathrm{odd}}$ points. Ten years later Bullock \cite[Thm. 2.1]{Bu13} characterized a general point of each component,
a general point of $\mathscr{H}_{2g-2}^{\mathrm{hyp}}$ has Weierstrass gaps $\{1,3,5,\ldots,2g-3,2g-1\}$,
a general point of $\mathscr{H}_{2g-2}^{\mathrm{odd}}$ has Weierstrass semigroup $\{1,2,3,\ldots,g-1,2g-1\}$ and finally
a general point of $\mathscr{H}_{2g-2}^{\mathrm{even}}$ has Weierstrass gaps $\{1,2,3,\ldots,g-2,g,2g-1\}$.
Say that an abelian di\-ffe\-rential with a zero at a point of order $2g-2$ it is equivalent to required that this point is \textit{subcanonical},
\cite[Def. 1]{Bu13}, i.e. the associated Weierstrass semigroup of this point is \textit{symmetric}.
Let $\M$ be the moduli space of smooth pointed curves of genus $g>1$ with a fixed symmetric Weierstrass
semigroup $\N$ at the marked point. There are two powerful tools to investigate the moduli spaces $\M$, both based on deformation of suitable curves.
On the one hand Eisenbud--Harris \cite{EH87
deformed stable curves and uses limit linear series
to study properties of $\M$ as a locally closed subset of $\mathcal{M}_{g,1}$.
On the other hand, Pinkham \cite{Pi74} studied the moduli $\M$ by using equivariant deformation theory,
deforming \textit{monomial curves}. Following a proposal given by Mumford \cite{M75} on
Petri's analysis of the canonical ideal, Stoehr \cite{St93} constructed a compactification of $\M$ when $\N$ is symmetric by allowing
Gorenstein curves at its bordering.
Stoehr's techniques avoid suitable classes of symmetric semigroups, more precisely, it is assumed that the multiplicity $n_1$ of $\N$ satisfies
$3<n_1<g$, and that $\N\neq \langle 4,5\rangle$, avoiding the general points of $\mathscr{H}_{2g-2}^{\mathrm{hyp}}$ and of
$\mathscr{H}_{2g-2}^{\mathrm{odd}}$ of the Kontsevich--Zorich space $\mathscr{H}_{2g-2}$. Another successful approach to study families of
Weierstrass points can be done by considering (generalized) Wronskians and its derivatives, we refer to \cite{Ga,GP99}.
In this paper we extend Stoehr's techniques in order to construct in a rather explicit way a compactification $\overline{\M}$ of the moduli
space $\M$ when $\N$ is a symmetric semigroup different from the hyperelliptic $\langle 2,2g+1\rangle$. Numerical semigroups of odd type
tends to be realized as Weierstrass semigroups of possibly singular Gorenstein curves which are a triple recovering of the
projective line $\mathbb{P}^1$, ie $3$-gonal singular curves, see Lemma \ref{lem31} below. Hence the canonical
ideal of the monomial Gorenstein curve associated to a numerical odd semigroup cannot be generated by only quadratic forms as required,
cf. Lemma \ref{lemaI0} of the present work.
Given a nonhyperelliptic symmetric semigroup $\N\neq\langle 2,2g+1\rangle$, we deform the ideal (which is generate by quadratic and
cubic forms) of the associated canonically embedded monomial Gorenstein curve. By analyzing suitable syzygies of canonical ideals, see Lemma \ref{lem2},
we get a compactification of $\M$ by allowing Gorenstein singularities at its bordering, cf. Theorem \ref{teo3}.
The compactification is (by construction)
a closed subset of the weighted projective space $\mathbb{P}(\mathrm{T}^{1,-}(\k[\N]))$, where $\mathrm{T}^{1,-}(\k[\N])$ stands for the
negatively graded part of the first module of cotangent complex associated to a suitable monomial curve. Since our construction is completely
explicit, we are able to produce non-trivial examples and investigate the global geometry of the moduli spaces $\M$. In the last
section of this paper we illustrate our techniques computing the equations of $\overline{\M}$ when $\N$ is odd of genus $5$,
$\N=\langle 5,6,7,8\rangle$ and of genus $6$, $\N=\langle 6,7,8,9,10\rangle$.
\section{Gorenstein subcanonical curves and Weierstrass Points}
Let $\C$ be a complete integral Gorenstein curve of arithmetical genus $g>1$ defined over an algebraically field $\k$.
Throughout this section we assume that $\C$ is subcanonical, i.e. there is a rational function on $\C$
with pole divisor $(2g-2)P$, where $P$ is a nonsingular point of $\C$. The dualizing sheaf $\omega$ of $\C$ is $\mathcal{O}_{\C}((2g-2)P)$,
and the vector space of its global sections is
$$H^0(\C, \omega)=\k\cdot x_{n_0}\oplus \k\cdot x_{n_1}\oplus\dots\oplus\k\cdot x_{n_{g-1}}$$
where $x_{n_i}$ is a rational function on $\C$ whose pole divisor is $n_iP$, for $i\geq 1$, with $n_0:=0$ and $n_{g-1}=2g-2$.
Equivalently, the base point $P\in \C$ is a Weierstrass point with gap sequence $1=\l_1<\l_2<\dots<\l_g=2g-1$, whose
symmetric Weierstrass semigroup $\N$ of genus $g$ is canonically
generated by its first $g$ non-gaps, $\langle n_0,n_1,\dots, n_{g-1}\rangle=\N$.
We recall that a semigroup $\N$ of genus $g$ is symmetric if its Frobenius number $\l_g$
is the largest possible, namely $\l_{g}=2g-1$. Equivalently, $\N$ is symmetric if and only if $\l_i=\l_g-n_{g-i}$, for all $i=1,\dots, g$.
Let us assume that $\C$ is also non-hyperelliptic, thus its dualizing sheaf $\omega$
induces an embedding in the $(g-1)$-dimensional projective space $\mathbb{P}^{g-1}$ defined over $\k$,
$$(x_{n_o}:\dots:x_{n_{g-1}}):\C\xhookrightarrow { \ \ \omega \ \ }\mathbb{P}^{g-1}=\mathbb{P}(H^0(\C, \omega))\,.$$
Therefore, $\C$ can be identified with its image under the canonical embedding. Hence
$\C\subset\mathbb{P}^{g-1}$ is a projective curve of genus $g$ and degree $2g-2$.
Reciprocally, every nonhyperelliptic symmetric numerical semigroup $\N$ of genus $g>1$ can be rea\-lized as a Weierstrass semigroup of a canonical Gorenstein curve.
We just consider the canonical generators $0=n_0<n_1,\dots,<n_{g-1}=2g-2$ of $\N$ and take the induced (canonical) monomial curve
$$\C^{(0)}:=\{(s^{n_0}t^{\l_g-1}: s^{n_1}t^{\l_{g-1}-1}:\ldots:s^{n_{g-2}}t^{\l_2-1}: s^{n_{g-1}}t^{\l_1-1})\,\vert\,(s:t)\in\mathbb{P}^1\}\subset \mathbb{P}^{g-1}\,.$$
It can be checked that it has a unique singular point, namely $(1:0:\dots:0)$, which is unibranch and has singularity degree $g$.
Since the semigroup $\N$ is symmetric, $C^{(0)}$ is a Gorenstein curve. The contact orders with
hyperplanes at its unique point $P=(0:\dots0:1)$ at the infinity are exactly $\l_i-1$, $i=1,\dots,g$ (the vanishing sequence). Thus $\C^{(0)}$ has degree $2g-2$ and its
Weierstrass semigroup at $P$ is $\N$.
According to Enriques--Babbage's theorem for smooth curves, cf. \cite{ACGH85},
if we assume that $\C$ is not isomorphic to a plane quintic, then its ideal can be generated by quadratic forms,
when it is non-trigonal, and by quadratic and cubic forms when it is trigonal.
An extended version of Max Noether's theorem for complete integral
non-hy\-pereliptic curves,
cf. \cite{CFM, Ma},
states that there is a surjective homomorphism $$\mathrm{Sym}^r(H^0(\C, \omega))\longrightarrow H^0(\C, \omega^{r})$$ for all $r\geq 1$.
In the following, we recall a suitable proof of Max-Noether's theorem for subcanonical curves given by St\"ohr in \cite{St93}.
Let $\C$ be a complete non-hyperelliptic Gorenstein curve with a subcanonical point $P$. Since $\C$ is non-hyperelliptic, we must to assume that the symmetric
semigroup $\N$ is not hyperelliptic, i.e. $2\notin\N$, equivalently $\N\neq\langle2,2g+1\rangle$.
Now, for each nongap $s\leq 4g-4$, we consider the partitions of $s$ as sums of two nongaps,
$$s=a_{s}+b_{s},\ a_{s}\leq b_{s}\leq 2g-2,$$
with $a_s$ the smallest possible nongap. From Oliveira's paper \cite[Thm. 1.3]{O91} the following $3g-3$ rational
functions $x_{a_s}x_{b_s}$ of $\C$ form a $P$-hermitian basis for the space
of the global sections of the bicanonical divisor $\omega^{2}=\mathcal{O}_{\C}((4g-4)P)$.
Now, for each integer $r\geq 3$ a $P$-hermitian basis for the space $H^{0}(\C, \omega^{r})$ is given by the $r$-monomials expressions
\begin{equation*}
\begin{array}{lr}
x_{n_{0}}^{r-1}x_{n_i} & (i=0,\ldots,g-1),\\
x_{n_{0}}^{r-2-i}x_{a_s}x_{b_s}x_{n_{g-1}}^{i} & (i=0,\ldots, r-2,\ s=2g,\ldots,4g-4),\\
x_{n_{0}}^{r-3-i}x_{n_1}x_{2g-n_1}x_{n_{g-2}}x_{n_{g-1}}^{i} & (i=0,\ldots, r-3).
\end{array}
\end{equation*}
\noindent Note that the pole orders of the above $(2r-1)(g-1)$ rational functions are pairwise different, so they form a linearly independent set in
$H^0(\C, \omega^r)$.
Let $I(\C)=\displaystyle\oplus_{r=2}^{\infty}I_r(\C)$ be the homogeneous canonical ideal of $\C\subset\mathbb{P}^{g-1}$. As an
immediate consequence of the existence of the above
$P$-hermitian basis of $r$-monomials for $H^{0}(\C, \omega^r)$, the homomorphism
\begin{equation*}
{\mathbf{k}[X_{n_0},\ldots,X_{n_{g-1}}]}_r\longrightarrow H^{0}(\C, \omega^r)
\end{equation*}
induced by the substitutions $X_{n_{i}}\longmapsto x_{n_i}$ is surjective for each $r\geq 1$. Thus we get a proof of Max-Noether's
theorem for non-hyperelliptic Gorenstein curves with a subcanonical point.
By virtue of Riemann's theorem, for each $r\geq 2$, the codimension of $I_r({\C})$ in the ${r+g-1\choose r}$-dimensional vector
space ${\mathbf{k}[X_{n_0},\ldots,X_{n_{g-1}}]}_r$ of homogeneous $r$-forms is equal to $(2r-1)(g-1)$.
So the vector space of quadratic and cubic relations have dimensions
\begin{equation*}
\dim I_2(\C)=\frac{(g-2)(g-3)}{2} \ \ \mbox{and}\ \dim I_3(\C)={g+2\choose 3}-(5g-5),
\end{equation*}
respectively.
For each $r\geq 2$, we define the vector subspace $\Lambda_r$ of ${\mathbf{k}[X_{n_0},\ldots,X_{n_{g-1}}]}_r$
spanned by the lifting of the above $P$-hermitian $r$-monomial basis of $H^{0}(\C, \omega^r)$. It is spanned by the $r$-monomials in $X_{n_0},\ldots,X_{n_{g-1}}$
whose weights are pairwise different between all the nongaps $n\leq r(2g-2)$. Since $\Lambda_r\cap I_r(\C)=0$ and
\begin{equation*}
\dim\Lambda_r=\dim H^{0}(\C, \omega^r)=\codim I_r(\C),
\end{equation*}
we obtain
\begin{equation}\label{directsum}
{\mathbf{k}[X_{n_0},\ldots,X_{n_{g-1}}]}_r=I_r(\C)\oplus\Lambda_r, \ \mbox{for each}\ r\geq 2.
\end{equation}
Let $r\N$ be the set of all sums of $r$ nongaps not bigger than $2g-2$. Oliveira showed, cf. \cite[theorem 1.5]{O91}, that each nongap smaller than or
equal to $r(2g-2)$ belongs to $r\N$. Moreover, each sum of $r$ nongaps $\leq 2g-2$ is a nongap $\leq r(2g-2)$.
Consequently, $\#r\N=(2r-1)(g-1)$
and therefore $$\#r\N=\dim H^{0}(\C, \omega^r)\,.$$ In particular, for each nongap $s\leq 4g-4$ we list all the partitions $s=a_{si}+b_{si}\in 2\N$, where
\begin{align*}
a_{si}\leq b_{si}\leq 2g-2\ (i=0,\ldots,\nu_s)\ \mbox{and}\ a_s:=a_{s0}<a_{s1}<a_{s2}<\ldots<a_{s\nu_s}\,.
\end{align*}
Since $x_{a_{si}}x_{b_{si}}\in H^{0}(\C, sP)$ and $\{x_{a_{s}}x_{b_{s}}\}$ is the above fixed basis, we can write
\begin{equation*}
x_{a_{si}}x_{b_{si}}=\displaystyle\sum_{n=0}^{s} c_{sin}x_{a_{n}}x_{b_{n}},
\end{equation*} for each $i=0,\dots,\nu_s$, where the coefficients $c_{sir}$ are uniquely determined constants and the summation
index only varies through nongaps. In the same way,
for each nongap $\sigma\leq 6g-6$ we consider the partitions $\sigma=a_{\sigma j}+b_{\sigma j}+c_{\sigma j}\in 3\N$ where
$a_{\sigma j}\leq b_{\sigma j}\leq c_{\sigma j}\leq 2g-2\ (j=0,\ldots,\nu_\sigma)$ with
$a_{\sigma}:=a_{\sigma0}<a_{\sigma 1}<\ldots<a_{\sigma\nu_\sigma}$ and $b_{\sigma}:=b_{\sigma 0}>b_{\sigma 1}>\ldots>b_{\sigma\nu_\sigma}$.
Analogously, we can write
\begin{equation*}
x_{a_{\sigma j}}x_{b_{\sigma j}}x_{c_{\sigma j}}=\displaystyle\sum_{n=0}^{\sigma} d_{\sigma jn}x_{a_{n}}x_{b_{n}x_{c_{n}}},
\end{equation*} for each integer $j=0,\ldots,\nu_{\sigma}$, where the coefficients $d_{\sigma jn}$ are uniquely determined constants and the
summation index only varies through nongaps.
Multiplying the functions $x_{n_0},\ldots, x_{n_{g-1}}$ by constants we do not change the $P$-hermitian property of the above basis, thus
we can normalize the coefficients $c_{sis}=1$ and $d_{\sigma j\sigma}=1$.
Therefore, the $\binom{g+1}{2}-(3g-3)=\frac{1}{2}(g-3)(g-2)$ quadratic forms
\begin{equation}\label{qdforms}
F_{si}=X_{a_{si}}X_{b_{si}}-X_{a_s}X_{b_s}-\displaystyle\sum_{n=0}^{s-1}c_{sin}X_{a_{n}}X_{b_{n}}
\end{equation}
and the $\binom{g+2}{3}-(5g-5)$ cubic forms
\begin{equation}\label{cforms}
G_{\sigma j}=X_{a_{\sigma j}}X_{b_{\sigma j}}X_{c_{\sigma j}}-X_{a_{\sigma }}X_{b_{\sigma }}X_{c_{\sigma }}-\displaystyle\sum_{n=0}^{\sigma-1}d_{\sigma jn}X_{a_{n}}X_{b_{n}}X_{c_{n}},
\end{equation}
vanish identically on $\C$. We attach to the variable $X_n$ the weight $n$, to the coefficient $c_{sin}$ the weight $s-n$ and to
$d_{\sigma jn}$ the weight $\sigma-n$. Thus the above quadric and cubic forms are also \textit{isobaric} forms.
In the view of Henriques--Babbage's theorem we want to assure that the canonical ideal of $\C$ is
generated by the above quadratic and cubic forms. We assume that the non-hyperelliptic symmetric semigroup $\N$ is a non-trivial semigroup of genus $g>1$, which is
equivalent to assume that the multiplicity $n_1$ of $\N$ satisfies $2<n_1\leq g$.
By a theorem of Oliveira \cite[Thm. 1.7]{O91}, if we consider $3<n_1<g$, then there
is at least one quadratic form, i.e. $\nu_s\geq 1$, whenever $s=n_i+2g-2$ for $i=0,\ldots, g-3$.
In this case Contiero--Stoehr \cite{CS} gave an algorithmic proof that the canonical ideal of a
Gorenstein curve $\C\subset\mathbb{P}^{g-1}$ with Weierstrass semigroup $\N$ at the base point is generated by only quadratic relations. If we assume
that $3\in\N$ then its genus has residue $1$ or $0$ module $3$, hence $\N:=\langle 3,g+1\rangle$. In this case
we already know that $\CM = \proj(T^{1,-}_{\k[\N]|\k})$.
If $\N=\langle 4,5\rangle$ , then $\C$ is isomorphic to a plane quintic where the quadric hypersurfaces containing $\C$ is the Veronese surface.
In the excluded case $S=\mathbb{N}\backslash\{1,2,\ldots,g-1, 2g-1\}$, the curve $\C$ is possibly trigonal, so its canonical ideal can not be generated by
only quadratic relations. In the next section we investigate the Weierstrass semigroup of trigonal complete curves and then, we will give an algorithmic proof that the
canonical ideal of a complete Gorenstein curve with symmetric Weierstrass semigroup
$$S:=\mathbb{N}\backslash\{1,2,\ldots,g-1, 2g-1\}=\langle 0,g,g+1,\dots,2g-2\rangle$$
at a smooth non-ramified point is generated by quadric and cubics forms.
\section{Curves with odd subcanonical points}
Let $\C$ be a complete integral curve of arithmetic genus $g$ defined over an algebraically closed field $\k$.
A \emph{linear system of dimension $r$ on $\C$} is a set of the form
$$
\mathscr{L} =\mathscr{L}(\mathscr{F} ,V):=\{x^{-1}\mathscr{F}\ |\ x\in V\setminus 0\}
$$
where $\mathscr{F}$ is a coherent fractional ideal sheaf on $C$ and $V$ is a vector subspace of
$H^{0}(\C, \mathscr{F})$ of dimension $r+1$.
The notion of linear systems on curves presented here
is characterized by interchanging bundles by torsion free sheaves of rank $1$.
This is a meaningful approach since they may possess \emph{non-removable} base points, see Coppens \cite{Cp}.
The \emph{degree} of the linear system $\mathscr{L}$ is the integer
$\deg \mathscr{F} :=\chi (\mathscr{F} )-\chi (\mathcal{O}_{\C})$, where $\chi$ denotes the Euler characteristic. Note, in particular, that if $\mathcal{O_{\C}}\subset\mathscr{F}$ then
$$\deg\mathscr{F}=\sum_{P\in C}\dim(\mathscr{F}_P/\mathcal{O}_{\C, P}).$$
The notation $g_{d}^{r}$ stands for a linear system of degree $d$ and dimension $r$.
The linear system is said to be \emph{complete} if $V=H^0(\C, \mathscr{F})$, in this case one simply writes $\mathscr{L}=|\mathscr{F}|$.
According to E. Ballico's \cite[p. 363, Dfn. 2.1 (3)]{Bal}, the gonality of $\C$ is the smallest $d$ for which there exists a
$g_{d}^{1}$ on $\C$, or equivalently, a torsion free sheaf $\mathscr{F}$ of rank $1$ on $\C$ with degree $d$ and
$h^0(\C, \mathscr{F})\geq 2$. %
The following lemma is a straightforward generalization of a Kim's result \cite[Thm. 2.6]{Kim} characterizing the Weierstrass semigroup
associated to a non-ramification point of a trigonal curve.
\begin{lem}\label{lem31}
Let $\C$ be a complete integral trigonal curve of arithmetical genus $g\geq 5$ and $P\in\C$ a Weierstrass non-ramification point.
The Weierstrass semigroup $\N$ of $\C$ at $P$ is of the form
$$\{0,m,m+1,m+2,\dots,m+(s-g), s+2,s+3,s+4,\dots\},$$
for some $s$ and $m$ such that $g\geq m\geq\left\lfloor\frac{s+1}{2}\right\rfloor+1$.
In particular, in the symmetric case we get the odd semigroup
$$\N=\{0,g,g+1,\dots,2g-2,2g,2g+1,2g+2,\dots\}.$$
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
Let $\l_g$ be the Frobenius number of the Weierstrass semigroup $\N$ associated to $P\in \C$. Equivalently, the integer $s:=\l_g-1$
is the largest such that the
divisor $D_0=s\,P$ is special. Since $P$ is a Weierstrass point, it is immediate that $g\leq \l_g-1\leq 2g-2$. By the maximality of $s$
\begin{equation*}
\dim|\mathcal{O}(D_0)|=s-g+1.
\end{equation*}
Since $D_0$ is a special divisor, let be
\begin{equation*}
\omega_{\C}\simeq \mathcal{O}_{\C}(D_0+P_1+P_2+\ldots+P_{2g-2-s})
\end{equation*}
the dualizing sheaf of $\C$ where $P_i\in\C$, $P_i\neq P$, with $i=1,\ldots,2g-2-s$. As $P$ is not a ramification point,
the first nongap $m$ is greater than $3$, and so $|mP|$ is not compounded of $g^1_3$.
By considering the divisor $$D:=(s-m)P+P_1+P_2+\ldots+P_{2g-2-s}$$ we see that $|D|$ is compounded of
$g^1_3$ because $\omega_{\C}=\mathcal{O}_{\C}(mP)\otimes\mathcal{O}_{\C}(D)$.
Applying the Riemann-Roch theorem, $\dim |D|=g-m$, hence we can write $|D|=(g-m)g^1_3+B$, where $B$ is the base
locus of $|D|$. For each element $R$ of $g^1_3$ with $R\succeq P$, we have $R=P+Q_1+Q_2$, with $P\neq Q_1$ and $P\neq Q_2$
because $P$ is not a ramification point of $\C$, thus
\begin{equation*}
D=(g-m)(P+Q_1+Q_2)+B=(s-m)P+P_1+P_2+\ldots+P_{2g-2-s},
\end{equation*}
and by the maximality of $s$
\begin{equation*}
P_1+P_2+\ldots+P_{2g-2-s}\succeq (g-m)Q_1+(g-m)Q_2,
\end{equation*}
implying $2(g-m)\leq 2g-2-s$. Therefore, $m\geq\left\lfloor\frac{s+1}{2}\right\rfloor+1$.
On the other hand,
\begin{equation*}
B\succeq (s-g)P,
\end{equation*}
which means that $(s-g)P$ is contained in the base locus of $|D|$. Consequently each divisor $iP$ is not in the base
locus of $|mP+iP|, i=0,\ldots, s-g$, and thus $m, m+1,\ldots, m+s-g$ are nongaps of $\N$.
Now by definition of $s$ and by Riemann-Roch theorem, $\dim|(s+1)P|=\dim |sP|$, which implies that $s+1$ is a gap of $\N$.
Since the divisor $(r-1)P$ is nonspecial for each integer $r\geq s+2$, it follows that
\begin{equation*}
\dim |rP|=r-g=\dim|(r-1)P|+1,
\end{equation*}
so each $r\geq s+2$ is a nongap. In this way the set
\begin{equation*}
S=\left\{0, m, m+1,\ldots, m+(s-g), s+2,\ldots\right\}
\end{equation*}
is contained in $\N$ and the cardinality of $\mathbb{N}-S$ is $g$.
\end{proof}
Let us consider the \textit{odd numerical semigroup} $\N:=\langle 0,g,g+1,\dots,2g-2\rangle$ of genus $g\geq 5$.
We now fix $\frac{1}{2}(g-3)(g-2)$ initial quadratic forms like in \eqref{qdforms}
\begin{equation*}
F_{si}^{(0)}:=X_{a_{si}}X_{b_{si}}-X_{a_s}X_{b_s}
\end{equation*} and $\binom{g+2}{3}-(5g-5)$ initial cubic forms like in \eqref{cforms}
\begin{equation*}
G_{\sigma j}^{(0)}:=X_{a_{\sigma j}}X_{b_{\sigma j}}X_{c_{\sigma j}}-X_{a_{\sigma }}X_{b_{\sigma }}X_{c_{\sigma }}.
\end{equation*}
\noindent It is clear that a considerable amount of cubic forms are just multiplies of quadratic ones, the next result explicitly find
them.
\begin{prop} Let $\N:=\langle 0,g,g+1,\dots,2g-2\rangle$. There are exactly $\wp={g+2\choose 3}-(5g-5)-\eta$, with
$$\eta=(g-3)(g-2)+(g-2)\left\lfloor\frac{g-2}{2}\right\rfloor+\left\lfloor\frac{g-3}{2}\right\rfloor+\displaystyle\sum_{j=1}^{g-4}\left\lfloor\frac{g-2-j}{2}\right\rfloor$$
initial cubic forms which are not multiples of the quadratic ones.
\end{prop}
\begin{proof}
Since the fixed basis for $\Lambda_2$ is $\{X_0^2, X_0X_{g+i},X_gX_{g+i}, X_{g+j}X_{2g-2}\}$ with $i=0,\ldots,g-2$ and $j=1,\ldots,g-2$,
the initial quadratic forms are
\begin{equation*}
F_{sl}^{(0)}=X_{a_{sl}}X_{b_{sl}}-X_gX_{g+i}\ \mbox{ and }\ F_{sl}^{(0)}=X_{a_{sl}}X_{b_{sl}}-X_{g+j}X_{2g-2},
\end{equation*}
where the $2$-monomials nonbasis elements of $\Lambda_2$ are the products $X_{g+i}X_{g+j}$ where $1\leq i\leq j=1,\ldots, g-3$.
While the fixed basis for $\Delta_3$ is
$$\{X_0^2X_{i}, X_0X_{as}X_{bs}, X_{as}X_{bs}X_{2g-2},X_{g}^2X_{2g-3}\}\,,$$ with $i=0,g,g+1,\dots,2g-2$
and $\{X_{as}X_{bs}\}$ the above fixed basis for $\Delta_2$.
Set $F:=F_{sl}^{(0)}$ for a initial quadratic form. It is clear that the $(g-3)(g-2)$ products $X_0F$ and $X_{2g-2}F$ are cubic forms for every $F$.
Since the monomials $X_{g+k}X_{g+i}X_{g+j}\notin\Lambda_3$ for $k=0,\ldots, g-3$ and $i,j=1,\ldots,g-3$,
the product $X_{g+k}F$ defines a cubic form when $X_{g+k}X_{g}X_{g+i}$ or $X_{g+k}X_{g+j}X_{2g-2}$
are in $\Lambda_3$. In the first case, $X_{g+k}X_{g}X_{g+i}\in\Lambda_3$ just for $i=g-2$,
$k=0,\ldots, g-3$ and for $i=g-3, k=0$. Hence we get the following $(g-2)\left\lfloor\frac{g-2}{2}\right\rfloor+\left\lfloor\frac{g-3}{2}\right\rfloor$ cubic forms
$$X_{g+k}\left(X_{a_{sl}}X_{b_{sl}}-X_gX_{2g-2}\right), \text{ with }k=0,\ldots, g-3$$
and
$$X_g\left(X_{a_{sl}}X_{b_{sl}}-X_gX_{2g-3}\right).$$
In the remaining case, $X_{g+k}X_{g+j}X_{2g-2}\in\Lambda_3$ just for $k=0$, $j=1,\ldots, g-2$. So we get the
following $\sum_{j=1}^{g-4}\left\lfloor\frac{g-2-j}{2}\right\rfloor$ initial cubic forms
$$X_g\left(X_{a_{sl}}X_{b_{sl}}-X_{g+j}X_{2g-2}\right), \ j=1,\ldots, g-4.$$\end{proof}
It is straightforward that the quadratic $F_{si}^{(0)}$ and cubic forms $G_{\sigma j}^{(0)}$ vanish identically on the monomial curve $\C^{(0)}$.
The next lemma show that they generate the ideal of $\C^{(0)}$.
\begin{lem}\label{lemaI0}
The canonical ideal $I({\C}^{(0)})$ is generated by the $\frac{1}{2}(g-2)(g-3)$ quadratic forms $F_{si}^{(0)}$ and by the $\wp$ cubic forms $G_{\sigma j}^{(0)}$.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
Since the $I({\C}^{(0)})$ is generated by homogeneous and isobaric forms, all we have to do is to show that for a homogeneous and isobaric form belongs to
$I({\C}^{(0)})$ if and only if belongs to the ideal $\mathcal{J}$ generated by the binomials $F_{si}^{(0)}$ and $G_{\sigma j}^{(0)}$. It is just obvious that
$\mathcal{J}\subseteq I({\C}^{(0)}) $. For the opposite inclusion we order the monomials $\prod_{k=0}^{g-1}X_{n_k}^{i_k}$ according to the
lexicographic ordering of the vectors $$\left(\sum\,i_k,\sum\,n_k\,i_k,-i_0,-i_{g-1},\dots,-i_1\right).$$ In this way, the binomials $F_{si}^{(0)}$ and $G_{\sigma j}^{(0)}$
form a Groebner basis for $\mathcal{J}$. Now, for each homogeneous form $F$ of degree $r$ which is also isobaric of weight $\omega$ we divide it by the Groebner basis getting a decomposition
$$F=\sum H_{si}F_{si}^{(0)}+T_{\sigma j}G_{\sigma j}^{(0)}+R$$ where $R\in\Lambda_{r}$ and $H_{si}$ and $T_{\sigma j}$ are homogeneous of degree $r-2$ and $r-3$ respectively,
and weight $\omega -s$ and $\omega-\sigma$, respectively. The remainder $R$ is the only monomial in $\Lambda_{r}$ of weight $\omega$ whose coefficient is equal to the sum
of the coefficients of $F$. Since $F\in I({\C}^{(0)})$ the sum of its coefficients is equal to zero, then $R=0$.
\end{proof}
A different proof of the above lemma can be found in \cite[Thm. 1.1]{GSS} by no\-ting that the symmetric semigroup $\N=\langle0,g,g+1,\dots,2g-2\rangle$ is generated by a generalized arithmetic
sequence. So the ideal $I(\C^{(0)})$ of the monomial curve $\C^{(0)}$ is also generated by the $2\times 2$ minors of suitable two matrices. It can be seen immediately that
the ideal given by this $2\times 2$ minors is equal to the ideal generated by the binomials $F_{si}^{(0)}$ and $G_{\sigma j}^{(0)}$.
The following lemma is a generalization of result in \cite[Lemma 2.3]{CS}, where due to the assumptions the authors just deal with the first syzygies
of quadratic forms. Here we also deal with syzygies of cubic forms, which will induce nonlinear syzygies, see the equations \eqref{syzyg5}, pg. 14, and \eqref{syzyg6}, pg. 17.
\begin{syzlem}\label{lem2}
For each of the $\frac{1}{2}(g-3)(g-4)$ quadratic forms $F_{s'i'}^{(0)}$
different from $F_{n_i+2g-2,1}^{(0)} (i=1,\ldots, g-3)$ there is a syzygy of the form
\begin{equation}\label{eq2}
X_{2g-2}F_{s'i'}^{(0)}+\displaystyle\sum_{nsi}^{}\epsilon_{nsi}^{(s'i')}X_nF_{si}^{(0)}=0
\end{equation}
and for each cubic forms $G_{\sigma'j'}^{(0)}$ different from $G_{4g-4,1}^{(0)}$, there is a syzygy of the form
\begin{equation}\label{eq3}
X_{2g-2}G_{\sigma'j'}^{(0)}+\displaystyle\sum_{q\sigma j}^{}\rho_{q\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}X_qG_{\sigma j}^{(0)}=0,
\end{equation}
where the coefficients $\epsilon_{nsi}^{(s'i')}$, $ \rho_{q\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}$ are integers equal to $1, -1$ or $0$,
and where the sum is take over the nongaps $n, q<2g-2$, the double indexes $si$ with $s+n=2g-2+s'$ and $\sigma j$
with $q+\sigma=2g-2+\sigma'$.
\end{syzlem}
\begin{proof}Given a quadratic form $F=F_{s'i'}^{(0)}$ or $F=-F_{s'i'}^{(0)}$, we can write
\begin{equation*}
F=X_mX_n-X_qX_r,
\end{equation*}
where $m, n, q, r$ are nongaps satisfying $m+n=q+r$ and $q<m\leq n<r<2g-2$. If $r+1$ is a gap then, by symmetry,
$k:=2g-2-r+n$ is a nongap and we find the syzygy
\begin{equation*}
X_{2g-2}(X_mX_n-X_qX_r)+X_r(X_qX_{2g-2}-X_mX_k)-X_m(X_nX_{2g-2}-X_rX_k)=0,
\end{equation*}
The binomials in the brackets can be written as $F_{si}^{(0)}-F_{sj}^{(0)}$, $F_{si}^{(0)}$ or $-F_{sj}^{(0)}$.
Analogously if $m+1$ is a gap then we take the nongap $k:=2g-2-m+r$ and we obtain a syzygy as above. Now we can
assume that $r+1$ and $m+1$ are nongaps, hence we have the syzygy
$$\begin{array}{l}
X_{2g-2}(X_mX_n-X_qX_r)+X_q(X_{2g-2}X_r-X_{2g-3}X_{r+1})-\\
X_{2g-3}(X_{m+1}X_n-X_qX_{r+1})-X_n(X_mX_{2g-2}-X_{2g-3}X_{m+1})=0.\\
\end{array}$$
\noindent For a cubic form, if we put $G=G^{(0)}_{\sigma j}$ or $G=-G^{(0)}_{\sigma j}$ then we can write
\begin{equation*}
G=X_mX_nX_p-X_qX_rX_t,
\end{equation*}
where $m, n, p, q, r, s$ are nongaps satisfying $m+n+p=q+r+t$ and $q<m\leq n\leq r\leq p<t\leq 2g-2$.
If $p+1$ is a gap then, by symmetry, the integer $k:=2g-2-p+q$ is a nongap smaller than $2g-2$, hence we have the syzygy
$$\begin{array}{r}
X_{2g-2}(X_mX_nX_p-X_qX_rX_t)+X_r(X_{2g-2}X_tX_q-X_tX_pX_k)-\\
X_p(X_{2g-2}X_mX_n-X_rX_tX_k)=0,\\
\end{array}$$
where the binomials in the brackets can be written as
$G_{\sigma j}^{(0)}-G_{\sigma i}^{(0)}$, $G_{\sigma j}^{(0)}$ or $-G_{\sigma i}^{(0)}$.
Analogously, if $r+1$ is a gap then $k:=2g-2-r+p$ is a nongap, and therefore we obtain the syzygy
$$\begin{array}{r}
X_{2g-2}(X_mX_nX_p-X_qX_rX_t)+X_m(X_kX_rX_n-X_{2g-2}X_pX_n)-\\
X_r(X_kX_mX_n-X_{2g-2}X_tX_q)=0.\\
\end{array}$$
Now we can assume that $p+1$ and $r+1$ are the nongaps. We just take the syzygy
$$\begin{array}{l}
X_{2g-2}(X_mX_nX_p-X_qX_rX_t)+X_{2g-3}(X_{r+1}X_qX_t-X_{p+1}X_nX_m) - \\ X_m(X_pX_{2g-2}X_n-X_{p+1}X_{2g-3}X_n)
- X_q(X_{2g-3}X_{r+1}X_t-X_{2g-2}X_rX_t)=0.
\end{array}$$
\end{proof}
\begin{rmk}
\emph{The $\eta$ syzygies corresponding to the cubic forms which are multiples of the quadratics are trivial,
therefore we just to consider syzygies for the $\wp-1$ cubic forms, however, these $\wp-1$ syzygies are not necessarily linear.}
\end{rmk}
\begin{lem}\label{lem3}
Let $I$ be the ideal generated by the $\frac{1}{2}(g-2)(g-3)$ quadratic forms $F_{si}$ and by the $\wp$ cubic forms $G_{\sigma j}$. Then,
\begin{equation*}
{\mathbf{k}[X_{n_0},\ldots,X_{n_{g-1}}]}_r=I_r+\Lambda_r\ \mbox{for each}\ r\geq2.
\end{equation*}
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
Let $F$ be a homogeneous polynomial of degree $r$ and weight $w$. Let $S$ be its quasi-homogeneous component of weight $w$ and $R$
the unique monomial in $\Lambda_r$ of weight $w$ whose coefficient is the sum of the coefficients of $S$. Thus, $S-R\in I(\C^{(0)})$
and by Lemma \ref{lem2} we can write the expression
\begin{equation}\label{eq1}
S-R=\displaystyle\sum_{si}^{}S_{si}F_{si}^{(0)}+\displaystyle\sum_{\sigma j}^{}H_{\sigma j}G_{\sigma j}^{(0)}.
\end{equation}
Replacing each polynomial $S_{si}$ and $H_{\sigma j}$ with its homogeneous component of degree $r-2$ and $r-3$,
respectively, we can take $S_{si}$ and $H_{\sigma j}$ homogeneous of degree $r-2$ and $r-3$, respectively. Likewise,
we can assume that $S_{si}$ and $H_{\sigma j}$ are quasi-homogeneous of weight $w-s$ and $w-\sigma$, respectively.
Then the polynomial
\begin{equation*}
F-R-\displaystyle\sum_{si}^{}S_{si}F_{si}^{(0)}-\displaystyle\sum_{\sigma j}^{}H_{\sigma j}G_{\sigma j}^{(0)}
\end{equation*}
is homogeneous of degree $r$ and weight smaller than $w$. Now, the proof follows by induction on $w$.
\end{proof}
\begin{rmk}
\emph{We see that if the curve $\C$ is not trigonal, then the last summand in \ref{eq1} does not appear because the
ideal $I(\C^{(0)})$ is generated by the $\frac{1}{2}(g-2)(g-3)$ quadratic forms $F_{si}^{(0)}$.}
\end{rmk}
Let us now invert the considerations of the previous section. Instead of take a pointed canonical
Gorenstein curve whose Weierstrass semigroup at the marked point is $\N:=\langle g, g+1,\ldots,2g-2\rangle$, we
consider the semigroup $\N$ and the associated monomial curve $\C^{(0)}$. We want to deform it in order to get a
Gorenstein curve with a marked point whose Weierstrass semigroup is also $\N$.
By Lemma \ref{lemaI0} the ideal of the monomial curve $\mathcal{C}^{(0)}$ is generated by the
$\frac{1}{2}(g-2)(g-3)$ quadratic forms $F_{si}^{(0)}$ and by the $\wp$ cubic forms $G_{\sigma j}^{(0)}$.
So, let us consider a \textit{pre-deformation} of the ideal of $\C^{(0)}$ which is
\begin{equation*}\label{qddeforms}
F_{si}=X_{a_{si}}X_{b_{si}}-X_{a_s}X_{b_s}-\displaystyle\sum_{n=0}^{s-1}c_{sin}X_{a_{n}}X_{b_{n}}
\end{equation*}
and
\begin{equation*}\label{cdeforms}
G_{\sigma j}=X_{a_{\sigma j}}X_{b_{\sigma j}}X_{c_{\sigma j}}-X_{a_{\sigma }}X_{b_{\sigma }}X_{c_{\sigma }}-\displaystyle\sum_{n=0}^{\sigma-1}d_{\sigma jn}X_{a_{n}}X_{b_{n}}X_{c_{n}},
\end{equation*}
where the coefficients $c_{sin}$ and $d_{\sigma jn}$ belongs to the ground field $\k$. It is clear that we are looking for
conditions on this coefficients such that this \textit{pre-deformation} is a
deformation: a curve of degree $2g-2$ and genus $g$ with a marked point whose Weierstrass semigroup is $\N$.
The main idea is to apply the Syzygy Lemma and erase the superscript zeros of the quadratic and cubic forms and then,
by means of \eqref{directsum}, get the conditions on the coefficients.
Replacing the left-hand side of the equation \eqref{eq2} of the Syzygy Lemma the binomials $F_{s'i'}^{(0)}$ and $F_{si}^{(0)}$
with the quadratic forms $F_{s'i'}$ and $F_{si}$ we obtain for each of the $\frac{1}{2}(g-3)(g-4)$ double indexes $s'i'$ a
linear combination of cubic monomials of weight less than $s'+2g-2$, which by Lemma \ref{lem3} admits the decomposition
\begin{equation*}
X_{2g-2}F_{s'i'}+\displaystyle\sum_{nsi}^{}\epsilon_{nsi}^{(s'i')}X_nF_{si}=\displaystyle\sum_{nsi}^{}\eta_{nsi}^{(s'i')}X_nF_{si}+R_{s'i'},
\end{equation*}
where the sum on the right-hand side is taken over all the nongaps $n\leq 2g-2$, the double indexes $si$ with $n+s<s'+2g-2$,
the coefficients $\epsilon_{nsi}^{(s'i')}$ are constants and where $R_{s'i'}$ is a linear combination of cubic monomials
of pairwise different weights less than $s'+2g-2$.
Repeating the above procedure for the equation \eqref{eq3} on the Syzygy Lemma, we obtain a decomposition
\begin{equation*}
X_{2g-2}G_{\sigma'j'}+\displaystyle\sum_{q\sigma j}^{}\rho_{q\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}X_qG_{\sigma j}=
\displaystyle\sum_{mq\sigma j}^{}\mu_{mq\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}X_mX_qF_{\sigma j}+\displaystyle\sum_{q\sigma j}^{}\nu_{q\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}X_qG_{\sigma j}+R_{\sigma'j'},
\end{equation*}
where the sum on the right-hand side is taken over the nongaps $m, q\leq 2g-2$, the indexes $mq\sigma$ and $q\sigma$
with $m+q+\sigma<2g-2+\sigma'$ and $q+\sigma<2g-2+\sigma'$, the coefficients
$\mu_{mq\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}, \nu_{q\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}$ are constants and where $R_{\sigma'j'}$ is a linear
combination of quartic monomials of pairwise different weights less than $2g-2+\sigma'$.
For each nongap $m<s'+2g+2$ (resp. $r<\sigma'+2g+2$) let $\varrho_{s'i'm}$ (resp. $\vartheta_{\sigma'j'r}$ )
be the unique coefficient of $R_{s'i'}$ (resp. $R_{\sigma' j'}$) of weight $m$ (resp. $r$). We do not lost
information about the coefficients of $R_{s'i'}$ and $R_{\sigma' j'}$ replacing the variables $X_n$ by powers $t^n$
of an indeterminate $t$. Hence it is convenient to consider the polynomials
\begin{equation*}
R_{s'i'}(t^{n_0},\ldots,t^{n_{g-1}})=\displaystyle\sum_{m=0}^{s'+2g-2}\varrho_{s'i'm}t^m
\end{equation*}
and
\begin{equation*}
R_{\sigma'j'}(t^{n_0},\ldots,t^{n_{g-1}})=\displaystyle\sum_{r=0}^{\sigma'+2g-2}\vartheta_{\sigma'j'r}t^r.
\end{equation*}
We can assume that the coefficients $\varrho_{s'i'm}$ are quasi-homogeneous polynomial expressions of weight
$s'+2g-2-m$ in the constants $c_{sin}$ while the coefficients $\vartheta_{\sigma'j'r}$ are quasi-homogeneous
polynomial expressions of weight $\sigma'+2g-2-r$ in the constants $d_{\sigma j n}$.
\begin{thm}
Let $\N$ be a nonhyperelliptic and non-ordinary numerical symmetric semigroup of genus $g$
The respective $\frac{1}{2}(g-2)(g-3)$ quadratic and the $\wp$ cubic forms, $F_{si}=F_{si}^{(0)}-\sum_{n=0}^{s-1}c_{sin}X_{a_{sin}}X_{b_{sin}}$
and $G_{\sigma j}=G_{\sigma j}^{{(0)}}-\sum_{n=0}^{\sigma}d_{\sigma jn}X_{a_{n}}X_{b_{n}}X_{c_{n}}$
cut out a canonical integral Gorenstein curve on $\mathbb{P}^{g-1}$ if and only if the coefficients $c_{sin}, d_{\sigma jn}$
satisfy the quasi-homogeneous equations $\varrho_{s'i'm}=0$ and $\vartheta_{\sigma'j'r}=0$. In this case, the point $P=(0:\ldots:0:1)$
is a smooth point of the canonical curve with Weierstrass semigroup $\N$.
\end{thm}
\begin{proof}
We first assume that the $\frac{1}{2}(g-2)(g-3)$ quadratic forms $F_{si}$ and the $\wp$ cubic forms $G_{\sigma j}$ cut out a canonical
curve $\C\subset\mathbb{P}^{g-1}$. Since each $R_{s'i'}$ and $R_{\sigma'j'}$ belongs to the ideal $I$, follows that
$R_{s'i'}(x_{n_0},\ldots,x_{n_{g-1}})=R_{\sigma'j'}(x_{n_0},\ldots,x_{n_{g-1}})=0$ for each pair of index $s'i'$ and $\sigma'j'$.
We can write
\begin{equation*}
R_{s'i'}(x_{n_0},\ldots,x_{n_{g-1}})=\displaystyle\sum_{m=0}^{s'+2g-2}\varrho_{s'i'm}z_{s'i'm}
\end{equation*}
and
\begin{equation*}
R_{\sigma'j'}(x_{n_0},\ldots,x_{n_{g-1}})=\displaystyle\sum_{r=0}^{\sigma'+2g-2}\vartheta_{\sigma'j'r}z_{\sigma'j'r},
\end{equation*}
where the $z_{s'i'm}, z_{\sigma'j'r}$ are monomial expressions of weights $m$ and $r$ respectively in the projective coordinates
functions $x_{n_0},\ldots,x_{n_{g-1}}$, and hence $z_{s'i'm}$ has pole divisor $mP$ while $z_{\sigma'j'r}$ has pole divisor $rP$.
Then we conclude that $\varrho_{s'i'm}=\vartheta_{\sigma'i'r}=0$.
On the opposite, let us assume that the coefficients $c_{sin}, d_{\sigma jn}$ satisfy the equations $\varrho_{s'i'm}=0$
and $\vartheta_{\sigma'i'r}=0$. Since the $g-3$ quadric hypersurfaces $V(F_{n_i+2g-2,1})\subset\mathbb{P}^{g-1} (i=1,\ldots,g-3)$
and the cubic hypersurface $V(G_{4g-4,1})$ intersect transversally at $P$, in an open neighborhood of $P$
their intersection has an unique irreducible component which contains $P$, and so this component is a projective integral
algebraic curve, say $\C$, which is smooth at $P$ and whose tangent line is the intersection of their tangent
hyperplanes $V(X_{n_i}), i=0,\ldots, g-3$.
Let $y_{n_0},\ldots,y_{n_{g-1}}$ be the projective coordinate functions of $\C$ and we look for the affine open $y_{n_{g-1}}=1$.
Since the local coordinate ring of $C$ at $P$ is a discrete valuation ring and $n_{g-1}-n_{g-2}=l_2-l_1=1$, we have that
$t:=y_{n_{g-2}}$ is a local parameter of $\C$ at $P$, and $y_{n_0},\ldots, y_{n_{g-3}}$ are the power series in $t$ of order
greater than $1$. More precisely, comparing coefficients in the $g-3$ equations
$$F_{n_i+2g-2}(y_{n_0},\ldots, y_{n_{g-2}}, y_{n_{g-1}})=0,\ \ i=1,\ldots,g-3$$ and $$G_{4g-4},1(y_{n_0},\ldots, y_{n_{g-2}}, y_{n_{g-1}})=0$$ one sees that
\begin{eqnarray*}
y_{n_i}=t^{n_{g-1}-n_i}+ (\mbox{sum of higher orders terms}) \\= t^{l_{g-i}-1}+(\mbox{sum of higher orders terms}),
\end{eqnarray*}
for each integer $i=0,\ldots,g-1$. This means that the $g$ integers $l_i-1$ $(i=1,\ldots,g)$ are the contact orders of
the curve $\C\subset\mathbb{P}^{g-1}$ with the hyperplanes at $P$. In particular, the curve $\C$ is not contained in any hyperplane.
By assumption, $\varrho_{s'i'm}=0$ and $\vartheta_{\sigma'j'r}=0$ for each pair of double indexes
$s'i'$ and $\sigma'j'$ , respectively. Hence, we obtain the syzygies
\begin{equation*}
X_{2g-2}F_{s'i'}+\displaystyle\sum_{nsi}^{}\epsilon_{nsi}^{(s'i')}X_nF_{si}-\displaystyle\sum_{nsi}^{}\eta_{nsi}^{(s'i')}X_nF_{si}=0
\end{equation*}
and
\begin{equation*}
X_{2g-2}G_{\sigma'j'}+\displaystyle\sum_{q\sigma j}^{}\rho_{q\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}X_qG_{\sigma j}-
\displaystyle\sum_{mq\sigma j}^{}\mu_{mq\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}X_mX_qF_{\sigma j}-\displaystyle\sum_{q\sigma j}^{}\nu_{q\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}X_qG_{\sigma j}=0.
\end{equation*}
Replacing the variables $X_{n_0},\ldots, X_{n_{g-1}}$ by the projective coordinates functions $y_{n_0},\ldots, y_{n_{g-1}}$
we get two systems: a system with $\frac{1}{2}(g-3)(g-4)$ linear homogeneous equations in the $\frac{1}{2}(g-3)(g-4)$ functions
$F_{s'i'}(y_{n_0},\ldots, y_{n_{g-1}})$ with the coefficients in the domain $\textit{k}[[t]]$ of formal power series;
the second system is composed by $\wp-1$ linear homogeneous equations in the $\wp-1$ functions $G_{\sigma'j'}(y_{n_0},\ldots, y_{n_{g-1}})$
with the coefficients in the domain $\textit{k}[[t]]$ of formal power series. Since the triple indexes $nsi$ of the
coefficients $\epsilon_{nsi}^{(s'i')}$, respectively, $\eta_{nsi}^{(s'i')}$, satisfy the inequalities $n<2g-2$ and $n+s=2g-2+s'$,
respectively, $n\leq 2g-2$ and $n+s<2g-2+s'$, the diagonal entries of the matrix of the system have constant terms $1$,
while the remaining entries have positive orders. Therefore, the matrix is invertible, and so the equation
$F_{si}(y_{n_0},\ldots, y_{n_{g-1}})=0$ holds for each double index $si$. In the second system, the indexes
$q\sigma j, mq\sigma j$ and $n\sigma j$ of the coefficients $\rho_{q\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}, \mu_{mq\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}$
and $\nu_{n\sigma j}^{(\sigma'j')}$, respectively, are such that satisfy the inequalities $q<2g-2$ and $q+\sigma=2g-2+\sigma'$,
respectively, $m, q\leq 2g-2$ and $m+q+\sigma<2g-2+\sigma'$. So the diagonal entries of the matrix of the system have constant
terms $1$, while the remaining entries have positive orders, hence the matrix is also invertible. This means that the equation
$G_{\sigma j}(y_{n_0},\ldots, y_{n_{g-1}})=0$ holds for each double index $\sigma j$. Therefore, we shown that $I\subset I(\C)$,
where $I$ is the ideal generated by the $\frac{1}{2}(g-2)(g-3)$ quadratic forms $F_{si}$ and by the $\wp$ cubic forms $G_{\sigma j}$.
By virtue of Lemma \ref{lem3}, $\codim I_r\leq\dim\Lambda_r$ for each $r\geq 2$. Since $I_r(\C)\cap\Lambda_r=0$,
we deduce $\dim\Lambda_r\leq \codim I_r(\C)$ and we obtain
\begin{equation*}
\codim I_r(\C)=\codim I_r=\dim\Lambda_r=(2g-2)r+1-g.
\end{equation*}
Thus $I(\C)=I$ and the curve $\C\subset\mathbb{P}^{g-1}$ has Hilbert polynomial $(2g-2)r+1-g$, hence $\C$ has degree $2g-2$ and
arithmetic genus $g$.
Intersecting the curve $\C$ with the hyperplane $V(X_{2g-2})$ we obtain the divisor $D:=(2g-2)P$ of degree $2g-2$, whose
complete linear system $|D|$ has dimension at least $g-1$, and so by Riemann--Roch theorem for complete integral
curves the Cartier divisor $D$ is canonical, and $\C$ is a canonical Gorenstein curve.
\end{proof}
Note that the fixed $P$-hermitian basis $x_{n_0}, x_{n_1},\ldots,x_{n_{g-1}}$ of $H^0(\C,(2g-2)P)$ is
uniquely determined up to a linear transformation $x_{n_i}\mapsto\displaystyle\sum_{j=i}^{g-1}c_{ij}x_{n_j}$,
with $(c_{ij})\in\GL_g(\k)$ an upper triangular matrix whose diagonal entries are of the form
$c_{ii}=c^{n_i}, i=0,\ldots, g-1$, for some non-zero constant $c$, due the normalizations $c_{sis}=1$.
We assume that the characteristic of the field of constants $\k$ is zero (or a prime not dividing any of the
differences $m-n$ with $n, m$ nongaps such that $m<n\leq2g-2$).
If the symmetric semigroup is non-odd we can normalize $\frac{1}{2}g(g-1)$ coefficients $c_{sin}$ of the quadratic forms
to be zero, for each $i=1,\dots,g-1$ we just transform $$X_{n_i}\mapsto X_{n_i}+\sum_{j=1}^{i}c_{n_in_{i-j}}X_{n_{i-j}}$$ and proceed by induction
on the weight of the coefficients, as in \cite[pg. 587]{CS}. In the odd case, we can normalize $g-3$ coefficients of the cubic
form $G_{4g-4,1}$ by transforming $$X_{2g-4}\mapsto X_{2g-4}+\sum_{i=1}^{g-3}d_{2g-4,n_{g-3-i}}X_{n_{g-3-i}},$$ and by transforming
$$X_{n_i}\mapsto X_{n_i}+\sum_{j=1}^{i}c_{n_in_{i-j}}X_{n_{i-j}}$$ with $n_i\neq n_{g-3}=2g-4$ we can normalize the remaining
$\frac{1}{2}g(g-1)-(g-3)$ coefficients of the quadratic forms $F_{n_i+2g-2,1}$.
Due all the normalizations the only freedom left
to us is to transform $x_{n_i}\mapsto c^{n_i}x_{n_i}, i=0,\ldots, g-1$ for some non-zero constant $c\in\k$.
Therefore, we have showed:
\begin{thm}\label{teo3}
Let $\N$ be a nonhyperelliptic and non-ordinary symmetric semigroup of genus $g\geq 5$
The isomorphism classes of the pointed complete integral Gorenstein curves with Weierstrass semigroup $\N$
correspond bijectively to the orbits of the $\mathbb{G}_m(\textit{k})$-action
\begin{equation*}
(c,\ldots,c_{sin},\ldots)\longmapsto(\ldots,c^{s-n}c_{sin},\ldots)
\end{equation*}
on the affine quasi-cone of the vectors whose coordinates are the coefficients $c_{sin}$, $d_{\sigma j n}$
of the normalized quadratic and cubic forms $F_{si}$ and $G_{\sigma j}$ satisfying the quasi-homogeneous
equations $\varrho_{s'i'm}=\vartheta_{\sigma'i'r}=0$.
\end{thm}
The dimension of the moduli spaces $\M$ for any $\N$ is known for a few special cases. A great lower bound
was obtained by Pflueger in \cite{N16}, where the effective weight is an upper bound for codimension of
$\M$ in $\mathcal{M}_{g,1}$. On the other hand, an upper bound follows from a formula obtained by
Deligne \cite{Del73}. Both bounds are sharp but there are examples where the strict inequalities hold, see
\cite{NP16} and \cite{CS}. In the case of odd symmetric semigroups $\N=\langle g,g+1,\dots,2g-2\rangle$ Rim--Vitulli \cite{RV77}
showed that $\N$ is negatively graduated, hence Pflueger's lower bound and Deligne's upper bound
are equal to $2g-1=\dim \M=\dim\CM$.
\section{Odd numerical semigroups of genus at most six}
We start this section with the following observation on the rationality of $\CM$
for $\N$ symmetric and generated by less than five elements, which was also noted in \cite{CS}.
If the symmetric semigroup $\N$ is
generated by $4$ elements,
using Pinkham's equivariant deformation theory \cite{Pi74},
Buchsbaum-Eisenbud's structure theorem
for Gorenstein ideals of codimension $3$ (see
\cite[p.\,466]{BE77}), one can deduce that the affine monomial curve $C^{(0)}$
can be negatively smoothed without any obstructions (see \cite{Bu80},
\cite{W79} \cite[Satz 7.1]{W80}), hence
$$
\CM = \proj(T^{1,-}_{\k[\N]|\k}).
$$
\noindent Although the above observation assures that $\CM=\mathbb{P}^9$ for $\N:=\langle 5,6,7,8\rangle$, we
believe that it is relevant to illustrate our techniques in an example not so involved with large
computations.
\subsection{Odd of genus five}
Let $\mathcal{C}^{(0)}$ be the canonical monomial Gorenstein curve of genus $5$ associated to the odd symmetric semigroup
of genus also $5$. Up to change of coordinates can we write:
$$\mathcal{C}^{(0)}:=\{(a^8\,:\,a^3b^5\,:\,a^2b^6\,:\,a^1b^7\,:\,b^8)\,\vert\,(a:b)\in\mathbb{P}^1\}\subseteq \mathbb{P}^4\,.$$
The symmetric Weierstrass semigroup of the smooth point $P=(0:0:0:0:1)$ is $\N:=\langle 5,6,7,8\rangle$. Following
Lemma \ref{lemaI0} the ideal of $\mathcal{C}^{(0)}$ can be generated by the following seven isobaric and homogeneous forms
$$ \begin{array}{ll}
F_{12}^{(0)}=X_6^2-X_5X_7& F_{13}^{(0)}=X_6X_7-X_5X_8,\\
F_{14}^{(0)}=X_7^2-X_6X_8& G_{15}^{(0)}=X_5^3-X_0X_7X_8,\\
G_{16}^{(0)}=X_5^2X_6-X_0X_8^2& G_{18}^{(0)}=X_6^3-X_5^2X_8,\\
G_{21}^{(0)}=X_7^3-X_5X_8^2.&\\
\end{array}$$
\noindent For each nongap $n\in \N$ we take the rational function $x_n$ with pole divisor $nP$.
Writing each one of the seven rational functions $x_6^2, x_6x_7, x_7^2, x_5^3, x_5^2x_6, x_6^3$ and $x_7^3$ as linear
combination of the basis elements of the vector spaces $H^0(\mathcal{C},2(2g-2))$ and $H^0(\mathcal{C},3(2g-2))$,
respectively, we obtain in the variables $X_0, X_5, X_6, X_7, X_8,$ the polynomials
\begin{equation*}
F_{i}=F_{i}^{(0)}-\displaystyle\sum_{j=1}^{i} c_{ij}Z_{i-j},\ (i=12, 13, 14),
\end{equation*}
and
\begin{equation*}
G_{i}=G_{i}^{(0)}-\displaystyle\sum_{j=1}^{i} d_{ij}Z_{i-j},\ (i=15, 16, 18, 21),
\end{equation*}
where $Z_{i-j}$ stands for the basis monomial of weight $i-j$, and the summation index $j$ varies
only through the integers such that $i-j\in \N$.
By using the transformations $X_{i}\mapsto X_{i}+\sum_{j=1}^{i-1}\lambda_{j}X_{i-j}$, we can normalize the following ten coefficients
$$c_{12, 1}=c_{12, 2}=c_{12, 7}=c_{13, 1}=c_{13, 2}=c_{13, 3}=c_{13, 8}=d_{16, 1}=d_{16, 6}=d_{21, 5}=0\,.$$
By applying the Syzygy Lemma \ref{lem2} we obtain the following four syzygies of the canonical monomial curve $\mathcal{C}^{(0)}$
\begin{equation}\label{syzyg5}
\begin{array}{l}
X_8F^{(0)}_{12}-X_7F^{(0)}_{13}+X_6F^{(0)}_{14}=0,\\
X_8G^{(0)}_{15}-X_5X_6F^{(0)}_{12}+X_5G^{(0)}_{18}-X_7G^{(0)}_{16}=0,\\
X_8G^{(0)}_{18}-X_5G^{(0)}_{21}+X_5X_7F^{(0)}_{14}-X_6X_8F^{(0)}_{12}=0,\\
X_8G^{(0)}_{21}-X_7X_8F^{(0)}_{14}+X_8^2F^{(0)}_{13}=0.\\
\end{array}
\end{equation}
\noindent Replacing each left-hand side of the above syzygies the binomials $F_{s,i}^{(0)}, F_{s',i'}^{(0)},G_{\sigma, j}^{(0)}$ and
$G_{\sigma', j'}^{(0)}$ by the quadratic and cubic forms $F_{s,i}, F_{s',i'}, G_{\sigma, j}$ and $G_{\sigma', j'}$, respectively,
and applying the division algorithm recursively until all the monomials of these new equations belong to the basis $\Lambda_3$ or $\Lambda_4$,
we get the following four polynomial equations
\medskip
\begin{flushright}
\noindent $\begin{array}{r}
X_8F_{12}-X_7F_{13}+X_6F_{14}=-F_{12}\left(c_{14, 3}X_{5}+c_{14, 8}X_{0}\right)+F_{14}c_{13, 6}X_{0}-G_{16}c_{14, 4}\\ +F_{13} \left(c_{13, 7}X_{0}-c_{14, 2}X_{5}
-c_{14, 7}X_{0}\right),\\
\end{array}$
\medskip
\noindent $\begin{array}{r}
X_{8}G_{15}-X_{6}G_{17}+X_{5}G_{18}-X_{7}G_{16}=(c_{12,6}X_{0}X_{5}-d_{18,1}X_{0}X_{8})F_{12}\\
-(c_{14,3}d_{16,4}+c_{14,3}d_{15,3}d_{18,1}+d_{18,7})X_{0}G_{16}+(d_{16,5}X_{5}+c_{12,5}X_{5})X_{0}F_{13}\\
+(d_{16,9}X_{0}-d_{18,1}X_{8}+d_{15,8}d_{18,1}X_{0}+d_{15,3}d_{18,1}X_{5}+d_{16,4}X_{5})X_{0}F_{14}\\
+(d_{16,10}X_{0}+d_{15,9}d_{18,1}X_{0}+d_{15,1}d_{18,1}X_{8}+d_{15,4}d_{18,1}X_{5}+d_{16,2}X_{8})X_{0}F_{13}\\
+(-c_{14,4}d_{16,4}X_{0}-c_{14,4}d_{15,3}d_{18,1}X_{0}-d_{18,1}X_{7}-d_{18,8}X_{0})G_{15},\\
\end{array}$
\medskip
\noindent $\begin{array}{r}
X_{8}G_{18}-X_{5}G_{21}-X_{6}X_8F_{12}+X_{7}X_{5}F_{14}=\\
(-c_{14, 3}^2d_{16, 4}-c_{14, 2}c_{14, 3}d_{15, 5}-c_{14, 3}c_{14, 4}d_{15, 3}+c_{14, 3}c_{14, 7})G_{16}X_{0}\\
+c_{14, 3}d_{15, 3}d_{14, 4}+c_{14, 2}c_{14,8}-c_{14, 2}c_{14, 4}d_{15, 4}+c_{14, 2}^2c_{14, 3}d_{15, 3})X_{0}G_{16}\\
(+c_{14, 4}d_{15, 9}X_{0}-d_{15, 1}c_{14, 2}^2X_{8}-d_{15, 4}d_{14, 4}X_{5}-c_{14, 8}X_{5}+c_{12, 5}X_{8}\\
+c_{14, 2}c_{14, 3}X_{8}+c_{14, 3}d_{16, 2}X_{8}-d_{15, 4}c_{14, 2}^2X_{5}-c_{14, 2}c_{14, 3}d_{15, 8}X_{0}\\
+c_{14, 4}d_{15, 1}X_{8}-d_{15, 1}d_{14, 4}X_{8}-d_{15, 9}d_{14, 4}X_{0}+c_{14, 3}d_{16, 10}X_{0}+c_{14, 3}d_{16, 5}X_{5}\\
+c_{14, 4}d_{15, 4}X_{5}-d_{15, 9}c_{14, 2}^2X_{0}-c_{14, 2}c_{14, 3}d_{15, 3}X_{5})X_{0}F_{13}\\
(+d_{14, 11}X_{0}+d_{14, 4}X_{7}+d_{14, 3}X_{8}-c_{14, 4}X_{7}+c_{14, 2}^2X_{7}-c_{14, 4}c_{14, 3}d_{16, 4}X_{0}\\
+c_{14, 1}c_{14, 2}X_{8}+d_{15, 3}c_{14, 2}^2c_{14, 4}X_{0}-c_{14, 4}^2d_{15, 3}X_{0}+c_{14, 4}d_{15, 3}d_{14, 4}X_{0}\\
-c_{14, 2}c_{14, 4}d_{15, 5}X_{0}+c_{14, 2}c_{14, 9}X_{0}+c_{14,4}c_{14, 7}X_{0}+c_{14, 2}c_{14, 4}X_{5}+c_{14, 2}c_{14, 3}X_{6})G_{15}\\
(c_{14, 2}^2X_{0}X_{8}-c_{14, 4}X_{0}X_{8}+d_{14, 4}X_{0}X_{8}-c_{14, 7}X_{0}X_{5}-c_{14, 2}X_{5}^2+c_{14, 3}d_{16, 9}X_{0}^2\\
+c_{14, 4}d_{15, 3}X_{0}X_{5}-d_{15, 3}d_{14, 4}X_{0}X_{5}+c_{14, 3}d_{16, 4}X_{0}X_{5}-d_{15, 8}d_{14, 4}X_{0}^2\\
+c_{14, 4}d_{15, 8}X_{0}^2-c_{14, 2}^2d_{15, 3}X_{0}X_{5}-c_{14, 2}^2d_{15, 8}X_{0}^2)F_{14}+(d_{14, 2}X_{8}-c_{14, 3}X_{7})G_{16}\\
(+c_{12, 6}X_{8}-c_{14, 2}c_{14, 3}d_{15, 9}X_{0}-c_{14, 2}c_{14, 3}d_{15, 4}X_{5}-c_{14, 2}c_{14, 3}d_{15, 1}X_{8})X_{0}F_{12},\\
\end{array}$
\medskip
\noindent $\begin{array}{r}
G_{21,2}X_{8}-G_{21,1}X_{8}-G_{22}X_{7}=X_8(c_{14, 3}X_{5}+c_{14, 8}X_{0})F_{13}\\
+X_{8}\left[(c_{14, 2}X_{5}+c_{14, 7}X_{0})F_{14}-c_{14, 2}c_{14, 4}G_{15}-c_{14, 2}c_{14, 3}G_{16}\right].\\
\end{array}$
\end{flushright}
\medskip
\noindent We now determine the weighted vector space $T^{1,-}_{\k[\N]|\k}$, which is (up to an isomorphism) the
locus of the linearizations of the above 4 equations, all we have to do is substituting by zero the right
hand side of each equation. These four equations give rise to other $20$ linear equations obtained by
replacing $X_{n_i}\mapsto t^{n_i}$. We can solve this linear system as follows:
\medskip
\noindent $\begin{array}{l}
d_{16,10}=d_{15,10}, d_{16,9}=d_{15,9}, d_{16,8}=d_{15,8}, c_{14,7}=c_{13,7}, d_{18,7}=c_{13,7}, d_{15,7}=-c_{13,7}, \\
d_{21,7}=2c_{13,7},c_{14,6}=-c_{12,6}, d_{21,6}=-c_{12,6}, d_{18,6}=c_{12,6}, d_{16,5}=d_{15,5},\\
c_{14,4}=-c_{12,4}, d_{16,4}=d_{15,4}, d_{21,4}=-c_{12,4}, d_{18,4}=c_{12,4}, d_{16,3}=d_{15,3}, d_{16,2}=d_{15,2}.\\
\end{array}$
\medskip
\noindent We can verify that the weighted vector space $T^{1,-}_{\mathbf{k[\N]}|\mathbf{k}}$ depends only on the ten coe\-fficients
$d_{15,2}, d_{15,3}, , c_{12,4}, d_{15,4}, d_{15,5}, c_{12,6}, c_{13,7}, d_{15,8}, d_{15,9}, d_{15,10}\,$,
which implies $$\dim T^{1,-}_{\mathbf{k[\N]}|\mathbf{k}}=10.$$
More precisely, counting the coefficients of weight $s$, we obtain the dimension of the graded component
of $T^{1,-}_{\mathbf{k[\N]}|\mathbf{k}}$ of negative weight $-s$:
$$\begin{array}{l}
\dim T^{1,-}_{s}=1,\ (s=-10, -9, -8, -7, -6, -5, -3,-2)\ \mbox{and}\ \dim T^{1,-}_{-4}=2.\\
\end{array}$$
For the remainder integers the dimension of $T^{1,-}_{s}$ is zero. In particular,
the compactified moduli space $\overline{\mathcal{M}_{5,1}^{\N}}$ can be
realized as closed subspace of the $9$-dimensional weighted projective space
$\mathbb{P}\left(T^{1,-}_{\mathbf{k[\N]}|\mathbf{k}}\right).$
Finally, we solve the four polynomial equations of the previous page to obtain the equations of the moduli
variety $\overline{\mathcal{M}_{5,1}^{\N}}$. By replacing $X_{n_i}\mapsto t^{n_i}$
the compactified moduli space $\overline{\mathcal{M}_{5,1}^{\N}}$ is cut out by $70$
equations which depend on $64$ variables, we can solve them in the following way:
\begin{itemize}
\item 18 coefficients which are identically zero, namely:
\end{itemize}
$$\begin{array}{l}
c_{12,5}=c_{13,5}=c_{13,6}=c_{14,1}=c_{14,2}=c_{14,3}=d_{15,1}=d_{16,11}=d_{18,1}=0 \\
d_{18,2}=d_{18,3}=d_{18,5}=d_{18,8}=d_{18,11}=d_{21,1}=d_{21,2}=d_{21,3}=d_{21,10}=0.\\
\end{array}$$
\medskip
\begin{itemize}
\item 11 linear equations:
\end{itemize}
$$\begin{array}{llll}
c_{14,4}=-c_{12,4}, & d_{15,7}=-c_{13,7}, & d_{16,2}=d_{15,2}, & d_{16,4}=d_{15,4}, \\
d_{16,5}=d_{15,5}, & d_{16,9}=d_{15,9}, & d_{18,4}=c_{12,4}, & d_{18,6}=c_{12,6}, \\
d_{18,7}=c_{13,7}, & d_{21,4}=-c_{12,4}, & d_{16,3}=d_{15,3}. & \\
\end{array}$$
\medskip
\begin{itemize}
\item 17 quadratic polynomials and isobarics:
\end{itemize}
$$\begin{array}{lll}
c_{12,12}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,8}, & & c_{13,13}=c_{12,4}d_{15,9}, \\
c_{14,6}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,2}-c_{12,6}, & & c_{14,7}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,3}+c_{13,7}, \\
c_{14,8}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,4} & &c_{14,9}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,5},\\
c_{14,14}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,10}, & & d_{15,15}=c_{12,6}d_{15,9}+c_{13,7}d_{15,8}, \\
d_{16,8}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,4}+d_{15,8},& & d_{16,10}=-c_{12,6}d_{15,4}-c_{13,7}d_{15,3}+d_{15,10}, \\
d_{18,12}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,8}-c_{12,6}^{2}, & & d_{21,6}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,2}-c_{12,6}, \\
d_{18,13}=c_{12,4}d_{15,9}, & & d_{21,7}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,3}+2\,c_{13,7}, \\
d_{21,8}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,4}, & & d_{21,9}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,5},\\
d_{18,10}=-c_{12,4}c_{12,6}. & & \\
\end{array}$$
\medskip
\begin{itemize}
\item and the following 8:
\end{itemize}
$$ \begin{array}{l}
d_{16,16}=-c_{12,4}d_{15,3}d_{15,9}+c_{12,4}d_{15,4}d_{15,8}, \ \ \ \ d_{18,18}=c_{12,4}c_{12,6}d_{15,8},\\
d_{21,13}=-c_{12,4}^{2}d_{15,2}d_{15,3}-c_{12,4}c_{12,6}d_{15,3}+c_{12,4}c_{13,7}d_{15,2}+c_{12,4}d_{15,9}+c_{12,6}c_{13,7},\\
d_{21,14}=-c_{12,4}^{2}d_{15,3}^{2}+2\,c_{12,4}c_{13,7}d_{15,3}-c_{12,4}d_{15,10}-c_{13,7}^{2},\\
d_{21,15}=-c_{12,4}^{2}d_{15,3}d_{15,4}+2\,c_{12,4}c_{13,7}d_{15,4}, \ \ \ \ d_{21,11}=-{c_{12,4}}^{2}d_{15,3}+c_{12,4}c_{13,7},\\
d_{21,16}=-c_{12,4}^{2}d_{15,3}d_{15,5}+c_{12,4}c_{13,7}d_{15,5},\\
d_{21,21}=-c_{12,4}^{2}d_{15,3}d_{15,10}+c_{12,4}^{2}d_{15,4}d_{15,9}+c_{12,4}c_{13,7}d_{15,10}.\\
\end{array}$$
\medskip
\noindent We note that there are 16 missing equations from the 70 annunciated, but each one of these 16 is redundant.
We also note that no one condition on the $10$ coefficients of the ambient space $T^{1,-}_{\mathbf{k[\N]}|\mathbf{k}}$ appears, which means
$$\overline{\mathcal{M}_{5,1}^{\N}}=\mathbb{P}(T^{1,-}_{\mathbf{k[\N]}|\mathbf{k}})\cong\proj^9_{\alpha},\ \mbox{ with } \alpha=(2,3,4,4,5,6,7,8,9,10).$$
\subsection{Odd of genus six}
Let $\mathcal{C}^{(0)}$ be the canonical monomial Gorenstein curve of genus $6$ associated to the odd symmetric semigroup
$\N:=<6,7,8,9,10>$. Take $P=(0:0:0:0:0:1)$ a smooth point in $\C^{(0)}$ whose Weierstrass semigroup is $\N$.
Applying Lemma \eqref{lemaI0}, the generators of the ideal of $\C^{(0)}$ are the following $6$ quadratic and $8$ cubic forms:
$$ \begin{array}{lll}
F_{14}^{(0)}=X_7^2-X_6X_8& F_{15}^{(0)}=X_7X_8-X_6X_9& F_{16}^{(0)}=X_8^2-X_6X_{10},\\
F_{16,1}^{(0)}=X_7X_9-X_6X_{10}& F_{17}^{(0)}=X_8X_9-X_7X_{10}& F_{18}^{(0)}=X_9^2-X_8X_{10},\\
G_{18}^{(0)}=X_6^3-X_0X_8X_{10}& G_{19}^{(0)}=X_6^2X_7-X_0X_9X_{10}& G_{20}^{(0)}=X_6^2X_8-X_0X_{10}^2,\\
G_{20,1}^{(0)}=X_6X_7^2-X_0X_{10}^2& G_{21}^{(0)}=X_7^3-X_6^2X_9& G_{22}^{(0)}=X_7^2X_8-X_6^2X_{10},\\
G_{26}^{(0)}=X_8X_9^2-X_6X_{10}^2& G_{27}^{(0)}=X_9^3-X_7X_{10}^2.\\
\end{array}$$
\noindent We consider a \textit{pre-deformation} of the ideal of $\C^{(0)}$ as follows:
\begin{equation*}
F_{i}=F_{i}^{(0)}-\displaystyle\sum_{j=1}^{i} c_{ij}Z_{i-j},\ (i=14,\ldots,18\mbox{ and } i=16,1)
\end{equation*}
and
\begin{equation*}
G_{i}=G_{i}^{(0)}-\displaystyle\sum_{j=1}^{i} d_{ij}Z_{i-j},\ (i=18,\ldots, 22, 26, 27\mbox{ and }i=20,1).
\end{equation*}
where $Z_{i-j}$ is a polynomial of weight $i-j$, whenever $i-j$ is a nongap of $\N$.
By suitable transformations of the variables $X_0, X_6, X_7, X_8, X_9, X_{10}$, we are able to normalize the following $15$ coefficients:
$$\begin{array}{l}
c_{14,1}=c_{15,1}=c_{16,1,1}=d_{18,1}=d_{18,2}=c_{15,2}=c_{16,1,2}=c_{15,3}=0,\\
c_{16,1,3}=c_{16,1,4}=c_{15,6}=c_{14,7}=c_{14,8}=c_{15,9}=c_{16,1,10}=0.\\
\end{array}$$
We also consider the ten syzygies of the monomial curve $\C^{(0)}$, which are induced by the Syzygy Lemma \eqref{lem2}.
\begin{equation}\label{syzyg6}
\begin{array}{l}
X_{10}F_{14}^{(0)}-X_8F_{16,1}^{(0)}+X_7F_{17}^{(0)}=0,\\
X_{10}F_{15}^{(0)}-X_9F_{16,1}^{(0)}+X_7F_{18}^{(0)}=0,\\
X_{10}F_{16}^{(0)}-X_{10}F_{16,1}^{(0)}-X_9F_{17}^{(0)}+X_8F_{18}^{(0)}=0,\\
X_{10}G_{18}^{(0)}-X_8G_{20}^{(0)}+X_6^2F_{16}^{(0)}=0,\\
X_{10}G_{19}^{(0)}-X_9G_{20,1}^{(0)}+X_6X_7F_{16,1}^{(0)}=0,\\
X_{10}G_{20}^{(0)}-X_{10}G_{20,1}^{(0)}+X_6X_{10}F_{14}^{(0)}=0,\\
X_{10}G_{21}^{(0)}-X_7X_{10}F_{14}^{(0)}-X_6X_{10}F_{15}^{(0)}=0,\\
X_{10}G_{22}^{(0)}-X_6X_{10}F_{16}^{(0)}-X_8X_{10}F_{14}^{(0)}=0,\\
X_{10}G_{26}^{(0)}-X_{10}^2F_{16,1}^{(0)}-X_9X_{10}F_{17}^{(0)}=0,\\
X_{10}G_{27}^{(0)}-X_{10}^2F_{17}^{(0)}-X_9X_{10}F_{18}^{(0)}=0.\\
\end{array}
\end{equation}
\medskip
\noindent The $10$ above syzygies of the monomial curve give rise to $10$ polynomial equations
between the $14$ polynomials $F_{i}'s$ and $G_{j}'s$.
\begin{equation}\label{presyzy6}
\begin{array}{l}
X_{10}F_{14}-X_8F_{16,1}+X_7F_{17},\\
X_{10}F_{15}-X_9F_{16,1}+X_7F_{18},\\
X_{10}F_{16}-X_{10}F_{16,1}-X_9F_{17}+X_8F_{18},\\
X_{10}G_{18}-X_8G_{20}+X_6^2F_{16},\\
X_{10}G_{19}-X_9G_{20,1}+X_6X_7F_{16,1},\\
X_{10}G_{20}-X_{10}G_{20,1}+X_6X_{10}F_{14},\\
X_{10}G_{21}-X_7X_{10}F_{14}-X_6X_{10}F_{15},\\
X_{10}G_{22}-X_6X_{10}F_{16}-X_8X_{10}F_{14},\\
X_{10}G_{26}-X_{10}^2F_{16,1}-X_9X_{10}F_{17},\\
X_{10}G_{27}-X_{10}^2F_{17}-X_9X_{10}F_{18}.\\
\end{array}
\end{equation}
Again, we compute the linearization of the above ten polynomials, which is isomorphic to the weighted
vector space $T^{1,-}_{\mathbf{k[\N]}|\mathbf{k}}$. To do this, we make the substitutions $X_i\mapsto t^i$ and
solve a homogeneous linear system with $60$ equations. We can solve it in way that the solution depends only on the $15$ coefficients:
$$\begin{array}{cccccccc}
d_{18,12}, & d_{18,11}, & c_{15,8}, & c_{16,1,9}, & c_{16,1,8},& c_{15,7}, & c_{14,6}, & d_{18,6},\\
d_{18,10}, & c_{14,5}, & d_{18,5}, & c_{14,4},& d_{18,4}, & d_{18,3}, & c_{14,2}. & \\
\end{array}$$
\noindent Therefore the compactified moduli space $\overline{\mathcal{M}_{6,1}^{\N}}$
can be realized as a closed subset of the $14$-dimensional weighted projective
space $\mathbb{P}(T^{1,-}_{\mathbf{k[\N]}|\mathbf{k}})\cong\proj^{14}_{\alpha}$, where
$\alpha=(2,3,4,4,5,5,6,6,7,8,8,9,10,11,12)$. Since the odd symmetric semigroup $\N$ is ne\-ga\-ti\-vely graded, cf. \cite{RV77},
the moduli space $\mathcal{M}_{6,1}^{\N}$ has codimension three in $\mathcal{M}_{6,1}$, cf. \cite{N16,Del73}. Hence
$\overline{\mathcal{M}_{6,1}^{\N}}$ has dimension $11$.
\noindent Now we have to take each polynomial in \eqref{presyzy6} and make successive divisions in order that
all its monomials belongs to the basis $\Lambda_3$ or $\Lambda_4$, it is possible by virtue of Lemma \ref{lem3}.
This procedure is completely computational and we can make it by using a suitable software on computer algebra, like
Singular or Maple. Here we do not display the resulting polynomials, just because they have a huge number of monomials.
Then, we make the substitutions $X_i\mapsto t^i$, with $i=6,7,8,9,10$, on the $10$ polynomials whose monomials
are in $\Lambda_3$ and $\Lambda_4$ and solve $188$ polynomial equations. This system can be solved by
increasing weights whose solution depends only on the $15$ coefficients of the linearization that here we rename them:
\begin{equation*}
\begin{array}{l}
d_{18,i}:=b_{i}\ \ (i=3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12),\\
c_{14,j}:=a_j\ \ (j=2, 4, 5, 6), \\
c_{16,1,8}:=b_8, \ \ c_{15,7}:=a_7,\ \ c_{15,8}:=a_8,\ \ c_{16,1,9}:=a_9.
\end{array}
\end{equation*}
By Theorem \ref{teo3} we can conclude that the moduli space
$\overline{\mathcal{M}_{6,1}^{\N}}$ is given by the zero locus of following $5$ isobaric polynomials.
\medskip
\noindent$\begin{array}{l}
\vartheta_{15}:={{4}}a_{{5}}a_{{6}}-a_{{2}}a_{{5}}b_{{8}}+a_{{4}}a_{{5}}b_{{6}}-a_{{4}}b_{{3}}b_{{8}}+{a_{{5}}}^{3}+{a_{{5}}}^{2}b_{{5}}+a_{{4}}b_{{11}}+a_{{5}}b_{{10}}+2\,a_{{7}}b_{{8}}.\\
\end{array}$
\bigskip
\noindent $\begin{array}{l}
\vartheta_{13}:=2\,a_{{2}}a_{{5}}a_{{6}}+{a_{{4}}}^{2}a_{{5}}+{a_{{4}}}^{2}b_{{5}}+a_{{4}}a_{{5}}b_{{4}}+a_{{4}}a_{{6}}b_{{3}}+{a_{{5}}}^{2}b_{{3}}-a_{{4}}a_{{9}}+a_{{5}}a_{{8}}-a_{{5}}b_{{8}}\\
-2\,a_{{6}}a_{{7}}.\\
\end{array}$
\bigskip
\noindent $\begin{array}{l}
\vartheta_{17}:=a_{{5}}b_{{12}}-a_{{2}}{a_{{5}}}^{3}-a_{{2}}{a_{{5}}}^{2}b_{{5}}-a_{{4}}a_{{5}}b_{{8}}-a_{{4}}b_{{5}}b_{{8}}+2\,{a_{{5}}}^{2}a_{{7}}+a_{{5}}a_{{7}}b_{{5}}-a_{{5}}a_{{8}}b_{{4}}\\-a_{{5}}a_{{9}}b_{{3}}
-a_{{6}}b_{{11}}+a_{{9}}b_{{8}}.\\
\end{array}$
\bigskip
\noindent $\begin{array}{l}
\vartheta_{16}:=a_{{2}}a_{{4}}{a_{{5}}}^{2}+a_{{2}}a_{{4}}a_{{5}}b_{{5}}-a_{{2}}a_{{6}}b_{{8}}-2\,a_{{4}}a_{{5}}a_{{7}}-a_{{4}}{a_{{6}}}^{2}-a_{{4}}a_{{6}}b_{{6}}-a_{{4}}a_{{7}}b_{{5}}+{b_{{8}}}^{2}\\
+a_{{4}}a_{{8}}b_{{4}}+a_{{4}}a_{{9}}b_{{3}}-a_{{4}}b_{{4}}b_{{8}}-{a_{{5}}}^{2}a_{{6}}-a_{{5}}a_{{6}}b_{{5}}-a_{{5}}b_{{3}}b_{{8}}-a_{{4}}b_{{12}}-a_{{6}}b_{{10}}-a_{{8}}b_{{8}}.\\
\end{array}$
\medskip
\noindent $\begin{array}{l}
\vartheta_{19}:={a_{{2}}}^{2}{a_{{5}}}^{3}+{a_{{2}}}^{2}{a_{{5}}}^{2}b_{{5}}+a_{{2}}a_{{4}}{a_{{5}}}^{2}b_{{3}}+a_{{2}}a_{{4}}a_{{5}}b_{{3}}b_{{5}}-4\,a_{{2}}{a_{{5}}}^{2}a_{{7}}-3\,a_{{2}}a_{{5}}a_{{7}}b_{{5}}\\
+b_{{8}}b_{{11}}+a_{{2}}a_{{5}}a_{{8}}b_{{4}}+a_{{2}}a_{{5}}a_{{9}}b_{{3}}+{a_{{4}}}^{2}a_{{5}}a_{{6}}+{a_{{4}}}^{2}a_{{5}}b_{{6}}+{a_{{4}}}^{2}a_{{6}}b_{{5}}+{a_{{4}}}^{2}b_{{5}}b_{{6}}+a_{{4}}{a_{{5}}}^{3}\\
-a_{{9}}b_{{10}}+2\,a_{{4}}{a_{{5}}}^{2}b_{{5}}-2\,a_{{4}}a_{{5}}a_{{7}}b_{{3}}+a_{{4}}a_{{5}}{b_{{5}}}^{2}-a_{{4}}a_{{7}}b_{{3}}b_{{5}}+a_{{4}}a_{{8}}b_{{3}}b_{{4}}+a_{{4}}a_{{9}}{b_{{3}}}^{2}\\
-a_{{2}}a_{{5}}b_{{12}}-a_{{2}}a_{{6}}b_{{11}}+a_{{4}}a_{{5}}b_{{10}}-a_{{4}}a_{{6}}a_{{9}}-a_{{4}}a_{{9}}b_{{6}}-a_{{4}}b_{{3}}b_{{12}}-a_{{4}}b_{{4}}b_{{11}}+a_{{4}}b_{{5}}b_{{10}}\\
-{a_{{5}}}^{2}a_{{9}}+4\,a_{{5}}{a_{{7}}}^{2}-a_{{5}}a_{{9}}b_{{5}}-a_{{5}}b_{{3}}b_{{11}}+2\,{a_{{7}}}^{2}b_{{5}}-2\,a_{{7}}a_{{8}}b_{{4}}-2\,a_{{7}}a_{{9}}b_{{3}}+2\,a_{{7}}b_{{12}}\\
-a_{{8}}b_{{11}}.\\
\end{array}$
\bigskip
By intersecting $\overline{\mathcal{M}_{6,1}^{\N}}$ with the open affine chart $\{a_5=1\}$ of $\mathbb{P}^{15}$, we see that $\overline{\mathcal{M}_{6,1}^{\N}}$
admits the following local parametrization
\medskip
\noindent $\begin{array}{l}
b_{10}=a_{{4}}b_{{3}}b_{{8}}+a_{{2}}b_{{8}}-a_{{4}}a_{{6}}-a_{{4}}b_{{6}}-a_{
{4}}b_{{11}}-2\,a_{{7}}b_{{8}}-b_{{5}}-1\\
b_{12}=a_{{4}}b_{{5}}b_{{8}}+a_{{2}}b_{{5}}+a_{{4}}b_{{8}}+a_{{6}}b_{{11}}-a_
{{7}}b_{{5}}+a_{{8}}b_{{4}}+a_{{9}}b_{{3}}-a_{{9}}b_{{8}}+a_{{2}}-2\,a
_{{7}}\\
b_8={a_{{4}}}^{2}b_{{5}}+a_{{4}}a_{{6}}b_{{3}}+2\,a_{{2}}a_{{6}}+{a_{{4}}}
^{2}-a_{{4}}a_{{9}}+a_{{4}}b_{{4}}-2\,a_{{6}}a_{{7}}+a_{{8}}+b_{{3}}.
\end{array}$
\medskip
\noindent Since $\mathcal{M}_{6,1}^{\N}$ is irreducible \cite[Thm 1.1]{Bu13}, the moduli variety $\mathcal{M}_{6,1}^{\N}$ is rational of dimension $11$.
We also note that Bullock \cite[Thm. 1]{Bu14} proved that the moduli spaces $\mathcal{M}_{g,1}^{\N}$ are stably rationals when $2\leq g\leq 6$,
with the possible exceptions $<6,7,8,9,10>$ and $<5,7,8,9,11>$, the last one is not subcanonical.
For a given monomial curve $\C$ associated to a semigroup $\N$, its obstruction space lies in the
second cohomological module of cotangent complex $T^2:=T^2(\k[\N]|\k)$. As noted in the beginning of the last section of this work,
if $\N$ is symmetric and generated by less than five elements, the monomial curve $\C$ can be smoothed without
any obstructions, which implies that $\CM$ is the weighted projective space $\proj(T^{1,-}(\k[\N]|\k))$.
The obstructions spaces of the two examples of this section are nonzero. To see this,
we use the description of $T^2$ given by Buschweitz in \cite[Thm 2.3.1]{Bu80}, and we can conclude that for genus
five, $\N=<5,6,7,8>$, the homogeneous graded part of degree $-9$ of $T^2$ has dimension $1$, for genus $6$, $\N=<6,7,8,9,10>$,
the homogeneous graded part of degree $-13$ has dimension $1$, and in both cases $T^1$ and $T^2$ are negatively graded.
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Александр Дмитриевич Андреев (наст. имя — Василий Дмитриевич, (12) 25 мая 1915, с. Красное, Курмышский уезд, Нижегородская губерния, Российская империя — август 1975, Москва) — русский советский , .
Биография
Из крестьян. В 1930 году отправился в г. Дзержинск и поступил на учёбу в ФЗУ. В 1933 году переехал в Москву, где работал столяром, сварщиком, шофёром. В 1935 году поступил в школу киноактёров при студии «Мосфильм», затем в 1939 году стал студентом ВГИКа. Во время учёбы снимался в фильме Марка Донского «Мои университеты» (1939) и в ряде других.
Перед началом войны перевёлся на сценарный факультет института.
Участник Великой Отечественной войны.
В 1941 году ушёл добровольцем на фронт. Во время битвы за Москву, командуя батальоном, получил тяжёлое ранение. В 1942 году начал свою литературную деятельность корреспонденциями с фронта, оставаясь офицером действующей армии. После второго ранения, в 1943 году капитан А. Андреев стал штатным военным корреспондентом «Комсомольской правды». В этом качестве участвовал во многих боевых операциях на фронте и в тылу врага.
Участник ночного парашютного десанта Днепровской воздушно-десантной операции.
После демобилизации работал в «Комсомольской правде» и «Литературной газете».
Боевые заслуги А. Андреева отмечены орденами и медалями СССР.
Умер в августе 1975 года. Похоронен на Ваганьковском кладбище (15 уч.).
Творчество
Автор романов и повестей о подвиге советского народа в годы Великой Отечественной войны, становлении молодёжи, теме рабочих и тружеников села. Некоторые его произведения носят автобиографический характер. Очеркист.
Избранные произведения
Падение Берлина (в соавт. сборник фронтовых записок, 1945)
Ясные дали (трилогия)
Взявшись за руки (книга 1, 1950)
Чистые пруды (книга 2, 1955)
Очень хочется жить (книга 3, 1958)
Широкое течение (роман, 1953)
Грачи прилетели (роман, 1960)
Рассудите нас, люди (роман, 1962)
Спокойных не будет (роман, 1968)
Берегите солнце (роман, 1968, продолжение повести «Очень хочется жить»)
В стране моего детства (очерк, 1969)
Сурские дали (очерк, 1970)
Белое пламя цветения (очерк, 1971)
Есенин (роман: кн 1: Легенда (1973), кн 2: (1980)
Прыжок (повесть, 1977)
Ряд книг писателя был экранизирован. По роману «Широкое течение» в 1956 году был снят фильм «Есть такой парень», роман «Рассудите нас, люди» экранизирован в 1971 году под названиями «Молодые».
Его произведения были переведены на болгарский и словацкий языки.
Премии
I премия конкурса на лучшую детскую книгу за книгу «Ясные дали».
Память
Одна из улиц в селе Красное, в котором родился писатель, названа его именем.
Литература
Володеев, И. Труженик, воин, писатель /Иван Васильевич Володеев // Борьба. — 1995. — 16 мая. — (Наши земляки).
Карякин, И. С., Шекуров, Н. Н. Андреев Александр Дмитриевич (1915—1975) // Карякин И. С., Шекуров Н. Н. Очерки истории села Сеченова и Сеченовского района. — М., 1988. — С. 38-42.
Кузнецов, Г. Ясные дали Александра Андреева/ Георгий Кузнецов// Борьба. — 1981. — 23 мая. — О наших земляках.
Храмов, М. И. Александр Дмитриевич Андреев // Храмов М. И. Люди земли теплостанской. — Нижний Новгород: НГЦ, 199. — С. 38-42.
Капитан Александр Андреев // Борьба. — 1985. — 25 мая.
Грудцова О., Правдивое и надуманное/ «Нов. мир», 1953, № 8;
Росляков В., Мужественные люди// «Правда», 1959, 27 сент.;
Аннинский Л., Аребин переезжает в деревню/ «Знамя», 1960, № 6;
Николаев Д., Сквозь схему…// «Лит. газ.», 1960, 10 мая.
Примечания
Ссылки
Андреев Александр Дмитриевич
Андреев Александр Дмитриевич
Члены Союза писателей СССР
Писатели-соцреалисты
Детские писатели СССР
Военные корреспонденты
Лауреаты литературных премий
Похороненные на Ваганьковском кладбище
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Minister Presents Plaque To Cricket Loving Couple
by Paula Harper-Grant | Mar 6, 2020 | Top Stories
Minister of Creative Economy, Culture and Sports, John King, presents Julie Craig with a plaque to commemorate the couple's 45th visit to Barbados while her husband, Simon Craig and Adrian Donovan of the National Sports Council, look on. (P.Harper-Grant/BGIS)
Minister of Creative Economy, Culture and Sports, John King, recently presented a token of appreciation to British couple, Simon and Julie Craig, who were married on February 24, on the Dover cricket field in Christ Church.
Minister King explained that the plaque was presented to the couple to mark their 45th visit to the island, and also to commemorate their unique wedding on the popular cricket ground.
The plaque was inscribed with the words 'Congratulations to Mr. Simon and Julie Craig from the Ministry of Creative Economy, Culture and Sports, Barbados. 45 not out. Keep on batting strong' on a map of Barbados next to a cricket bat and ball.
Mrs. Craig explained that she first visited Barbados in 2007, when the world cup cricket matches were held here, and had 'fallen in love' with the island from then.
She revealed that she came from a cricketing background and that this love of the game had been inculcated in her from childhood.
"I have links back home because I'm the secretary and treasurer and the administrator of a local club back home, which my parents were involved in. My dad played there for 50 years. So, from kids, we've always been involved in cricket and everything," the new bride shared.
The couple, who leave on March 6, thanked the Sports Minister for his gift, and pledged that this visit would not be their last.
paula.harper-grant@barbados.gov.bb
Tags: cricket, John King, Minister of Creative Economy Culture and Sports, Tourism
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{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
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| 4,900
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Q: Weird projectile motion question The question is as follows:
A ball is thrown from a point $O$ towards a vertical wall in such a way that, after rebounding from the wall, it returns to $O$ without striking the ground. The ball's initial velocity has magnitude $U$ and is at an angle $θ$ above the horizontal. When the ball strikes the wall, the horizontal component of its velocity is reversed and halved, but the vertical component is unchanged.
(i) Show that $U^2\sin{2\theta}=3gb$, where $b$ is the horizontal distance of the wall from $O$.
(ii) The point $P$ at which the ball strikes the wall is at a height $\frac{2}{9}b$ above the level of $O$. Find $U$ in terms of $b$ and $g$.
(iii) The ball is thrown again from $O$ with the same speed $U$, strikes the wall at the point $Q$, different from $P$ and returns to $O$ without striking the ground. Find, in terms of $b$, the height of $Q$ above the ground.
I found parts (i) and (ii) relatively straight-forward to solve, and I happened to get $U=\sqrt{5gb}$ for part (ii),
My question is: How is at possible that a particle is projected with the same speed from the same point able to follow the same trajectory both ways but hit a different point on the wall? Or am I missing something here?
A:
How is at possible that a particle is projected with the same speed from the same point able to follow the same trajectory both ways but hit a different point on the wall?
Same speed isn't the same thing as same velocity. Two projectiles launched from the same point with the same speed but different angles will follow different trajectories, as they start off with different velocities.
A: I'm not sure I understand the problem exactly, so do let me know if this doesn't answer your question:
If you've solved the first part, you should be convinced that the particle returns to $O$ when it's projected at a value of $\theta$ that satisfies the following equation: $$\sin{2\theta} = \frac{3 g b}{U^2}.$$ It can be shown that this equation has two roots in the regime $0<\theta<\pi/2$. See, for example, this Math.SE answer to Two roots of arcsin(x)
in the range [0,2π]. Essentially, it all boils down to the fact that $\sin{\theta} = \sin{(\pi-\theta)},$ and therefore that $$\sin{2\theta} = \sin(\pi - 2\theta) = \sin\Big(2\left(\frac{\pi}{2} - \theta\right)\Big).$$
In other words, $\theta$ and $\pi/2 - \theta$ are both solutions to the equation, and therefore there are two values of $\theta$ that satisfy the specified relation and consequently two heights that do, too!
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{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
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About Health Forward
Grantees and Applicants
Johnson County's WIC Community Garden First of Its Kind in Kansas
By Mike Sherry on May 15, 2013
KHI News Service
We all know that low-income families often don't have access to healthy foods. We also know that poverty exists in suburbia.
Those facts led some Johnson County officials to, uh, plow new ground in Olathe.
On Friday, the county christened a community garden for families in WIC — the federal program designed to maintain the health of pregnant women, infants, and children under the age of 5.
WIC has been around since the early 1970s, which is about the same time that organizers formed the American Community Gardening Association.
But when you think about it, community gardening has been around for a lot longer than that in the United States. One researcher traced their roots back to WPA programs during the Great Depression and the Victory Gardens planted on the home front during World War II.
But local organizers think they are one of just a handful of programs around the country to establish a community garden for WIC participants.
The plot, measuring about a third to half an acre in size, sits right next to the county building that houses the WIC program. The garden has enough room for at least a dozen 60-foot beds.
What's really interesting about the endeavor, however, is how the plan germinated in the halls of county government. You might say it was the result of cross-pollination.
That's how Julie Coon, who works in an area overseeing the landfill, came to be the project coordinator.
By day, Coon is the county's solid waste management specialist. But Coon is also a passionate grower who operates an urban farm business on the side.
As Coon told it, the general idea of a county-sponsored community garden had percolated among employees for a couple years.
Then her boss, the deputy director of the county's department of health and environment, heard about a WIC community garden operating in Denver. That was sort of like the fertilizer for people like Coon and the WIC program manager.
They all finally sat down in December, thinking that, maybe they could get something going within the next year or so. But the director of the county's access to healthy foods coalition had other ideas.
"There is grant funding," she told the group. "We can apply for it. It's due in two weeks."
And that's how the county secured the $4,475 grant to start the garden this spring. The grant came from a joint program of the Kansas Health Foundation and the K-State Research and Extension.
County workers did some initial site preparation last month.
The idea is to begin with four beds this year, starting with hearty summer crops like tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. In the fall, they can grow things like beets, carrots, and broccoli.
WIC participants who put sweat equity into the garden will get first dibs on the harvest. But the county is also looking to community volunteers to help weed, water, and pick — even in triple digit temperatures.
Finding those hearty souls won't be the only challenge. A voracious deer population could, quite literally, nip the program in the bud.
So, if you happen to be in the area of 119th Street and Sunset Drive in Olathe, don't be surprised to see a scarecrow next to a county building.
Medical students need to understand poverty and its pernicious effect on health
A Domestic Guy's Guide to Fitness
"Miss Ann, I've been looking forward to this day my entire life"
Health Forward Blog aims to discuss health and health policy issues that impact those most in need in our communities. If you would like your organization to be featured on our blog, please contact us.
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Today information systems can be accessed at any time, any place and in any situation. The majority of people on the streets own a smart phone enabling them a mobile access to the internet. In our environments screens have been continuously growing in the last years from 12 inch up to 24 inch computer screens at a work desk, huge projections or multi-screen displays in control centres or up to 60 inch ultrathin LCD displays supporting a high-resolution television at home. Further on, more and more of these displays get interactive enabling single- or multi-touch control based on finger- or pen-based interaction, gesture recognition or tangible control. They are used by a single-user (like a cell phone), by several persons (e.g. public displays), or by multiple persons at once (in a control centre).
In the future, interaction will be performed by interfaces that can follow the user on all his devices, get automatically adapted to the actual context of the user, and consider his preferences. The interactions can even span over several devices by distributing user interfaces for one or several users to several devices.
Such scenarios require flexible and robust (re-) layouting mechanisms of the user interface and need to consider the underlying tasks and concepts of an interactive application to generate a consistent layout presentation for all states and distributions of the user interface. My research is about to figure out possible layout-adaptation based on the user's context and the modalities and interaction devices used.
The broad range of possible user interface distributions and the diversity of available interaction devices make a complete specification of each potential context-of-use scenario during the application design impossible. Thus, I am trying to figure out ways of modelling such layout adaptations more efficiently at design-time based on interactive tools that take benefit of other already existing information and relate them to the layout generation. Further on I try to identify layout-algorithms at runtime that are capable of calculate adaptations to interaction devices and contexts that have been unknown during design-time.
S. Feuerstack, M. Blumendorf, V. Schwartze, and S. Albayrak, "Model-based Layout Generation," in Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, 2008.
that is embedded in a model-based user interface generation process.
Veit Schwartze, Sebastian Feuerstack, and S. Albayrak, "Behavior-sensitive User Interfaces for Smart Environments," in HCII 2009 – User Modeling, 2009.
situation). In a case study of the "4-star Cooking assistant�?
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{"url":"https:\/\/inverseprobability.com\/talks\/slides\/2015-12-01-logistic-and-glm.slides.html","text":"\nLogistic Regression and GLMs\n\nUniversity of Sheffield\n\nReview\n\n\u2022 Last week: Specified Class Conditional Distributions, $p(\\inputVector_i|\\dataScalar_i, \\parameterVector)$.\n\u2022 Used Bayes Classifier + naive Bayes model to specify joint distribution.\n\u2022 Used Bayes rule to compute posterior probability of class membership.\n\u2022 This week:\n\u2022 direct estimation of probability of class membership.\n\u2022 introduction of generalised linear models.\n\nLogistic Regression and GLMs\n\n\u2022 Modelling entire density allows any question to be answered (also missing data).\n\u2022 Comes at the possible expense of strong assumptions about data generation distribution.\n\u2022 In regression we model probability of $\\dataScalar_i |\\inputVector_i$ directly.\n\u2022 Allows less flexibility in the question, but more flexibility in the model assumptions.\n\u2022 Can do this not just for regression, but classification.\n\u2022 Framework is known as generalized linear models.\n\nLog Odds\n\n\u2022 model the log-odds with the basis functions.\n\u2022 odds are defined as the ratio of the probability of a positive outcome, to the probability of a negative outcome.\n\u2022 Probability is between zero and one, odds are: $\\frac{\\pi}{1-\\pi}$\n\u2022 Odds are between $0$ and $\\infty$.\n\u2022 Logarithm of odds maps them to $-\\infty$ to $\\infty$.\n\nLogistic function\n\n\u2022 Logistic (or sigmoid) squashes real line to between 0 & 1. Sometimes also called a \u2018squashing function\u2019.\n\nPrediction Function\n\n\u2022 Can now write $\\pi$ as a function of the input and the parameter vector as, $\\pi(\\inputVector,\\mappingVector) = \\frac{1}{1+ \\exp\\left(-\\mappingVector^\\top \\basisVector(\\inputVector)\\right)}.$\n\u2022 Compute the output of a standard linear basis function composition ($\\mappingVector^\\top \\basisVector(\\inputVector)$, as we did for linear regression)\n\u2022 Apply the inverse link function, $g(\\mappingVector^\\top \\basisVector(\\inputVector))$.\n\u2022 Use this value in a Bernoulli distribution to form the likelihood.\n\nBernoulli Reminder\n\n\u2022 From last time $P(\\dataScalar_i|\\mappingVector, \\inputVector) = \\pi_i^{\\dataScalar_i} (1-\\pi_i)^{1-\\dataScalar_i}$\n\n\u2022 Trick for switching betwen probabilities\n\nMaximum Likelihood\n\n\u2022 Conditional independence of data: $P(\\dataVector|\\mappingVector, \\inputMatrix) = \\prod_{i=1}^\\numData P(\\dataScalar_i|\\mappingVector, \\inputVector_i).$\n\nLog Likelihood\n\n\\begin{align*} \\log P(\\dataVector|\\mappingVector, \\inputMatrix) = & \\sum_{i=1}^\\numData \\log P(\\dataScalar_i|\\mappingVector, \\inputVector_i) \\\\ = &\\sum_{i=1}^\\numData \\dataScalar_i \\log \\pi_i \\\\ & + \\sum_{i=1}^\\numData (1-\\dataScalar_i)\\log (1-\\pi_i) \\end{align*}\n\nObjective Function\n\n\u2022 Probability of positive outcome for the $i$th data point $\\pi_i = g\\left(\\mappingVector^\\top \\basisVector(\\inputVector_i)\\right),$ where $g(\\cdot)$ is the inverse link function\n\u2022 Objective function of the form \\begin{align*} E(\\mappingVector) = & - \\sum_{i=1}^\\numData \\dataScalar_i \\log g\\left(\\mappingVector^\\top \\basisVector(\\inputVector_i)\\right) \\\\& - \\sum_{i=1}^\\numData(1-\\dataScalar_i)\\log \\left(1-g\\left(\\mappingVector^\\top \\basisVector(\\inputVector_i)\\right)\\right). \\end{align*}\n\nMinimize Objective\n\n\u2022 Grdient wrt $\\pi(\\inputVector;\\mappingVector)$ \\begin{align*} \\frac{\\text{d}E(\\mappingVector)}{\\text{d}\\mappingVector} = & -\\sum_{i=1}^\\numData \\frac{\\dataScalar_i}{g\\left(\\mappingVector^\\top \\basisVector(\\inputVector)\\right)}\\frac{\\text{d}g(\\mappingFunction_i)}{\\text{d}\\mappingFunction_i} \\basisVector(\\inputVector_i) \\\\ & + \\sum_{i=1}^\\numData \\frac{1-\\dataScalar_i}{1-g\\left(\\mappingVector^\\top \\basisVector(\\inputVector)\\right)}\\frac{\\text{d}g(\\mappingFunction_i)}{\\text{d}\\mappingFunction_i} \\basisVector(\\inputVector_i) \\end{align*}\n\n\\begin{align*} \\frac{\\text{d}E(\\mappingVector)}{\\text{d}\\mappingVector} = & -\\sum_{i=1}^\\numData \\dataScalar_i\\left(1-g\\left(\\mappingVector^\\top \\basisVector(\\inputVector)\\right)\\right) \\basisVector(\\inputVector_i) \\\\ & + \\sum_{i=1}^\\numData (1-\\dataScalar_i)\\left(g\\left(\\mappingVector^\\top \\basisVector(\\inputVector)\\right)\\right) \\basisVector(\\inputVector_i). \\end{align*}\n\nOptimization of the Function\n\n\u2022 Can\u2019t find a stationary point of the objective function analytically.\n\u2022 Optimization has to proceed by numerical methods.\n\u2022 Similarly to matrix factorization, for large data stochastic gradient descent (Robbins Munro (Robbins and Monro, 1951) optimization procedure) works well.\n\n\u2022 This approach used in many internet companies.\n\u2022 Billions of users\n\u2022 How do you choose who to show what?\n\u2022 Logistic regression used in combination with decision trees\n\u2022 Paper available here\n\n{ ## Olivetti Glasses Data\n\nLet\u2019s classify images with logistic regression. We\u2019ll look at a data set of individuals with glasses. We can load in the data from pods as follows.\n\nGoing Further: Optimization\n\nOther optimization techniques for generalized linear models include Newton\u2019s method, it requires you to compute the Hessian, or second derivative of the objective function.\n\nMethods that are based on gradients only include L-BFGS and conjugate gradients. Can you find these in python? Are they suitable for very large data sets? }\n\nOther GLMs\n\n\u2022 Logistic regression is part of a family known as generalized linear models\n\u2022 They all take the form $g^{-1}(\\mappingFunction_i(x)) = \\mappingVector^\\top \\basisVector(\\inputVector_i)$\n\u2022 Other examples include Poisson regression.\n\nPoisson Distribution\n\n\u2022 Poisson distribution is used for \u2018count data\u2019. For non-negative integers, $y$, $P(y) = \\frac{\\lambda^y}{y!}\\exp(-y)$\n\u2022 Here $\\lambda$ is a rate parameter that can be thought of as the number of arrivals per unit time.\n\u2022 Poisson distributions can be used for disease count data. E.g. number of incidence of malaria in a district.\n\nPoisson Regression\n\n\u2022 In a Poisson regression make rate a function of space\/time. $\\log \\lambda(\\inputVector, t) = \\mappingVector_x^\\top \\basisVector_\\inputScalar(\\inputVector) + \\mappingVector_t^\\top \\basisVector_t(t)$\n\u2022 This is known as a log linear or log additive model.\n\u2022 The link function is a logarithm.\n\u2022 We can rewrite such a function as $\\log \\lambda(\\inputVector, t) = \\mappingFunction_x(\\inputVector) + \\mappingFunction_t(t)$\n\nMultiplicative Model\n\n\u2022 Be careful though \u2026 a log additive model is really multiplicative. $\\log \\lambda(\\inputVector, t) = \\mappingFunction_x(\\inputVector) + \\mappingFunction_t(t)$\n\u2022 Becomes $\\lambda(\\inputVector, t) = \\exp(\\mappingFunction_x(\\inputVector) + \\mappingFunction_t(t))$\n\u2022 Which is equivalent to $\\lambda(\\inputVector, t) = \\exp(\\mappingFunction_x(\\inputVector))\\exp(\\mappingFunction_t(t))$\n\u2022 Link functions can be deceptive in this way.","date":"2021-09-23 12:24:53","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 2, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9892610311508179, \"perplexity\": 3475.7054562970497}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": false, \"markdown_code\": false, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-39\/segments\/1631780057421.82\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210923104706-20210923134706-00299.warc.gz\"}"}
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Q: Converting SWFs to mac .app I'm putting together a program that runs on the desktop rather than being an online program. There are relatively easy ways (http://swf-to-exe.com/) to do that for Windows. Now I need to put together something for Macs. I asked this before and got some good hints which I am now pursuing. This page was recommended.
Can somebody explain what this means? I find adt.bat and adt.jar files, but I am clueless as to what these directions are telling me to do:
adt -package
-keystore ../cert.p12 -storetype pkcs12
-target bundle
myApp.app
myApp-app.xml
myApp.swf icons resources
I've been doing many searches for information about this but haven't found it.
Here are the instructions I got from Jeff Ward in this question:
In Flash Develop, I created an "AIR AS3 Projector" type project named
DesktopTest. I then modified the Packager.bat file according to the
article I posted above. Change the OUTPUT and call adt lines and leave
the other lines of the file in-tact:
set OUTPUT=-target bundle %AIR_NAME% And:
call adt -package %OPTIONS% %SIGNING_OPTIONS% %OUTPUT% %APP_XML%
%FILE_OR_DIR% You then need to run CreateCertificate.bat once
(right-click, execute). After that, compile your project and run
PackageApp.bat. For my project named DesktopTest, this results in a
DesktopTest sub directory that is my compiled app, with a
DesktopTest.exe in it.
That part makes sense. What I don't understand is how to deal with the information from Adobe. I'm sure it's simple, but this is an area I haven't dealt with much and I'm drawing a blank.
A: Quick google search brought up this: http://www.multidmedia.com/software/zinc/#Download it works for both Mac OS X and Windows.
A: Just got the following from Phillipe, the admin on the FlashDevelop discussion board:
Yes AIR allows you to package a SWF into an application.
This isn't simple though and everything has to be done through the
command line. You'll have to search quite a bit to figure how things
work but that's quite powerful.
It looks like this is not well documented. If anybody knows of a good place for documentation, please let me know.
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{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
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package de.hub.clickwatch.apps.examples.logvshbase;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client.HTable;
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client.Put;
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client.Result;
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client.ResultScanner;
import org.eclipse.emf.ecore.util.EcoreUtil;
import org.eclipse.equinox.app.IApplication;
import org.eclipse.equinox.app.IApplicationContext;
import com.google.inject.Inject;
import com.google.inject.name.Named;
import de.hub.clickwatch.main.ClickWatchExternalLauncher;
import de.hub.clickwatch.main.IArgumentsProvider;
import de.hub.clickwatch.main.IClickWatchContext;
import de.hub.clickwatch.main.IClickWatchMain;
import de.hub.clickwatch.main.IRecordProvider;
import de.hub.clickwatch.recorder.ClickWatchRecorderModule;
import de.hub.clickwatch.recorder.database.DataBase;
import de.hub.clickwatch.recorder.database.HBaseRowMap;
import de.hub.clickwatch.recorder.database.Record;
import de.hub.clickwatch.recorder.recorder.HBaseUtil;
import de.hub.clickwatch.util.ILogger;
import de.hub.clickwatch.util.Throwables;
import de.hub.emfxml.util.EmfXmlUtil;
public class ExtrapolateDataBase implements IClickWatchMain, IApplication {
@Inject @Named(ClickWatchRecorderModule.I_PUTS_BUFFER_SIZE) int handlerPerRecord;
@Inject HBaseUtil hbaseUtil;
@Inject ILogger logger;
@Override
public void main(IClickWatchContext ctx) {
Record sourceRecord = ctx.getAdapter(IRecordProvider.class).getRecord();
Record targetRecord = EcoreUtil.copy(sourceRecord);
HBaseRowMap sourceRowMap = sourceRecord.getHBaseRowMap();
String[] args = ctx.getAdapter(IArgumentsProvider.class).getArguments();
String targetRecordName = args[0];
int factor = Integer.parseInt(args[1]);
long offset = sourceRecord.getEnd() - sourceRecord.getStart();
targetRecord.setName(targetRecordName);
HTable targetTable = hbaseUtil.getHBaseTable(targetRecordName, true);
HTable sourceTable = hbaseUtil.getHBaseTable(sourceRecord.getName(), false);
List<Put> puts = new ArrayList<Put>();
try {
ResultScanner scanner = sourceTable.getScanner(HBaseUtil.colFamily, HBaseUtil.col);
Result result = scanner.next();
while (result != null) {
byte[] row = result.getRow();
byte[] value = result.getValue(HBaseUtil.colFamily, HBaseUtil.col);
long time = sourceRowMap.getTime(row);
for (int i = 0; i < factor; i++) {
long newTime = time + (i * offset);
row = sourceRowMap.createRow(row, newTime);
Put put = new Put(row);
put.add(HBaseUtil.colFamily, HBaseUtil.col, value);
puts.add(put);
if (puts.size() > handlerPerRecord) {
logger.log(ILogger.DEBUG, "put row, puts size is " + puts.size(), null);
targetTable.put(puts);
puts.clear();
}
}
result = scanner.next();
}
} catch (Exception e) {
Throwables.propagate(e);
}
targetRecord.setEnd(sourceRecord.getStart() + (factor*offset));
((DataBase)sourceRecord.eContainer()).getRecords().add(targetRecord);
try {
targetRecord.eResource().save(EmfXmlUtil.defaultLoadSaveOptions());
} catch (IOException e) {
Throwables.propagate(e);
}
}
@Override
public Object start(IApplicationContext context) throws Exception {
String[] args = (String[]) context.getArguments().get("application.args");
ClickWatchExternalLauncher.launch(args, ExtrapolateDataBase.class);
return EXIT_OK;
}
@Override
public void stop() {
System.out.println("forced to stop ... rude by OSGI!");
}
public static final void main(String args[]) {
ClickWatchExternalLauncher.launch(args, ExtrapolateDataBase.class);
}
}
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{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
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Tom Crean
An Irish Antarctic Explorer
Biographer – Michael Smith
Tom Crean Quiz
Ernest Shackleton Quiz
The South Pole Quiz
Tom Crean For Kids
Tom Crean Timeline – Timeline of the life of Tom Crean.
The Endurance Expedition
The James Caird
Scott's Hut Antarctica
Shackleton's Hut Antarctica
The Great White South
The Worst Journey In The World – Apsley Cherry-Garrard
South by Ernest Shackleton
Into The Frozen South
Amundsen – History of The South Pole
Instagram Feed – Tom Crean Discovery
Shop – Polar Apparel
Tom Crean - Antarctic Explorer
A brief overview of the life of Ireland's greatest Antarctic explorer.
The Scott Expeditions
The Discovery and Terra Nova Expeditions.
With Shackleton
The remarkable tale of heroism and survival on The Endurance Expedition
To The End Of The Earth
Some amazing facts and information all about the frozen continent. For kids and adults alike!
← Tom Crean – Christmas Day 1902.
On This Day – January 5th 1922 →
On This Day, January 4th 1912 – Tom Crean parts company with the polar party.
Crean and Scott's Last Farewell
Terra Nova Expedition
On January 4th, 1912, Tom Crean would bid a final farewell to Captain Robert Falcon Scott, on the Polar Plateau, approximately 150 miles from the South Pole. Crean had served with Scott on the Discovery Expedition 1901 – 1904, and afterwards at Scott's request, Crean joined him as a member of the crew of the Victorious in 1906. The two men would serve together from this point, right up until Scott's untimely demise on his return from the South Pole, and they had formed a strong mutual respect for each other.
Above: Camp on the polar march taken during the last, tragic voyage to Antarctica by Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his crew, among them Lieutenant Henry Robertson (Birdie) Bowers who took this photograph, circa December 1911. Bowers and Scott were both tutored by Herbert Ponting, the renowned photographer who was the camera artist to the expedition, which enabled them to take their own memorable pictures before perishing on their return from the South Pole on or after 29th March 1912. (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)
On the 3rd of January Scott had announced that his Polar Party would consist of 5 men, namely Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Taff Evans and Oates, while Tom Crean, Bill Lashly and Lieutenant Teddy Evans were to return to base, as the last supporting team. Crean was sorely disappointed, not to have been among the number of the Polar Party, and privately he had surely thought he would have been selected. When one takes into consideration, the amount of time he had served under Scott, coupled with his vast experience on the ice, he probably should have been. Crean had also been spared the rigours of man hauling the sledges, on the 400 mile Barrier section of the outward journey, as he had been tasked with leading one of the ponies. He did not fall into harness until the ascent of the Beardmore Glacier, and as a result would have had more reserves of strength than some in the Polar Party, who had hauled for the duration.
Scott referred to the returning party in his diary on January 3rd, 1912 – "They are disappointed but take it well." But it appears Scott did have a lingering sense of guilt, regarding his decision not to elect Crean. On hearing Crean clearing his throat, Scott by way of a justifiable excuse, opined, "that's a bad cold you have Crean." While Crean was not a man to hold a grudge, or indeed question the orders of his Captain, he knew Scott was dishonestly trying to validate his decision.
"I understand a half-sung song, sir," was his curt response.
It (among many other facets of the journey) has long since been argued that Scott made a grave error, by not selecting Crean, and denying the Polar Party the benefits of his indomitable spirit, character, strength and stamina. Many hold the opinion that, had the Irish Giant been among the polar party, things may not have taken such a tragic turn. The truth is we will never know.
What did transpire on the morning of January 4th, 1912, after their rations and supplies had been reapportioned, the two groups readied themselves to go their separate ways. The five man Polar Party faced a trek of 150 miles to the Pole, and the return march, while Crean, Evans and Lashly faced a 750 mile journey back to base.
The eight men walked together in the direction of the Pole, for a short distance, before exchanging letters, good wishes and handshakes of farewell. Scott noted, "Poor old Crean wept and even Lashly was affected." Tom Crean, Lt. Evans and Bill Lashly watched and waved as the Polar Party slowly disappeared into the Antarctic whiteness, never to be seen alive again.
The Polar Party at the South Pole
Standing from left is Wilson, Scott and Oates – Seated from left is Bowers and Evans
* It is worth noting that Scott's decision to take five men to the Pole rendered Crean, Lashly and Evans as a three-man sledge hauling team, as opposed to the normal four-man team. When Evans fell out of harness, due to snow blindness, during the decent of the Beardmore Glacier it was up to Lashly and Crean to drag their supplies. Shortly afterwards Evans was afflicted with scurvy, and not only could he not contribute to the effort, he was placed on the sledge and hauled onward by the two men, who refused his order to leave him behind and save themselves. The three-man team had now become a two-man team, hauling one man on top of their provisions.
Source Michael Smith Tom Crean – An Illustrated Life. The Collins Press, 2011
Posted in 1912, On This Day, Robert Falcon Scott, South Pole, Terra Nova, The Southern Journey, Tom Crean | Tagged polar party, Scott, Terra Nova | 2 Replies
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How the loss of Shackleton's Socks changed the course of Antarctic History
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In Defence of the Defendable – Edward Evans did not Sabotage Captain Scott's Southern Journey
Honouring Tom Crean by Bill Sheppard with Aileen Crean O'Brien
Photographs from Captain Scott's Terra Nova Expedition
Shackleton, Crean and Worsley Return To Elephant Island
Tom Crean Antarctic Explorer Portrait.
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Jamboroo
Football Is Not Family
Drew Magary
Filed to: jamborooFiled to: jamboroo
balls deep
Drew Magary's Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday during the NFL season. Email Drew here.
You may remember last year when the NFL's marketing department foisted the world's worst Vikings/Cowboys/Steelers/Bengals/London Monarchs family upon the general population. It was an ad that everyone (me) despised, but it must have moved product because the NFL has taken that shitty ad and made an entire CAMPAIGN out of it for 2015.
The Worst NFL Family In America Must Be Stopped
Drew Magary's Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday during the NFL…
You cannot escape the FOOTBALL IS FAMILY campaign. At every break, you get a tasteful interview with "Brandon" (that would be Marshall) or a parade of tasteful middle-aged Cialis ad actresses all rocking team gear. They really do have a "women's" version of the commercial where they stick a "nflshop.com/women" URL at the end. Someone at the NFL was like, "Give the women an ad and put the word WOMEN at the end so that women will know it's for women." If Roger Goodell has his way, all Planned Parenthoods will become NFL Shop outlets by 2017.
Now, as someone who likes football AND has a family, I'm here to tell you something you totally already knew, and that is that football is NOT family. Not at all. Football is fucking WAR. Football is anger and beer and broken legs and nachos. It is not a feel-good experience. My job as a football fan is to get shitfaced and be miserable for nine hours every Sunday. Family has nothing to do with it.
If anything, family interferes with football. I spend my entire Sunday telling my family to leave me the hell alone so that I can watch football properly. Do they ever join me? Do we ever snuggle up on a sectional and cheer on our gosh darn boys? FUCK AND NO. That's not real life. Real life is me having to pause the game because the toddler set fire to the oldest kid's hair. Real life is people around the house screaming and being annoying and taking me away from the bliss of ignoring the game action to check fantasy updates on my phone. I am at my most irritable on Sundays because I want to watch football and I know there will be obstacles. And then my family gets mad at me, and I get mad at them, and we spend the whole day seething. I want to watch football in an airtight box that is completely cut off from the rest of the universe, and I don't possess such a MAN BOX, so I am mad.
THAT is what an NFL Shop ad should show. I want an NFL Shop ad directed by some Danish asshole shot in natural light where daddy is drunk and everyone is fighting and unhappy. That would get me to buy some jerseys. Anything else is a flagrant lie. Football is not family. Football is MURDER.
All games in the Jamboroo are evaluated for sheer watchability on a scale of 1 to 5 Throwgasms.
Five Throwgasms
Packers at Broncos: If the Broncos can't beat the Packers at home, then your Super Bowl matchup is virtually assured to be Patriots/Packers, because there's no way in hell that the fucking Bengals or Panthers are gonna be able to knock off either of those two. I'm annoyed already. WHY EVEN HAVE PLAYOFFS?! This sucks.
Bengals at Steelers: Listen, I know I said that daily fantasy was pure evil just one month ago. But that was before I ripped off THREE smoking hot head-to-head wins in a row. I AM A SHARK NOW. And so I am here to issue the following correction: Daily Fantasy is NOT evil. It's fucking awesome. I'm up a whopping 11 dollars and 20 cents, bitch! I MAY NEVER LOSE AGAIN! What if I become a millionaire?! Me! Just an Average Joe who parlayed his gut football instincts into a goddamn war chest. That could happen! Don't you take my DFS away from me, feds. I will fucking fight you. I will take you on and risk arrest so I can enter multiplier pools until I've signed my house away DON'T MAKE ME GO BACK TO REGULAR FANTASY I WON'T DO IT I'M SO AWFUL AT IT PLEASE I NEED THIS BRO.
Four Throwgasms
Dolphins at Patriots: Did you see Dan Campbell's postgame speech against the Texans? This man is a national treasure:
"They had some drops! They had a lot of drops! Some people would say you gotta catch the ball. I'mma tell you: You transferred energy without physically even touchin' 'em. And things like that happen, guys. Things like that happen. THEY FELT YOU."
You got that? The Miami Dolphins now have The Force. Tonight, they might just Force-choke Tom Brady and walk away with the football. I support that. I want Dan Campbell to transfer more of his spiritual Jaden Smith vibes into Ryan Tannehill.
Three Throwgasms
Jets at Raiders: The Texans had Ryan Fitzpatrick and Ryan Mallett last season and somehow they gave away the better of the two. It has to hurt watching Fitzpatrick throw for a meager 86.1 passer rating and realize you could have had THAT. Ohhhh, what Bill O'Brien would give for an 86.1-rated passer right now. He'd fill his chin cleft with joint compound for that.*
*Shockingly, Fitzpatrick had even better stats with the Texans last season than he does with the Jets this season. His yards per attempt were better. His completion percentage was better. He had a decent TD:INT ratio. Kinda makes you wonder why they ever get rid of him. Seriously, what kind of beef-brained shithead runs that Houston team?
Colts at Panthers: Panthers wideout Philly Brown has insisted that everyone refer to him as Corey Brown (his real name) from now on, and that is unacceptable. Philly Brown is a much cooler name. You should be legally unable to go by anything other than Philly once your nickname is Philly. Even Doug Martin is like, "Fuck you. You're Philly."
Cardinals at Browns: I was in Cleveland last week! I was checking out town with someone and we were driving through a suburb when they said, "This is Parma. It's… Well, it's the racist part of town." So if you're ever hanging around Cleveland and you're looking for some racism, Parma is your hood. Nice city otherwise! They have restaurants and everything. FUN TIMES IN CLEVELAND TODAY CLEEEEVELAND!
They were also gearing up for the Republican National Convention next summer, which meant that all the roads were under renovation. They were even building a second bridge into town to accommodate the event. I had no idea that a political convention could inspire such IOC-levels of new infrastructure. One day the Democrats will hold a bidding war and put their convention inside a brand-new, custom $500 million velodrome in Akron. The system works.
I also clogged my hotel toilet in Cleveland. I walked in, dropped anchor, and then watched in horror as the toilet water rose just up to the rim before settling back down. That's not a fun call down to the concierge. I fled the premises as quickly as possible when they sent the fixer up.
Bucs at Falcons: According to this list, the Bucs have appeared on Sunday Night Football once. That's it. And they're not alone! The Browns, Raiders, Rams, Bucs, and Bills all have a single meager appearance in the league's weekly showcase game. And only the Bucs won theirs. It's amazing that those six teams have managed to remain so thoroughly miserable for an entire decade. I feel for them. I really do. It's nice to win, but it's also nice to feel like your team is RELEVANT, and that other non-fans might actually be interested in them. By contrast, the Cowboys have been on Sunday night 33 times, more than any other team. And that's unfair. The Cowboys are shitty and annoying. If there were any justice, they'd be down there with the dregs.
Vikings at Bears: I would honestly rather swallow my own piss than a full dip. I tried dip at camp when I was a kid and was sick for hours because I'm not a real man. There's no way I could handle downing an entire chaw. I'd jump into an industrial fan.
Giants at Saints: Right after the New York Times published that Baby Hitler poll last week, everyone on Twitter (me included) got in on the action because, at that moment, you could tell virtually ANY Hitler joke and have it be okay! You know how nice it was to have a free Hitler pass for a day? Every day on the web should be Hitler Day!
Two Throwgasms
Seahawks at Cowboys: Normally, I buy it when any coach explains away a sideline fracas by saying guys were "emotional" or whatever. Totally plausible. But come on, man. This Greg Hardy thing was different. This was a legitimate shitbag who terrorized a woman and has never displayed any remorse about it. And then he went off on a fucking special teams coach for a play that he wasn't even involved in. This wasn't like a QB and a wideout arguing over who was to blame for a pick. This was some rampaging asshole getting after a random coach to NO benefit of the team around him. There's a clear difference between what he did and your average sideline beef. There's no defending Hardy, even given his skill set. This was a good team without him last year and an AWFUL team with him this year. It's not like the Futon King over here is the X-factor. Fuck that.
One Throwgasm
Chiefs at Lions (London): It's obvious now that, one day, the NFL will have a game in Europe at 9:30 a.m. every week. There won't be an actual team in London because there doesn't need to be. They'll just fill out a full dance card for Wembley so you can wake up every morning and watch the Jaguars eke out a win against a sub-MAC team on your iPad every Sunday. I am fine with this. This is arguably the only high point of the Roger Goodell tenure. We could space out the week so that one game is played in every other time zone. You could have one game in Japan, then another in Africa, and then another on the Faroe Islands. That way, I can look up from my Cheez-Its at any time and watch Matthew Stafford get murdered by his own offensive line. That would be pretty great!
Between the London experiment and the prospect of three teams all suing to move to L.A. simultaneously, the NFL is slowly proving that it doesn't really matter WHERE the teams play. As much as you may value your local team, the NFL could easily move it to a fucking ice floe in Greenland and still have it be successful. So long as there's a team name and fantasy players to pick, you're still gonna watch. They could relocate EVERY team to Los Angeles. They could build one $5 billion dual mega-Stadium, put all 32 teams on a rotation, set up permanent cameras, pay extras to sit in the stands, and it would be fine. This is already a made-for-television venture, so they may as well go all the way. I haven't set foot in Minnesota in over two decades, but that's still my team and they'd be my team even if the NFL switched out every player with a house cat and put them on Mars. I'm a trained sheep at this point.
49ers at Rams: It wasn't that long ago that Colin Kaepernick strolled into Lambeau for a playoff game and beat Aaron Rodgers in -800 Kelvin temperatures. This can't possibly be all on him, man. I know he may have boned Aldon Smith's girlfriend (oops!), but this isn't the same as RG3's decline. Kaep never got hurt. His skills are still intact. Meanwhile, they shipped out all the good coaches and half the defense fucking retired and the owner staged one of the more appalling tank jobs in sports history. Of course Kaep was gonna regress. But he's still the least of that team's worries. I'm not trying to make Kaep sound like a saint here because he makes a shitload of mistakes and is fully capable of wanton douchebaggery. But if he gets cut, that team will become utterly hopeless for the rest of forever.
Chargers at Ravens: I hope all the refs got together before this season and, sick of John Harbaugh's shit, decided to troll him for an entire year with bad calls. That would be fair and just. I support terrible officiating when John Harbaugh is the victim.
Titans at Texans: Nope. Fuck this game.
Pregame Song That Makes Me Want To Run Through A Goddamn Brick Wall
"Young & Alive" by Beach Slang, submitted by Jeff. Just put the word "young" anywhere in your song and I'm already on board. Oh, this is for the youths! I'm still one of those! LOL Old people are so beat. LET'S ROCK OUT, FELLOW YOUNG PEOPLE!
Suicide Pick Of The Week
Last week's suicide picks of the Giants, San Diego, and Buffalo went 1-2, making me 12-9 on the season. Again, we now pick three teams for your suicide pool, along with one thing that makes me want to commit suicide. This week, the picks are K.C., St. Louis, Seattle, and this week's report on processed meats causing cancer. Lemme tell you something, BIG MEAT STUDY: You don't have the right to take my bacon away. Everything can give you cancer if you overdo it. But I pace my bacon. I ration that bacon out. You leave my bacon the hell alone.
Related: I eat roughly half a pound of sliced ham daily. Is that bad?
Gregg Easterbrook Memorial Haughty Dipshit Of The Week
Numerous readers have pointed out that GREGGGGGGGG himself was particularly awful this week, offering his usual amalgam of praise for undrafted players, coaches who went to Andover, and Tom Brady's weightlifting schedule. But I refuse to succumb to his GLORY BOY tactics. Instead, let us focus on WaPo columnist Alexandra Petri, who decided to bravely stand with New Jersey governor and novelty-sized beach ball Chris Christie, and against the tyranny of Amtrak's Quiet Car:
I realize I am on the quiet car only when one of the Enforcers on board (there is another word that we could use for them, but I am showing them more mercy than they show me) hovers at my elbow and whispers, in the most self-righteous tone any statement has been uttered by a human being, "This is the quiet car."
Or maybe you could have looked at the sign that says QUIET CAR that hangs from the ceiling of every quiet car? It's not the Illiteracy Car. You're free to read.
As though I didn't know perfectly well that this was the quiet car.
Then why are you talking?
(I didn't, as it happens, but now I am on the defensive.)
Wait, did you or didn't you know?
Why do they need silence, anyhow?
To work? Sleep? Write up exciting nuggets for MMQB the next day about Roger Goodell's pushup regimen?
These people never seem to be working on anything.
Yeah because they can't concentrate because you're on the phone in the fucking quiet car.
Half the joy, for me, of riding the train is listening to Important Acela Businessmen saying things like "Do you have the quarterly? Well, tell Jim if he doesn't have the quarterlies, we're all wasting our time."
That sounds awful. You are a monster.
I love watching families travel together trying to see how long it will be before the children unravel entirely.
Again, monstrous.
Once I witnessed a young child on a train shout, "NEWARK! YAY!" on seeing the sign and half our row burst out laughing. (The child had never been to Newark, he just liked it as a concept. We felt bad for his parents, having to break Newark to him.)
"Poor kid. Doesn't know what a slum is!"
These are moments that people on the quiet car invariably miss out on. And for what?
TO AVOID PEOPLE LIKE YOU. I don't even bother riding that Quiet Car because I'll just sit there for four hours WAITING for the Alexandra Petris of the world to disregard protocol and piss me off. Look what you've done to me, Petri. I have become Peter King. I BLAME YOU.
Emmitt Smith's Lock Of The Week!
"This week I like the Dinner Broncos (+3) to win at home against the Green Day Packers! That Dinner defense is STIFLERING! Now, I'd like to take a moment to talk about Greg Harding, because forensic violets is a problem we all need to solve together. But should Greg Harding be pun-inched for speaking his mind on the Salad sideline? HELP NO! That's leadershit! That's showing that you have a little fire in your jelly! YOU WANT TO MOTORBATE YOUR TEAMMATES! I don't think Greg Hardy should be menstruated for his motorbational tictacs!"
2014 Emmitt Smith record: 5-5
Fantasy Player Who Deserves To Die A Slow, Painful Death
NO ONE BECAUSE I'M ON A WINNING STREAK AND EVERYTHING IS WONDERFUL! If you're losing in fantasy maybe you should do your research, bro!
Fire This Asshole!
Is there anything more exciting than a coach losing his job? All year long, we'll keep track of which coaches will almost certainly get fired at year's end or sooner. And now, your potential 2015 chopping block:
Joe Philbin - FIRED!
Gus Bradley
Mike Pettine
Chuck Pagano*
Mike McCoy
Jim Tomsula
Bill O'Brien
Rex Ryan
Jay Gruden
Reader Brian is not a fan of the Whis…
He is like 4-28 in his past 32 games as a head coach (no joke). His players also hate him because he is an asshole.
I have no evidence of that but I'll choose to believe it anyway.
Great Moments In Poop History
Reader Tom sends in this story I call POOP GOES TO CAMP:
My family had recently moved into a new town, and it was the summer going from elementary school into middle school. My small elementary school would be combining with other schools in town - I would be going to school with a lot of new kids in 6th middle school. Anyway, that summer my parents signed me up for YMCA summer camp which included a few sleep-away camping trips.
One night on one of these trips, for reasons that I cannot remember, I went to bed in my bathing suit. It was one of those bathing suits with the mesh-like underwear attached. I remember waking up in the middle of the night with a rumble in my stomach. I knew I had to go but figured to just go back to bed and hope I woke up the next morning with daylight. No go. Some time later I wake up and it is a pitch black EMERGENCY. I hop up out of my sleeping bag, grab my shoes and a flashlight, open the tent quietly enough to not wake my camp-mates and begin the approximately half mile journey to the rudimentary bathroom at the front of the campground.
I had only just zipped the tent behind me and walked maybe 10 feet when it happens. Poop. In my bathing suit. There was no stopping it. I have to make this half mile walk to the bathroom with poop in my bathing suit. Luckily it is lord-knows-o'clock and there is noone else around so I get to the bathroom in peace. I open the door, head into a stall and begin the delicate process of cleaning up. I shimmy over the seat to get the poop out and it plops directly on the floor in front of the toilet seat. Oh well. Good enough.
I clean up as best as I can but now I have to walk a half of a mile BACK to the campground and I'm not putting my poopy bathing suit back on so... I walk back half naked. I press my oversized shirt down over my naughty bits and walk back. I get to the campground without any more issues (thankfully there were no banjos in the woods) and toss my bathing suit down a hill that was near the campground, sneak back into the tent, and go back to sleep until morning.
The next morning I am awoken by laughter and the unmistakable sounds children make when they find a poopy bathing suit. I step out of the tent and to my horror see my poop-filled bathing suit hanging from a branch maybe 10 feet away from the firepit/eating area. While I was right about the hill, I didn't realize that when I tossed the bathing suit, it got caught on a branch before ever even remotely making its way down the hill.
Of course after waking up I had to use the bathroom. I was hoping someone had already cleaned the poop up off the floor but I walked in the bathroom behind someone's dad and I obviously chose the non-poopy stall. He walked in to the other stall and he audibly yells "OH COME ON WHO SHIT ON THE FLOOR???" I can see my nice, long, 6 inch mess on the floor directly in front of the toilet.
Luckily - LUCKILY - nobody recognized the fact that it was my bathing suit from the day before and the counselors assumed that a kid from the campground at the bottom of the hill had an accident and stashed his suit up near our campground. What a miserable night but at least I avoided being the pooped his pants kid to start middle school.
PS - There were two other camping trips this same summer. One of them I sliced my finger open with a pocketknife requiring a tetanus shot, and another I got bit by a snake and had to be rushed to the emergency room (turns out the snake wasn't venomous). Great fucking summer camp, mom.
Never go to camp.
Gametime Halloween Candy Of The Week
Reese's miniatures! There's a new Reese mini wrapper this Halloween. No more foil. You get the plastic wrapper instead, and it's better because there are no foil bits that break off. Nothing worse than scouring around a floor for shreds of Reese's or Hershey Kiss foil.
Gametime Cheap Beer Of The Week
KINGDOM DARK! From Cambodia! Reader Paul explains:
Greetings from Cambodia, a land where pretty much any beer that didn't have to cross an international border is cheap (fifty cent drafts of Angkor and Anchor beer are commonplace). But even in a crowded field, KINGDOM DARK stands out. It is dark. It is, as the can claims, INSANELY STRONG (it is no quad IPA but in a world of sub-5 percent lagers, 8 percent is Bonds on the juice). It is 60 cents a can even at overpriced markets near tourist hotels.
Channeling Will Gordon, the beer opens with a slight note of roasted grain that quickly turns metallic on the palate (whether that is a result of the brewing process or Kingdom's canning techniques remains a mystery). It finishes slightly hot with a not entirely unpleasant aftertaste. It is disturbingly easy to down this stuff on a hot day...and every day I have spent here has been hot.
I bet! The "insanely strong" on the can makes it. I like it when beermakers cut to the chase. I MUST HAVE IT.
Jim Tomsula's Lifehack Of The Week!
"Island? No no no, Kaep isn't on an island. I've been on islands. I spent eight years on Snake Island filling mud packs. The key to living on Snake Island was: you LET the snakes bite you. Once those fangs are in, they aren't going anywhere. So then you can get grab 'em good. You get a permanent wound, but you also get a meal. It's a fair trade-off."
Sunday Afternoon Movie Of The Week For Ravens Fans
It Follows. This is the VD movie. As a parent, I support any horror movie that teaches teenagers that sex will kill them. That is a perfectly healthy, natural way of endorsing abstinence.
Gratuitous Simpsons Quote
"Honey, I'm your dad. I've lied to you more times than there are stars in the sky."
(NOTE: This was from a new episode that I watched the other day that was shockingly great. Like, it was a legitimately coherent and wonderful new episode of The Simpsons. They don't come along often anymore, but it's worth checking out.)
Enjoy the games, everyone.
Recent from Drew Magary
Could A Dog Win The Hot Dog Eating Contest?
Please, I Ask You All, Murder Me With Butter
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NHRA Funny Car driver Ron Capps seeks win, new record this weekend at Englishtown
By Jerry BonkowskiMay 30, 2014, 12:12 AM EDT
For the last few races, the buildup to one of the more significant milestones in NHRA history has been who would win the 100th national event by a female driver?
Now that Funny Car driver Courtney Force earned that distinction this past Sunday at Topeka, Kansas, another milestone could be on tap in this weekend's 45th annual Toyota NHRA Summernationals at Old Bridge Township Raceway Park in Englishtown, N.J.
You might say Funny Car driver Ron Capps is on a mission at the fabled Englishtown track. It was there two years ago that Capps recorded the fastest elapsed time in a Funny Car in NHRA history: 3.964 seconds.
But if Capps – a previous Funny Car winner at Englishtown in 2006 – has his way, he's going to lay down an even quicker time than that this weekend.
And this time, he wants it to become the NHRA elapsed time record (his 2012 mark, while it remains the quickest in the sport's annals, was not "backed up" in succeeding runs that weekend, thus denying Capps of the national record.
"It was fitting that it happened at such a historic racetrack, and I've got a lot of other great memories there," Capps said in an NHRA media release. "To win there, you have to have a great crew chief and a great team.
"Obviously, the driver has to be on his game to leave on time and keep the car in the middle of the track. That place can go from the most extreme record-setting conditions, like we saw on that 3.96, to hot and humid and tricky."
In a way, Capps has some unfinished business to take care of this weekend.
"That 3.96 is going to get broken this year, and it could be us on Friday night if the conditions are right and we're at the back of the pack on the second qualifying session," Capps said. "(But Englishtown is) a track that's very, very unforgiving for a crew chief that doesn't have his act together."
Capps doesn't have to worry about that. Rahn Tobler was his crew chief in 2012 and remains in that same position today. If anyone can send Capps down the 1,000-foot dragstrip and break that elapsed time mark, it's Tobler.
Although he hasn't won a race yet in 2014, Capps has unquestionably been knocking on the door, having reached the semifinals in five of the last six races, including last weekend at Topeka.
"It's funny because even before our string of semifinal finishes, Rahn Tobler had been playing around a little with the tune-up," Capps said. "A great part of having him as our crew chief and our crew being together for several years is that we don't veer too far away from having a really good car.
"We can try to be the best in qualifying, but we usually have a good car for Sunday when he can make great decisions."
This weekend's event brings to an end a run of three consecutive weekends of racing for the NHRA pros. But after next weekend off, they'll have four straight races to contend with.
That's why Capps wants to go into the upcoming off-weekend with momentum from a win and a potential record.
"I love it because it's a chance for a team like mine to make a run in the points," Capps said. "I don't think many teams can keep their heads above water like ours can.
"It's our time to keep our noses down and make a move in the standings. We have a week off after Englishtown, and then it's four in a row, and we can move up to second or third. It can be a great time for our team."
Qualifying begins Friday with sessions at 4 and 6:15 p.m. The final two qualifying sessions are Saturday at 12:45 and 3:15 p.m. Final eliminations begin Sunday at 11 a.m.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
}
| 169
|
import React, { Component } from 'react';
import { Radio } from 'synfrastructure';
import ToggleScaffold from '../../common/forms/ToggleScaffold';
class Radios extends Component {
constructor(props) {
super(props);
this.state = {
checkedRadio: null,
};
}
toggleRadio(e) {
this.setState({ checkedRadio: e.target.value });
}
render() {
const cmyk = ['cyan', 'magenta', 'yellow', 'key', 'disabled'];
return (
<div className="paper">
<div className="styleguide__title">Radio Inputs</div>
<div className="styleguide__row">
{cmyk.map(color => {
const colorLabel = `${color.charAt(0).toUpperCase()}${color.substr(1)}`;
return (
<ToggleScaffold
key={color}
label={colorLabel}
disabled={color === 'disabled'}
>
<Radio
id={color}
value={color}
checked={this.state.checkedRadio === color}
onChange={this.toggleRadio.bind(this)}
disabled={color === 'disabled'}
/>
</ToggleScaffold>
);
})}
</div>
</div>
);
}
}
export default Radios;
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 3,338
|
package it.smartcommunitylab.riciclo.app.importer.model;
import org.hibernate.validator.constraints.NotEmpty;
public class Istituzioni {
@NotEmpty
private String nome;
@NotEmpty
private String descrizione;
private String ufficio;
private String indirizzo;
private String orarioUfficio;
private String sito;
private String pec;
private String email;
private String telefono;
private String fax;
private String localizzazione;
private String facebook;
public String getNome() {
return nome;
}
public void setNome(String nome) {
this.nome = nome;
}
public String getUfficio() {
return ufficio;
}
public void setUfficio(String ufficio) {
this.ufficio = ufficio;
}
public String getIndirizzo() {
return indirizzo;
}
public void setIndirizzo(String indirizzo) {
this.indirizzo = indirizzo;
}
public String getDescrizione() {
return descrizione;
}
public void setDescrizione(String descrizione) {
this.descrizione = descrizione;
}
public String getSito() {
return sito;
}
public String getOrarioUfficio() {
return orarioUfficio;
}
public void setOrarioUfficio(String orarioUfficio) {
this.orarioUfficio = orarioUfficio;
}
public void setSito(String sitoIstituzionale) {
this.sito = sitoIstituzionale;
}
public String getPec() {
return pec;
}
public void setPec(String pec) {
this.pec = pec;
}
public String getEmail() {
return email;
}
public void setEmail(String email) {
this.email = email;
}
public String getTelefono() {
return telefono;
}
public void setTelefono(String telefono) {
this.telefono = telefono;
}
public String getFax() {
return fax;
}
public void setFax(String fax) {
this.fax = fax;
}
public String getLocalizzazione() {
return localizzazione;
}
public void setLocalizzazione(String localizzazione) {
this.localizzazione = localizzazione;
}
public String getFacebook() {
return facebook;
}
public void setFacebook(String facebook) {
this.facebook = facebook;
}
}
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 3,706
|
Q: image error load placeholder image issue on mobile safari/chrome I am using the following script to load a placeholder image, if an image src png is not available/error's:
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery("img").error(function () {
jQuery(this).unbind("error").attr("src", "/images/people_placeholder.png");
});
</script>
I am loading the above script just before the closing </body> tag.
It works fine on Chrome desktop & shows the placeholder image.
It doesn't work on Safari Desktop or on Mobile phone in Safari/Chrome
Any idea's?
A: It could be because handler not called if onerror event already fired, you could try instead to capture onerror event, place this script just before </head> tag:
document.addEventListener('error', function (event) {
var elm = event.target;
if (elm.tagName == 'IMG') {
elm.src = "/images/people_placeholder.png";
}
}, true ); // true to capture event
Or try checking for specific properties, you could use just before </body> tag:
jQuery("img").one('error', function () {
jQuery(this).attr("src", "/images/people_placeholder.png"); //.unbind("error") is useless here
}).each(function () {
if (this.complete && !this.naturalHeight && !this.naturalWidth) {
$(this).triggerHandler('error');
}
});
A: Try This one
I found this Here Link
function imgError(image) {
image.onerror = "";
image.src = "/images/people_placeholder.gif";
return true;
}
HTML:
<img src="image.png" onerror="imgError(this);"/>
A: <img src="URL_OF_IMAGE" alt="image info" onerror="this.src='DEFAULT_IMG_URL'"/>
check docs
or create Global Function to solve this issue
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 7,163
|
Q: How to Close Angular-Strap Tabs In my app I have 3 static tabs that get rendered when the application loads. Using ng-grid, when a user double clicks on a row a new tab is generated with the results of that row. My question is..... how do I close the tab? It seems so simple but, I've goggled and tinkered with no results.
What I'd like is that after viewing the results the user would click on a small X near the tab heading to close/dismiss the tab. I've created a plunker http://plnkr.co/edit/ZkamtnBK01h0IvC9Hmjh?p=preview that resembles my tab layout. It has a button that you can click to add a new tab. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
A: you can easily remove tabs by altering scope, http://plnkr.co/edit/AKlmUaRkaYWjOYnPRnWF
$scope.remove = function() {
$scope.tabs.splice($scope.tabs.activeTab,1);
}
These tabs are problably created with templates from the tabs directive, so I suggest using css positioning the element outside the bs-tabs div to get the effect you want
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 5,215
|
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders
THE RIVET IN GRANDFATHER'S NECK
A Comedy of Limitations
BY
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
"_To this new South, who values her high past in chief, as fit
foundation of that edifice whereon she labors day by day, and with
augmenting strokes_."
1915
TO
PRISCILLA BRADLEY CABELL
"Nightly I mark and praise, or great or small,
Such stars as proudly struggle one by one
To heaven's highest place, as Procyon,
Antares, Naoes, Tejat and Nibal
Attain supremacy, and proudly fall,
Still glorious, and glitter, and are gone
So very soon;--whilst steadfast and alone
Polaris gleams, and is not changed at all.
"Daily I find some gallant dream that ranges
The heights of heaven; and as others do,
I serve my dream until my dream estranges
Its errant bondage, and I note anew
That nothing dims, nor shakes, nor mars, nor changes,
Fond faith in you and in my love of you."
CONTENTS
PART ONE - PROPINQUITY
PART TWO - RENASCENCE
PART THREE - TERTIUS
PART FOUR - APPRECIATION
PART FIVE - SOUVENIR
PART SIX - BYWAYS
PART SEVEN - YOKED
PART EIGHT - HARVEST
PART NINE - RELICS
PART TEN - IMPRIMIS
In the middle of the cupboard door was the carved figure of a man....
He had goat's legs, little horns on his head, and a long beard; the
children in the room called him, "Major-General-field-sergeant
-commander-Billy-goat's-legs" ... He was always looking at the
table under the looking-glass where stood a very pretty little
shepherdess made of china.... Close by her side stood a little
chimney-sweep, as black as coal and also made of china.... Near
to them stood another figure.... He was an old Chinaman who could nod
his head, and used to pretend he was the grandfather of the shepherdess,
although he could not prove it. He, however, assumed authority over her,
and therefore when "Major-general-field-sergeant-commander-Billy-goat's
-legs" asked for the little shepherdess to be his wife, he nodded his head
to show that he consented.
Then the little shepherdess cried, and looked at her sweetheart, the
chimney-sweep. "I must entreat you," said she, "to go out with me into
the wide world, for we cannot stay here." ... When the chimney-sweep saw
that she was quite firm, he said, "My way is through the stove up the
chimney." ... So at last they reached the top of the chimney.... The sky
with all its stars was over their heads.... They could see for a very
long distance out into the wide world, and the poor little shepherdess
leaned her head on her chimney-sweep's shoulder and wept. "This is too
much," she said, "the world is too large." ... And so with a great deal
of trouble they climbed down the chimney and peeped out.... There lay
the old Chinaman on the floor ... broken into three pieces.... "This is
terrible," said the shepherdess. "He can be riveted," said the
chimney-sweep.... The family had the Chinaman's back mended and a strong
rivet put through his neck; he looked as good as new, but when
"Major-General-field-sergeant-commander-Billy-goat's-legs" again asked
for the shepherdess to be his wife, the old Chinaman could no longer nod
his head.
And so the little china people remained together and were thankful for
the rivet in grandfather's neck, and continued to love each other until
they were broken to pieces.
PART ONE - PROPINQUITY
_"A singer, eh?... Well, well! but when he sings
Take jealous heed lest idiosyncrasies
Entinge and taint too deep his melodies;
See that his lute has no discordant strings
To harrow us; and let his vaporings
Be all of virtue and its victories,
And of man's best and noblest qualities,
And scenery, and flowers, and similar things_.
"Thus bid our paymasters whose mutterings
Some few deride, and blithely link their rhymes
At random; and, as ever, on frail wings
Of wine-stained paper scribbled with such rhymes
Men mount to heaven, and loud laughter springs
From hell's midpit, whose fuel is such rhymes."
PAUL VERVILLE. _Nascitur_.
I
At a very remote period, when editorials were mostly devoted to
discussion as to whether the Democratic Convention (shortly to be held
in Chicago) would or would not declare in favor of bi-metallism; when
golf was a novel form of recreation in America, and people disputed how
to pronounce its name, and pedestrians still turned to stare after an
automobile; when, according to the fashion notes, "the godet skirts and
huge sleeves of the present modes" were already doomed to extinction;
when the baseball season had just begun, and some of our people were
discussing the national game, and others the spectacular burning of the
old Pennsylvania Railway depot at Thirty-third and Market Street in
Philadelphia, and yet others the significance of General Fitzhugh Lee's
recent appointment as consul-general to Habana:--at this remote time,
Lichfield talked of nothing except the Pendomer divorce case.
And Colonel Rudolph Musgrave had very narrowly escaped being named as
the co-respondent. This much, at least, all Lichfield knew when George
Pendomer--evincing unsuspected funds of generosity--permitted his wife
to secure a divorce on the euphemistic grounds of "desertion." John
Charteris, acting as Rudolph Musgrave's friend, had patched up this
arrangement; and the colonel and Mrs. Pendomer, so rumor ran, were to be
married very quietly after a decent interval.
Remained only to deliberate whether this sop to the conventions should
be accepted as sufficient.
"At least," as Mrs. Ashmeade sagely observed, "we can combine
vituperation with common-sense, and remember it is not the first time a
Musgrave has figured in an entanglement of the sort. A lecherous race!
proverbial flutterers of petticoats! His surname convicts the man
unheard and almost excuses him. All of us feel that. And, moreover, it
is not as if the idiots had committed any unpardonable sin, for they
have kept out of the newspapers."
Her friend seemed dubious, and hazarded something concerning "the merest
sense of decency."
"In the name of the Prophet, figs! People--I mean the people who count
in Lichfield--are charitable enough to ignore almost any crime which is
just a matter of common knowledge. In fact, they are mildly grateful. It
gives them something to talk about. But when detraction is printed in
the morning paper you can't overlook it without incurring the suspicion
of being illiterate and virtueless. That's Lichfield."
"But, Polly--"
"Sophist, don't I know my Lichfield? I know it almost as well as I know
Rudolph Musgrave. And so I prophesy that he will not marry Clarice
Pendomer, because he is inevitably tired of her by this. He will marry
money, just as all the Musgraves do. Moreover, I prophesy that we will
gabble about this mess until we find a newer target for our stone
throwing, and be just as friendly with the participants to their faces
as we ever were. So don't let me hear any idiotic talk about whether or
no _I_ am going to receive her--"
"Well, after all, she was born a Bellingham. We must remember that."
"Wasn't I saying I knew my Lichfield?" Mrs. Ashmeade placidly observed.
* * * * *
And time, indeed, attested her to be right in every particular.
Yet it must be recorded that at this critical juncture chance rather
remarkably favored Colonel Musgrave and Mrs. Pendomer, by giving
Lichfield something of greater interest to talk about; since now, just
in the nick of occasion, occurred the notorious Scott Musgrave murder.
Scott Musgrave--a fourth cousin once removed of the colonel's, to be
quite accurate--had in the preceding year seduced the daughter of a
village doctor, a negligible "half-strainer" up country at Warren; and
her two brothers, being irritated, picked this particular season to
waylay him in the street, as he reeled homeward one night from the
Commodores' Club, and forthwith to abolish Scott Musgrave after the
primitive methods of their lower station in society.
These details, indeed, were never officially made public, since a
discreet police force "found no clues"; for Fred Musgrave (of King's
Garden), as befitted the dead man's well-to-do brother, had been at no
little pains to insure constabulary shortsightedness, in preference to
having the nature of Scott Musgrave's recreations unsympathetically
aired. Fred Musgrave thereby afforded Lichfield a delectable opportunity
(conversationally and abetted by innumerable "they _do_ say's") to
accredit the murder, turn by turn, to every able-bodied person residing
within stone's throw of its commission. So that few had time, now, to
talk of Rudolph Musgrave and Clarice Pendomer; for it was not in
Lichfieldian human nature to discuss a mere domestic imbroglio when
here, also in the Musgrave family, was a picturesque and gory
assassination to lay tongue to.
So Colonel Musgrave was duly reelected that spring to the librarianship
of the Lichfield Historical Association, and the name of Mrs. George
Pendomer was not stricken from the list of patronesses of the Lichfield
German Club, but was merely altered to "Mrs. Clarice Pendomer."
* * * * *
At the bottom of his heart Colonel Musgrave was a trifle irritated that
his self-sacrifice should be thus unrewarded by martyrdom. Circumstances
had enabled him to assume, and he had gladly accepted, the blame for
John Charteris's iniquity, rather than let Anne Charteris know the truth
about her husband and Clarice Pendomer. The truth would have killed
Anne, the colonel believed; and besides, the colonel had enjoyed the
performance of a picturesque action.
And having acted as a hero in permitting himself to be pilloried as a
libertine, it was preferable of course not to have incurred ostracism
thereby. His common-sense conceded this; and yet, to Colonel Musgrave,
it could not but be evident that Destiny was hardly rising to the
possibilities of the situation.
II
Concerning Colonel Musgrave one finds the ensuing account in a
publication of the period devoted to biographies of more or less
prominent Americans. It is reproduced unchanged, because these memoirs
were--in the old days--compiled by the person whom they commemorated.
The custom was a worthy one, since the value of an autobiography is
determined by the nature of its superfluities and falsehoods.
"MUSGRAVE, RUDOLPH VARTREY, editor; _b_. Lichfield, Sill., Mar. 14,
1856; _s_. William Sebastian and Martha (Allardyce) M; _g. s_.
Theodorick Q.M., gov. of Sill. 1805-8, judge of the General Ct.,
1808-11, judge Supreme Ct. of Appeals, 1811-50 and pres. Supreme Ct. of
Appeals, 1841-50; grad. King's Coll. and U. of Sill. Corr. sec.
Lichfield Hist. Soc., and editor Sill. Mag. of Biog. since 1890; dir.
Traders Nat. Bank, Sill.; mem. Soc. of the Sons of Col. Govs., pres.
Sill. Soc. of Protestant Martyrs, comdr. Sill. Mil. Order of Lost
Battles, mem. exec. bd. Sill. Hist. Assn. for the Preservation of Ruins.
Democrat, Episcopalian, unmarried. _Author_: Colonial Lichfield, 1892;
Right on the Scaffold, 1893; Secession and the South, 1894; Chart of the
Descendants of Zenophon Perkins, 1894; Recollections of a Gracious Era,
1895; Notes as to the Vartreys of Westphalia, 1896. Has also written
numerous pamphlets on hist., biog. and geneal. subjects. _Address_:
Lichfield, Sill."
For Colonel Musgrave was by birth the lineal head of all the Musgraves
of Matocton, which is in Lichfield, as degrees are counted there,
equivalent to what being born a marquis would mean in England. Handsome
and trim and affable, he defied chronology by looking ten years younger
than he was known to be. For at least a decade he had been invaluable to
Lichfield matrons alike against the entertainment of an "out-of-town
girl," the management of a cotillion and the prevention of unpleasant
pauses among incongruous dinner companies.
In short, he was by all accounts the social triumph of his generation;
and his military title, won by four years of arduous service at
receptions and parades while on the staff of a former Governor of the
State, this seasoned bachelor carried off with plausibility and
distinction.
The story finds him "Librarian and Corresponding Secretary" of the
Lichfield Historical Association, which office he had held for some six
years. The salary was small, and the colonel had inherited little; but
his sister, Miss Agatha Musgrave, who lived with him, was a notable
housekeeper. He increased his resources in a gentlemanly fashion by
genealogical research, directed mostly toward the rehabilitation of
ambiguous pedigrees; and for the rest, no other man could have fulfilled
more gracefully the main duty of the Librarian, which was to exhibit the
Association's collection of relics to hurried tourists "doing"
Lichfield.
His "Library manner" was modeled upon that which an eighteenth century
portrait would conceivably possess, should witchcraft set the canvas
breathing.
III
Also the story finds Colonel Musgrave in the company of his sister on a
warm April day, whilst these two sat upon the porch of the Musgrave home
in Lichfield, and Colonel Musgrave waited until it should be time to
open the Library for the afternoon. And about them birds twittered
cheerily, and the formal garden flourished as gardens thrive nowhere
except in Lichfield, and overhead the sky was a turkis-blue, save for a
few irrelevant clouds which dappled it here and there like splashes of
whipped cream.
Yet, for all this, the colonel was ill-at-ease; and care was on his
brow, and venom in his speech.
"And one thing," Colonel Musgrave concluded, with decision, "I wish
distinctly understood, and that is, if she insists on having young men
loafing about her--as, of course, she will--she will have to entertain
them in the garden. I won't have them in the house, Agatha. You remember
that Langham girl you had here last Easter?" he added, disconsolately
--"the one who positively littered up the house with young men,
and sang idiotic jingles to them at all hours of the night about
the Bailey family and the correct way to spell chicken? She drove me to
the verge of insanity, and I haven't a doubt that this Patricia person
will be quite as obstreperous. So, please mention it to her,
Agatha--casually, of course--that, in Lichfield, when one is partial to
either vocal exercise or amorous daliance, the proper scene of action is
the garden. I really cannot be annoyed by her."
"But, Rudolph," his sister protested, "you forget she is engaged to the
Earl of Pevensey. An engaged girl naturally wouldn't care about meeting
any young men."
"H'm!" said the colonel, drily.
Ensued a pause, during which the colonel lighted yet another cigarette.
Then, "I have frequently observed," he spoke, in absent wise, "that all
young women having that peculiarly vacuous expression about the eyes--I
believe there are misguided persons who describe such eyes as being
'dreamy,'--are invariably possessed of a fickle, unstable and coquettish
temperament. Oh, no! You may depend upon it, Agatha, the fact that she
contemplates purchasing the right to support a peculiarly disreputable
member of the British peerage will not hinder her in the least from
making advances to all the young men in the neighborhood."
Miss Musgrave was somewhat ruffled. She was a homely little woman with
nothing of the ordinary Musgrave comeliness. Candor even compels the
statement that in her pudgy swarthy face there was a droll suggestion
of the pug-dog.
"I am sure," Miss Musgrave remonstrated, with placid dignity, "that you
know nothing whatever about her, and that the reports about the earl
have probably been greatly exaggerated, and that her picture shows her
to be an unusually attractive girl. Though it is true," Miss Musgrave
conceded after reflection, "that there are any number of persons in the
House of Lords that I wouldn't in the least care to have in my own
house, even with the front parlor all in linen as it unfortunately is.
So awkward when you have company! And the Bible does bid us not to put
our trust in princes, and, for my part, I never thought that photographs
could be trusted, either."
"Scorn not the nobly born, Agatha," her brother admonished her, "nor
treat with lofty scorn the well-connected. The very best people are
sometimes respectable. And yet," he pursued, with a slight hiatus of
thought, "I should not describe her as precisely an attractive-looking
girl. She seems to have a lot of hair,--if it is all her own, which it
probably isn't,--and her nose is apparently straight enough, and I
gather she is not absolutely deformed anywhere; but that is all I can
conscientiously say in her favor. She is artificial. Her hair, now! It
has a--well, you would not call it exactly a crinkle or precisely a
wave, but rather somewhere between the two. Yes, I think I should
describe it as a ripple. I fancy it must be rather like the reflection
of a sunset in--a duck-pond, say, with a faint wind ruffling the water.
For I gather that her hair is of some light shade,--induced, I haven't a
doubt, by the liberal use of peroxides. And this ripple, too, Agatha, it
stands to reason, must be the result of coercing nature, for I have
never seen it in any other woman's hair. Moreover," Colonel Musgrave
continued, warming somewhat to his subject, "there is a dimple--on the
right side of her mouth, immediately above it,--which speaks of the most
frivolous tendencies. I dare say it comes and goes when she
talks,--winks at you, so to speak, in a manner that must be simply
idiotic. That foolish little cleft in her chin, too--"
But at this point, his sister interrupted him.
"I hadn't a notion," said she, "that you had even looked at the
photograph. And you seem to have it quite by heart, Rudolph,--and some
people admire dimples, you know, and, at any rate, her mother had red
hair, so Patricia isn't really responsible. I decided that it would be
foolish to use the best mats to-night. We can save them for Sunday
supper, because I am only going to have eggs and a little cold meat, and
not make company of her."
For no apparent reason, Rudolph Musgrave flushed.
"I inspected it--quite casually--last night. Please don't be absurd,
Agatha! If we were threatened with any other direful visitation
--influenza, say, or the seventeen-year locust,--I should
naturally read up on the subject in order to know what to expect. And
since Providence has seen fit to send us a visitor rather than a
visitation--though, personally, I should infinitely prefer the
influenza, as interfering in less degree with my comfort,--I have, of
course, neglected no opportunity of finding out what we may reasonably
look forward to. I fear the worst, Agatha. For I repeat, the girl's face
is, to me, absolutely unattractive!"
The colonel spoke with emphasis, and flung away his cigarette, and took
up his hat to go.
And then, "I suppose," said Miss Musgrave, absently, "you will be
falling in love with her, just as you did with Anne Charteris and Aline
Van Orden and all those other minxes. I _would_ like to see you married,
Rudolph, only I couldn't stand your having a wife."
"I! I!" sputtered the colonel. "I think you must be out of your head! I
fall in love with that chit! Good Lord, Agatha, you are positively
idiotic!"
And the colonel turned on his heel, and walked stiffly through the
garden. But, when half-way down the path, he wheeled about and came
back.
"I beg your pardon, Agatha," he said, contritely, "it was not my
intention to be discourteous. But somehow--somehow, dear, I don't quite
see the necessity for my falling in love with anybody, so long as I have
you."
And Miss Musgrave, you may be sure, forgave him promptly; and
afterward--with a bit of pride and an infinity of love in her kind,
homely face,--her eyes followed him out of the garden on his way to open
the Library. And she decided in her heart that she had the dearest and
best and handsomest brother in the universe, and that she must remember
to tell him, accidentally, how becoming his new hat was. And then, at
some unspoken thought, she smiled, wistfully.
"She would be a very lucky girl if he did," said Miss Musgrave, apropos
of nothing in particular; and tossed her grizzly head.
"An earl, indeed!" said Miss Musgrave
IV
And this is how it came about:
Patricia Vartrey (a second cousin once removed of Colonel Rudolph
Musgrave's), as the older inhabitants of Lichfield will volubly attest,
was always a person who did peculiar things. The list of her
eccentricities is far too lengthy here to be enumerated; but she began
it by being born with red hair--Titian reds and auburns were
undiscovered euphemisms in those days--and, in Lichfield, this is not
regarded as precisely a lady-like thing to do; and she ended it, as far
as Lichfield was concerned, by eloping with what Lichfield in its horror
could only describe, with conscious inadequacy, as "a quite unheard-of
person."
Indisputably the man was well-to-do already; and from this nightmarish
topsy-turvidom of Reconstruction the fellow visibly was plucking wealth.
Also young Stapylton was well enough to look at, too, as Lichfield
flurriedly conceded.
But it was equally undeniable that he had made his money through a
series of commercial speculations distinguished both by shiftiness and
daring, and that the man himself had been until the War a wholly
negligible "poor white" person,--an overseer, indeed, for "Wild Will"
Musgrave, Colonel Musgrave's father, who was of course the same
Lieutenant-Colonel William Sebastian Musgrave, C.S.A., that met his
death at Gettysburg.
This upstart married Patricia Vartrey, for all the chatter and
whispering, and carried her away from Lichfield, as yet a little dubious
as to what recognition, if any, should be accorded the existence of the
Stapyltons. And afterward (from a notoriously untruthful North, indeed)
came rumors that he was rapidly becoming wealthy; and of Patricia
Vartrey's death at her daughter's birth; and of the infant's health and
strength and beauty, and of her lavish upbringing,--a Frenchwoman,
Lichfield whispered, with absolutely nothing to do but attend upon the
child.
And then, little by little, a new generation sprang up, and, little by
little, the interest these rumors waked became more lax; and it was
brought about, at last, by the insidious transitions of time, that
Patricia Vartrey was forgotten in Lichfield. Only a few among the older
men remembered her; some of them yet treasured, as these fogies so often
do, a stray fan or an odd glove; and in bycorners of sundry
time-toughened hearts there lurked the memory of a laughing word or of a
glance or of some such casual bounty, that Patricia Vartrey had accorded
these hearts' owners when the world was young.
But Agatha Musgrave, likewise, remembered the orphan cousin who had
been reared with her. She had loved Patricia Vartrey; and, in due time,
she wrote to Patricia's daughter,--in stately, antiquated phrases that
astonished the recipient not a little,--and the girl had answered. The
correspondence flourished. And it was not long before Miss Musgrave had
induced her young cousin to visit Lichfield.
Colonel Rudolph Musgrave, be it understood, knew nothing of all this
until the girl was actually on her way. And now, she was to arrive that
afternoon, to domicile herself in his quiet house for two long
weeks--this utter stranger, look you!--and upset his comfort, ask him
silly questions, expect him to talk to her, and at the end of her visit,
possibly, present him with some outlandish gimcrack made of cardboard
and pink ribbons, in which she would expect him to keep his papers. The
Langham girl did that.
* * * * *
It is honesty's part to give you the man no better than he was.
Lichfield at large had pampered him; many women had loved him; and above
all, Miss Agatha had spoiled him. After fifteen years of being the pivot
about which the economy of a household revolves, after fifteen years of
being the inevitable person whose approval must be secured before any
domestic alteration, however trivial, may be considered, no mortal man
may hope to remain a paragon of unselfishness.
Colonel Musgrave joyed in the society of women. But he classed
them--say, with the croquettes adorned with pink paper frills which were
then invariably served at the suppers of the Lichfield German Club,--as
acceptable enough, upon a conscious holiday, but wholly incongruous with
the slippered ease of home. When you had an inclination for feminine
society, you shaved and changed your clothes and thought up an impromptu
or so against emergency, and went forth to seek it. That was natural;
but to have a petticoated young person infesting your house, hourly, was
as preposterous as ice-cream soda at breakfast.
The metaphor set him off at a tangent. He wondered if this Patricia
person could not (tactfully) be induced to take her bath after
breakfast, as Agatha did? after he had his? Why, confound the girl, he
was not responsible for there being only one bathroom in the house! It
was necessary for him to have his bath and be at the Library by nine
o'clock. This interloper must be made to understand as much.
The colonel reached the Library undecided as to whether Miss Stapylton
had better breakfast in her room, or if it would be entirely proper for
her to come to the table in one of those fluffy lace-trimmed garments
such as Agatha affected at the day's beginning?
The question was a nice one. It was not as though servants were willing
to be bothered with carrying trays to people's rooms; he knew what
Agatha had to say upon that subject. It was not as though he were the
chit's first cousin, either. He almost wished himself in the decline of
life, and free to treat the girl paternally.
And so he fretted all that afternoon.
* * * * *
Then, too, he reflected that it would be very awkward if Agatha should
be unwell while this Patricia person was in the house. Agatha in her
normal state was of course the kindliest and cheeriest gentlewoman in
the universe, but any physical illness appeared to transform her nature
disastrously. She had her "attacks," she "felt badly" very often
nowadays, poor dear; and how was a Patricia person to be expected to
make allowances for the fact that at such times poor Agatha was
unavoidably a little cross and pessimistic?
V
Yet Colonel Musgrave strolled into his garden, later, with a tolerable
affectation of unconcern. Women, after all, he assured himself, were
necessary for the perpetuation of the species; and, resolving for the
future to view these weakly, big-hipped and <DW72>-shouldered makeshifts
of Nature's with larger tolerance, he cocked his hat at a
devil-may-carish angle, and strode up the walk, whistling jauntily and
having, it must be confessed, to the unprejudiced observer very much the
air of a sheep in wolf's clothing.
"At worst," he was reflecting, "I can make love to her. They, as a rule,
take kindlily enough to that; and in the exercise of hospitality a host
must go to all lengths to divert his guests. Failure is not
permitted...."
Then She came to him.
She came to him across the trim, cool lawn, leisurely, yet with a
resilient tread that attested the vigor of her slim young body. She was
all in white, diaphanous, ethereal, quite incredibly incredible; but as
she passed through the long shadows of the garden--fire-new, from the
heart of the sunset, Rudolph Musgrave would have sworn to you,--the lacy
folds and furbelows and semi-transparencies that clothed her were now
tinged with gold, and now, as a hedge or flower-bed screened her from
the horizontal rays, were softened into multitudinous graduations of
grays and mauves and violets.
"Failure is not permitted," he was repeating in his soul....
"You're Cousin Rudolph, aren't you?" she asked. "How perfectly
entrancing! You see until to-day I always thought that if I had been
offered the choice between having cousins or appendicitis I would have
preferred to be operated on."
And Rudolph Musgrave noted, with a delicious tingling somewhere about
his heart, that her hair was really like the reflection of a sunset in
rippling waters,--only many times more beautiful, of course,--and that
her mouth was an inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and
that her eyes were purple glimpses of infinity.
Then he observed that his own mouth was giving utterance to divers
irrelevant and foolish sounds, which eventually resolved themselves into
the statement he was glad to see her. And immediately afterward the
banality of this remark brought the hot blood to his face and, for the
rest of the day, stung him and teased him, somewhere in the background
of his mind, like an incessant insect.
Glad, indeed!
Before he had finished shaking hands with Patricia Stapylton, it was
all over with the poor man.
"Er--h'm!" quoth he.
"Only," Miss Stapylton was meditating, with puckered brow, "it would be
unseemly for me to call you Rudolph--"
"You impertinent minx!" cried he, in his soul; "I should rather think it
would be!"
"--and Cousin Rudolph sounds exactly like a dried-up little man with
eyeglasses and crows' feet and a gentle nature. I rather thought you
were going to be like that, and I regard it as extremely hospitable of
you not to be. You are more like--like what now?" Miss Stapylton put her
head to one side and considered the contents of her vocabulary,--"you
are like a viking. I shall call you Olaf," she announced, when she had
reached a decision.
This, look you, to the most dignified man in Lichfield,--a person who
had never borne a nickname in his life. You must picture for yourself
how the colonel stood before her, big, sturdy and blond, and glared down
at her, and assured himself that he was very indignant; like Timanthes,
the colonel's biographer prefers to draw a veil before the countenance
to which art is unable to do justice.
Then, "I have no admiration for the Northmen," Rudolph Musgrave
declared, stiffly. "They were a rude and barbarous nation, proverbially
addicted to piracy and intemperance."
"My goodness gracious!" Miss Stapylton observed,--and now, for the
first time, he saw the teeth that were like grains of rice upon a pink
rose petal. Also, he saw dimples. "And does one mean all that by a
viking?"
"The vikings," he informed her--and his Library manner had settled upon
him now to the very tips of his fingers--"were pirates. The word is of
Icelandic origin, from _vik_, the name applied to the small inlets along
the coast in which they concealed their galleys. I may mention that Olaf
was not a viking, but a Norwegian king, being the first Christian
monarch to reign in Norway."
"Dear me!" said Miss Stapylton; "how interesting!"
Then she yawned with deliberate cruelty.
"However," she concluded, "I shall call you Olaf, just the same."
"Er--h'm!" said the colonel.
* * * * *
And this stuttering boor (he reflected) was Colonel Rudolph Musgrave,
confessedly the social triumph of his generation! This imbecile, without
a syllable to say for himself, without a solitary adroit word within
tongue's reach, wherewith to annihilate the hussy, was a Musgrave of
Matocton!
* * * * *
And she did. To her he was "Olaf" from that day forth.
Rudolph Musgrave called her, "You." He was nettled, of course, by her
forwardness--"Olaf," indeed!--yet he found it, somehow, difficult to
bear this fact in mind continuously.
For while it is true our heroes and heroines in fiction no longer fall
in love at first sight, Nature, you must remember, is too busily
employed with other matters to have much time to profit by current
literature. Then, too, she is not especially anxious to be realistic.
She prefers to jog along in the old rut, contentedly turning out
chromolithographic sunrises such as they give away at the tea stores,
contentedly staging the most violent and improbable melodramas;
and--sturdy old Philistine that she is--she even now permits her
children to fall in love in the most primitive fashion.
She is not particularly interested in subtleties and soul analyses; she
merely chuckles rather complacently when a pair of eyes are drawn,
somehow, to another pair of eyes, and an indescribable something is
altered somewhere in some untellable fashion, and the world, suddenly,
becomes the most delightful place of residence in all the universe.
Indeed, it is her favorite miracle, this. For at work of this sort the
old Philistine knows that she is an adept; and she has rejoiced in the
skill of her hands, with a sober workmanly joy, since Cain first went
a-wooing in the Land of Nod.
So Colonel Rudolph Musgrave, without understanding what had happened to
him, on a sudden was strangely content with life.
It was at supper--dinner, in Lichfield, when not a formal
entertainment, is eaten at two in the afternoon--that he fell
a-speculating as to whether Her eyes, after all, could be fitly
described as purple.
Wasn't there a grayer luminosity about them than he had at first
suspected?--wasn't the cool glow of them, in a word, rather that of
sunlight falling upon a wet slate roof?
It was a delicate question, an affair of nuances, of almost
imperceptible graduations; and in debating a matter of such nicety, a
man must necessarily lay aside all petty irritation, such as being
nettled by an irrational nickname, and approach the question with
unbiased mind.
He did. And when, at last, he had come warily to the verge of decision,
Miss Musgrave in all innocence announced that they would excuse him if
he wished to get back to his work.
He discovered that, somehow, the three had finished supper; and,
somehow, he presently discovered himself in his study, where eight
o'clock had found him every evening for the last ten years, when he was
not about his social diversions. An old custom, you will observe, is not
lightly broken.
VI
Subsequently: "I have never approved of these international marriages,"
said Colonel Musgrave, with heat. "It stands to reason, she is simply
marrying the fellow for his title. _(The will of Jeremiah Brown, dated
29 November, 1690, recorded 2 February, 1690-1, mentions his wife Eliza
Brown and appoints her his executrix.)_ She can't possibly care for him.
_(This, then, was the second wife of Edward Osborne of Henrico, who,
marrying him 15 June, 1694, died before January, 1696-7.)_ But they are
all flibbertigibbets, every one of them. _(She had apparently no
children by either marriage--)_ And I dare say she is no better than the
rest."
Came a tap on the door. Followed a vision of soft white folds and
furbelows and semi-transparencies and purple eyes and a pouting mouth.
"I am become like a pelican in the wilderness, Olaf," the owner of these
vanities complained. "Are you very busy? Cousin Agatha is about her
housekeeping, and I have read the afternoon paper all through,--even the
list of undelivered letters and the woman's page,--and I just want to
see the Gilbert Stuart picture," she concluded,--exercising, one is
afraid, a certain economy in regard to the truth.
This was a little too much. If a man's working-hours are not to be
respected--if his privacy is to be thus invaded on the flimsiest of
pretexts,--why, then, one may very reasonably look for chaos to come
again. This, Rudolph Musgrave decided, was a case demanding firm and
instant action. Here was a young person who needed taking down a peg or
two, and that at once.
But he made the mistake of looking at her first. And after that, he lied
glibly. "Good Lord, no! I am not in the least busy now. In fact, I was
just about to look you two up."
"I was rather afraid of disturbing you." She hesitated; and a lucent
mischief woke in her eyes. "You are so patriarchal, Olaf," she lamented.
"I felt like a lion venturing into a den of Daniels. But if you cross
your heart you aren't really busy--why, then, you can show me the
Stuart, Olaf."
It is widely conceded that Gilbert Stuart never in his after work
surpassed the painting which hung then in Rudolph Musgrave's study,--the
portrait of the young Gerald Musgrave, afterward the friend of Jefferson
and Henry, and, still later, the author of divers bulky tomes,
pertaining for the most part to ethnology. The boy smiles at you from
the canvas, smiles ambiguously,--smiles with a woman's mouth, set above
a resolute chin, however,--and with a sort of humorous sadness in his
eyes. These latter are of a dark shade of blue--purple, if you
will,--and his hair is tinged with red.
"Why, he took after me!" said Miss Stapylton. "How thoughtful of him,
Olaf!"
And Rudolph Musgrave saw the undeniable resemblance. It gave him a queer
sort of shock, too, as he comprehended, for the first time, that the
faint blue vein on that lifted arm held Musgrave blood,--the same blood
which at this thought quickened. For any person guided by appearances,
Rudolph Musgrave considered, would have surmised that the vein in
question contained celestial ichor or some yet diviner fluid.
"It is true," he conceded, "that there is a certain likeness."
"And he is a very beautiful boy," said Miss Stapylton, demurely. "Thank
you, Olaf; I begin to think you are a dangerous flatterer. But he is
only a boy, Olaf! And I had always thought of Gerald Musgrave as a
learned person with a fringe of whiskers all around his face--like a
centerpiece, you know."
The colonel smiled. "This portrait was painted early in life. Our
kinsman was at that time, I believe, a person of rather frivolous
tendencies. Yet he was not quite thirty when he first established his
reputation by his monograph upon _The Evolution of Marriage_. And
afterwards, just prior to his first meeting with Goethe, you will
remember--"
"Oh, yes!" Miss Stapylton assented, hastily; "I remember perfectly. I
know all about him, thank you. And it was that beautiful boy, Olaf, that
young-eyed cherub, who developed into a musty old man who wrote musty
old books, and lived a musty, dusty life all by himself, and never
married or had any fun at all! How _horrid_, Olaf!" she cried, with a
queer shrug of distaste.
"I fail," said Colonel Musgrave, "to perceive anything--ah--horrid in a
life devoted to the study of anthropology. His reputation when he died
was international."
"But he never had any fun, you jay-bird! And, oh, Olaf! Olaf! that boy
could have had so much fun! The world held so much for him! Why, Fortune
is only a woman, you know, and what woman could have refused him
anything if he had smiled at her like that when he asked for it?"
Miss Stapylton gazed up at the portrait for a long time now, her hands
clasped under her chin. Her face was gently reproachful.
"Oh, boy dear, boy dear!" she said, with a forlorn little quaver in her
voice, "how _could_ you be _so_ foolish? _Didn't_ you know there was
something better in the world than grubbing after musty old tribes and
customs and folk-songs? Oh, precious child, how could you?"
Gerald Musgrave smiled back at her, ambiguously; and Rudolph Musgrave
laughed. "I perceive," said he, "you are a follower of Epicurus. For my
part, I must have fetched my ideals from the tub of the Stoic. I can
conceive of no nobler life than one devoted to furthering the cause of
science."
She looked up at him, with a wan smile. "A barren life!" she said: "ah,
yes, his was a wasted life! His books are all out-of-date now, and
nobody reads them, and it is just as if he had never been. A barren
life, Olaf! And that beautiful boy might have had so much fun--Life is
queer, isn't it, Olaf?"
Again he laughed, "The criticism," he suggested, "is not altogether
original. And Science, no less than War, must have her unsung heroes.
You must remember," he continued, more seriously, "that any great work
must have as its foundation the achievements of unknown men. I fancy
that Cheops did not lay every brick in his pyramid with his own hand;
and I dare say Nebuchadnezzar employed a few helpers when he was laying
out his hanging gardens. But time cannot chronicle these lesser men.
Their sole reward must be the knowledge that they have aided somewhat in
the unending work of the world."
Her face had altered into a pink and white penitence which was flavored
with awe.
"I--I forgot," she murmured, contritely; "I--forgot you were--like
him--about your genealogies, you know. Oh, Olaf, I'm very silly! Of
course, it is tremendously fine and--and nice, I dare say, if you like
it,--to devote your life to learning, as you and he have done. I forgot,
Olaf. Still, I am sorry, somehow, for that beautiful boy," she ended,
with a disconsolate glance at the portrait.
VII
Long after Miss Stapylton had left him, the colonel sat alone in his
study, idle now, and musing vaguely. There were no more addenda
concerning the descendants of Captain Thomas Osborne that night.
At last, the colonel rose and threw open a window, and stood looking
into the moonlit garden. The world bathed in a mist of blue and silver.
There was a breeze that brought him sweet, warm odors from the garden,
together with a blurred shrilling of crickets and the conspiratorial
conference of young leaves.
"Of course, it is tremendously fine and--and nice, if you like it," he
said, with a faint chuckle. "I wonder, now, if I do like it?"
He was strangely moved. He seemed, somehow, to survey Rudolph Musgrave
and all his doings with complete and unconcerned aloofness. The man's
life, seen in its true proportions, dwindled into the merest flicker of
a match; he had such a little while to live, this Rudolph Musgrave! And
he spent the serious hours of this brief time writing notes and charts
and pamphlets that perhaps some hundred men in all the universe might
care to read--pamphlets no better and no more accurate than hundreds of
other men were writing at that very moment.
No, the capacity for originative and enduring work was not in him; and
this incessant compilation of dreary footnotes, this incessant rummaging
among the bones of the dead--did it, after all, mean more to this
Rudolph Musgrave than one full, vivid hour of life in that militant
world yonder, where men fought for other and more tangible prizes than
the mention of one's name in a genealogical journal?
He could not have told you. In his heart, he knew that a thorough digest
of the Wills and Orders of the Orphans' Court of any county must always
rank as a useful and creditable performance; but, from without, the
sounds and odors of Spring were calling to him, luring him, wringing his
very heart, bidding him come forth into the open and crack a jest or two
before he died, and stare at the girls a little before the match had
flickered out.
* * * * *
At this time he heard a moaning noise. The colonel gave a shrug, sighed,
and ascended to his sister's bedroom. He knew that Agatha must be ill;
and that there is no more efficient quietus to wildish meditations than
the heating of hot-water bottles and the administration of hypnotics he
had long ago discovered.
PART TWO - RENASCENCE
"As one imprisoned that hath lain alone
And dreamed of sunlight where no vagrant gleam
Of sunlight pierces, being freed, must deem
This too but dreaming, and must dread the sun
Whose glory dazzles,--even as such-an-one
Am I whose longing was but now supreme
For this high hour, and, now it strikes, esteem
I do but dream long dreamed-of goals are won.
"Phyllis, I am not worthy of thy love.
I pray thee let no kindly word be said
Of me at all, for in the train thereof,
Whenas yet-parted lips, sigh-visited,
End speech and wait, mine when I will to move,
Such joy awakens that I grow afraid."
THOMAS ROWLAND. _Triumphs of Phyllis_.
I
They passed with incredible celerity, those next ten days--those
strange, delicious, topsy-turvy days. To Rudolph Musgrave it seemed
afterward that he had dreamed them away in some vague Lotus Land--in a
delectable country where, he remembered, there were always purple eyes
that mocked you, and red lips that coaxed you now, and now cast gibes at
you.
You felt, for the most part of your stay in this country, flushed and
hot and uncomfortable and unbelievably awkward, and you were mercilessly
bedeviled there; but not for all the accumulated wealth of Samarkand and
Ind and Ophir would you have had it otherwise. Ah, no, not otherwise in
the least trifle. For now uplifted to a rosy zone of acquiescence, you
partook incuriously at table of nectar and ambrosia, and noted abroad,
without any surprise, that you trod upon a more verdant grass than
usual, and that someone had polished up the sun a bit; and, in fine, you
snatched a fearful joy from the performance of the most trivial
functions of life.
Yet always he remembered that it could not last; always he remembered
that in the autumn Patricia was to marry Lord Pevensey. She sometimes
gave him letters to mail which were addressed to that nobleman. He
wondered savagely what was in them; he posted them with a vicious shove;
and, for the time, they caused him acute twinges of misery. But not for
long; no, for, in sober earnest, if some fantastic sequence of events
had made his one chance of winning Patricia Stapylton dependent on his
spending a miserable half-hour in her company, Rudolph Musgrave could
not have done it.
As for Miss Stapylton, she appeared to delight in the cloistered,
easy-going life of Lichfield. The quaint and beautiful old town fell
short in nothing of her expectations, in spite of the fact that she had
previously read John Charteris's tales of Lichfield,--"those effusions
which" (if the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_ is to be trusted) "have
builded, by the strength and witchery of record and rhyme, romance and
poem, a myriad-windowed temple in Lichfield's honor--exquisite,
luminous, and enduring--for all the world to see."
Miss Stapylton appeared to delight in the cloistered easy-going life of
Lichfield,--that town which was once, as the outside world has
half-forgotten now, the center of America's wealth, politics and
culture, the town to which Europeans compiling "impressions" of America
devoted one of their longest chapters in the heyday of Elijah Pogram and
Jefferson Brick. But the War between the States has changed all that,
and Lichfield endures to-day only as a pleasant backwater.
Very pleasant, too, it was in the days of Patricia's advent. There were
strikingly few young men about, to be sure; most of them on reaching
maturity had settled in more bustling regions. But many maidens remained
whom memory delights to catalogue,--tall, brilliant Lizzie Allardyce,
the lovely and cattish Marian Winwood, to whom Felix Kennaston wrote
those wonderful love-letters which she published when he married
Kathleen Saumarez, the rich Baugh heiresses from Georgia, the Pride
twins, and Mattie Ferneyhaugh, whom even rival beauties loved, they say,
and other damsels by the score,--all in due time to be wooed and won,
and then to pass out of the old town's life.
Among the men of Rudolph Musgrave's generation--those gallant oldsters
who were born and bred, and meant to die, in Lichfield,--Patricia did
not lack for admirers. Tom May was one of them, of course; rarely a
pretty face escaped the tribute of at least one proposal from Tom May.
Then there was Roderick Taunton, he with the leonine mane, who spared
her none of his forensic eloquence, but found Patricia less tractable
than the most stubborn of juries. Bluff Walter Thurman, too, who was
said to know more of Dickens, whist and criminal law than any other man
living, came to worship at her shrine, as likewise did huge red-faced
Ashby Bland, famed for that cavalry charge which history-books tell you
that he led, and at which he actually was not present, for reasons all
Lichfield knew and chuckled over. And Courtney Thorpe and Charles
Maupin, doctors of the flesh and the spirit severally, were others among
the rivals who gathered about Patricia at decorous festivals when,
candles lighted, the butler and his underlings came with trays of
delectable things to eat, and the "nests" of tables were set out, and
pleasant chatter abounded.
And among Patricia's attendants Colonel Musgrave, it is needless to
relate, was preeminently pertinacious. The two found a deal to talk
about, somehow, though it is doubtful if many of their comments were of
sufficient importance or novelty to merit record. Then, also, he often
read aloud to her from lovely books, for the colonel read admirably and
did not scruple to give emotional passages their value. _Trilby_,
published the preceding spring in book form, was one of these books, for
all this was at a very remote period; and the _Rubaiyat_ was another,
for that poem was as yet unhackneyed and hardly wellknown enough to be
parodied in those happy days.
Once he read to her that wonderful sad tale of Hans Christian Andersen's
which treats of the china chimney-sweep and the shepherdess, who eloped
from their bedizened tiny parlor-table, and were frightened by the
vastness of the world outside, and crept ignominiously back to their fit
home. "And so," the colonel ended, "the little china people remained
together, and were thankful for the rivet in grandfather's neck, and
continued to love each other until they were broken to pieces."
"It was really a very lucky thing," Patricia estimated, "that the
grandfather had a rivet in his neck and couldn't nod to the
billy-goat-legged person to take the shepherdess away into his cupboard.
I don't doubt the little china people were glad of it. But after
climbing so far--and seeing the stars,--I think they ought to have had
more to be glad for." Her voice was quaintly wistful.
"I will let you into a secret--er--Patricia. That rivet was made out of
the strongest material in the whole universe. And the old grandfather
was glad, at bottom, he had it in his neck so that he couldn't nod and
separate the shepherdess from the chimney-sweep."
"Yes,--I guess he had been rather a rip among the bric-a-brac in his day
and sympathized with them?"
"No, it wasn't just that. You see these little china people had forsaken
their orderly comfortable world on the parlor table to climb very high.
It was a brave thing to do, even though they faltered and came back
after a while. It is what we all want to do, Patricia--to climb toward
the stars,--even those of us who are too lazy or too cowardly to attempt
it. And when others try it, we are envious and a little uncomfortable,
and we probably scoff; but we can't help admiring, and there is a rivet
in the neck of all of us which prevents us from interfering. Oh, yes,
we little china people have a variety of rivets, thank God, to prevent
too frequent nodding and too cowardly a compromise with
baseness,--rivets that are a part of us and force us into flashes of
upright living, almost in spite of ourselves, when duty and inclination
grapple. There is always the thing one cannot do for the reason that one
is constituted as one is. That, I take it, is the real rivet in
grandfather's neck and everybody else's."
He spoke disjointedly, vaguely, but the girl nodded. "I think I
understand, Olaf. Only, it is a two-edged rivet--to mix metaphors--and
keeps us stiffnecked against all sorts of calls. No, I am not sure that
the thing one cannot do because one is what one is, proves to be always
a cause for international jubilations and fireworks on the lawn."
II
Thus Lichfield, as to its staid trousered citizenry, fell prostrate at
Miss Stapylton's feet, and as to the remainder of its adults,
vociferously failed to see anything in the least remarkable in her
appearance, and avidly took and compared notes as to her personal
apparel.
"You have brought Asmodeus into Lichfield," Colonel Musgrave one day
rebuked Miss Stapylton, as they sat in the garden. "The demon of pride
and dress is rampant everywhere--er--Patricia. Even Agatha does her hair
differently now; and in church last Sunday I counted no less than seven
duplicates of that blue hat of yours."
Miss Stapylton was moved to mirth. "Fancy your noticing a thing like
that!" said she. "I didn't know you were even aware I had a blue hat."
"I am no judge," he conceded, gravely, "of such fripperies. I don't
pretend to be. But, on the other hand, I must plead guilty to deriving
considerable harmless amusement from your efforts to dress as an example
and an irritant to all Lichfield."
"You wouldn't have me a dowd, Olaf?" said she, demurely. "I have to be
neat and tidy, you know. You wouldn't have me going about in a
continuous state of unbuttonedness and black bombazine like Mrs. Rabbet,
would you?"
Rudolph Musgrave debated as to this. "I dare say," he at last conceded,
cautiously, "that to the casual eye your appearance is somewhat
--er--more pleasing than that of our rector's wife. But, on the
other hand----"
"Olaf, I am embarrassed by such fulsome eulogy. Mrs. Rabbet isn't a day
under forty-nine. And you consider me _somewhat_ better-looking than she
is!"
He inspected her critically, and was confirmed in his opinion.
"Olaf"--coaxingly--"do you really think I am as ugly as that?"
"Pouf!" said the colonel airily; "I dare say you are well enough."
"Olaf"--and this was even more cajoling--"do you know you've never told
me what sort of a woman you most admire?"
"I don't admire any of them," said Colonel Musgrave, stoutly. "They are
too vain and frivolous--especially the pink-and-white ones," he added,
unkindlily.
"Cousin Agatha has told me all about your multifarious affairs of
course. She depicts you as a sort of cardiacal buccaneer and visibly
gloats over the tale of your enormities. She is perfectly dear about
it. But have you never--_cared_--for any woman, Olaf?"
Precarious ground, this! His eyes were fixed upon her now. And hers, for
doubtless sufficient reasons, were curiously intent upon anything in the
universe rather than Rudolph Musgrave.
"Yes," said he, with a little intake of the breath; "yes, I cared once."
"And--she cared?" asked Miss Stapylton.
She happened, even now, not to be looking at him.
"She!" Rudolph Musgrave cried, in real surprise. "Why, God bless my
soul, of course she didn't! She didn't know anything about it."
"You never told her, Olaf?"--and this was reproachful. Then Patricia
said: "Well! and did she go down in the cellar and get the wood-ax or
was she satisfied just to throw the bric-a-brac at you?"
And Colonel Musgrave laughed aloud.
"Ah!" said he; "it would have been a brave jest if I had told her,
wouldn't it? She was young, you see, and wealthy, and--ah, well, I won't
deceive you by exaggerating her personal attractions! I will serve up to
you no praises of her sauced with lies. And I scorn to fall back on the
stock-in-trade of the poets,--all their silly metaphors and similes and
suchlike nonsense. I won't tell you that her complexion reminded me of
roses swimming in milk, for it did nothing of the sort. Nor am I going
to insist that her eyes had a fire like that of stars, or proclaim that
Cupid was in the habit of lighting his torch from them. I don't think
he was. I would like to have caught the brat taking any such liberties
with those innocent, humorous, unfathomable eyes of hers! And they
didn't remind me of violets, either," he pursued, belligerently, "nor
did her mouth look to me in the least like a rosebud, nor did I have the
slightest difficulty in distinguishing between her hands and lilies. I
consider these hyperbolical figures of speech to be idiotic. Ah, no!"
cried Colonel Musgrave, warming to his subject--and regarding it, too,
very intently; "ah, no, a face that could be patched together at the
nearest florist's would not haunt a man's dreams o'nights, as hers does!
I haven't any need for praises sauced with lies! I spurn hyperbole. I
scorn exaggeration. I merely state calmly and judicially that she was
God's masterpiece,--the most beautiful and adorable and indescribable
creature that He ever made."
She smiled at this. "You should have told her, Olaf," said Miss
Stapylton. "You should have told her that you cared."
He gave a gesture of dissent. "She had everything," he pointed out,
"everything the world could afford her. And, doubtless, she would have
been very glad to give it all up for me, wouldn't she?--for me, who
haven't youth or wealth or fame or anything? Ah, I dare say she would
have been delighted to give up the world she knew and loved,--the world
that loved her,--for the privilege of helping me digest old county
records!"
And Rudolph Musgrave laughed again, though not mirthfully.
But the girl was staring at him, with a vague trouble in her eyes. "You
should have told her, Olaf," she repeated.
And at this point he noted that the arbutus-flush in her cheeks began to
widen slowly, until, at last, it had burned back to the little pink
ears, and had merged into the coppery glory of her hair, and had made
her, if such a thing were possible--which a minute ago it manifestly was
not,--more beautiful and adorable and indescribable than ever before.
"Ah, yes!" he scoffed, "Lichfield would have made a fitting home for
her. She would have been very happy here, shut off from the world with
us,--with us, whose forefathers have married and intermarried with one
another until the stock is worthless, and impotent for any further
achievement. For here, you know, we have the best blood in America, and
--for utilitarian purposes--that means the worst blood. Ah, we may prate
of our superiority to the rest of the world,--and God knows, we
do!--but, at bottom, we are worthless. We are worn out, I tell you! we
are effete and stunted in brain and will-power, and the very desire of
life is gone out of us! We are contented simply to exist in Lichfield.
And she--"
He paused, and a new, fierce light came into his eyes. "She was so
beautiful!" he said, half-angrily, between clenched teeth.
"You are just like the rest of them, Olaf," she lamented, with a hint
of real sadness. "You imagine you are in love with a girl because you
happen to like the color of her eyes, or because there is a curve about
her lips that appeals to you. That isn't love, Olaf, as we women
understand it. Ah, no, a girl's love for a man doesn't depend altogether
upon his fitness to be used as an advertisement for somebody's
ready-made clothing."
"You fancy you know what you are talking about," said Rudolph Musgrave,
"but you don't. You don't realize, you see, how beautiful she--was."
And this time, he nearly tripped upon the tense, for her hand was on his
arm, and, in consequence, a series of warm, delicious little shivers was
running about his body in a fashion highly favorable to extreme
perturbation of mind.
"You should have told her, Olaf," she said, wistfully. "Oh, Olaf, Olaf,
why didn't you tell her?"
She did not know, of course, how she was tempting him; she did not know,
of course, how her least touch seemed to waken every pulse in his body
to an aching throb, and set hope and fear a-drumming in his breast.
Obviously, she did not know; and it angered him that she did not.
"She would have laughed at me," he said, with a snarl; "how she would
have laughed!"
"She wouldn't have laughed, Olaf." And, indeed, she did not look as if
she would.
"But much you know of her!" said Rudolph Musgrave, morosely. "She was
just like the rest of them, I tell you! She knew how to stare a man out
of countenance with big purple eyes that were like violets with the dew
on them, and keep her paltry pink-and-white baby face all pensive and
sober, till the poor devil went stark, staring mad, and would have
pawned his very soul to tell her that he loved her! She knew! She did it
on purpose. She would look pensive just to make an ass of you! She--"
And here the colonel set his teeth for a moment, and resolutely drew
back from the abyss.
"She would not have cared for me," he said, with a shrug. "I was not
exactly the sort of fool she cared for. What she really cared for was a
young fool who could dance with her in this silly new-fangled gliding
style, and send her flowers and sweet-meats, and make love to her
glibly--and a petticoated fool who would envy her fine feathers,--and,
at last, a knavish fool who would barter his title for her money. She
preferred fools, you see, but she would never have cared for a
middle-aged penniless fool like me. And so," he ended, with a vicious
outburst of mendacity, "I never told her, and she married a title and
lived unhappily in gilded splendor ever afterwards."
"You should have told her, Olaf," Miss Stapylton persisted; and then she
asked, in a voice that came very near being inaudible: "Is it too late
to tell her now, Olaf?"
The stupid man opened his lips a little, and stood staring at her with
hungry eyes, wondering if it were really possible that she did not hear
the pounding of his heart; and then his teeth clicked, and he gave a
despondent gesture.
"Yes," he said, wearily, "it is too late now."
Thereupon Miss Stapylton tossed her head. "Oh, very well!" said she;
"only, for my part, I think you acted very foolishly, and I don't see
that you have the least right to complain. I quite fail to see how you
could have expected her to marry you--or, in fact, how you can expect
any woman to marry you,--if you won't, at least, go to the trouble of
asking her to do so!"
Then Miss Stapylton went into the house, and slammed the door after her.
III
Nor was that the worst of it. For when Rudolph Musgrave followed her--as
he presently did, in a state of considerable amaze,--his sister
informed him that Miss Stapylton had retired to her room with an
unaccountable headache.
And there she remained for the rest of the evening. It was an unusually
long evening.
Yet, somehow, in spite of its notable length--affording, as it did, an
excellent opportunity for undisturbed work,--Colonel Musgrave found,
with a pricking conscience, that he made astonishingly slight progress
in an exhaustive monograph upon the fragmentary Orderly Book of an
obscure captain in a long-forgotten regiment, which if it had not
actually served in the Revolution, had at least been demonstrably
granted money "for services," and so entitled hundreds of aspirants to
become the Sons (or Daughters) of various international disagreements.
Nor did he see her at breakfast--nor at dinner.
IV
A curious little heartache accompanied Colonel Musgrave on his way home
that afternoon. He had not seen Patricia Stapylton for twenty-four
hours, and he was just beginning to comprehend what life would be like
without her. He did not find the prospect exhilarating.
Then, as he came up the orderly graveled walk, he heard, issuing from
the little vine-covered summer-house, a loud voice. It was a man's
voice, and its tones were angry.
"No! no!" the man was saying; "I'll agree to no such nonsense, I tell
you! What do you think I am?"
"I think you are a jackass-fool," Miss Stapylton said, crisply, "and a
fortune-hunter, and a sot, and a travesty, and a whole heap of other
things I haven't, as yet had time to look up in the dictionary. And I
think--I think you call yourself an English gentleman? Well, all I have
to say is God pity England if her gentlemen are of your stamp! There
isn't a costermonger in all Whitechapel who would dare talk to me as
you've done! I would like to snatch you bald-headed, I would like to
kill you--And do you think, now, if you were the very last man left in
all the _world_ that I would--No, don't you try to answer me, for I
don't wish to hear a single word you have to say. Oh, oh! how _dare_
you!"
"Well, I've had provocation enough," the man's voice retorted, sullenly.
"Perhaps, I have cut up a bit rough, Patricia, but, then, you've been
talkin' like a fool, you know. But what's the odds? Let's kiss and make
up, old girl."
"Don't touch me!" she panted; "ah, don't you _dare!_"
"You little devil! you infernal little vixen? You'll jilt me, will you?"
"Let me go!" the girl cried, sharply. Rudolph Musgrave went into the
summer-house.
The man Colonel Musgrave found there was big and loose-jointed, with
traces of puffiness about his face. He had wheat- hair and
weakish-looking, pale blue eyes. One of his arms was about Miss
Stapylton, but he released her now, and blinked at Rudolph Musgrave.
"And who are you, pray?" he demanded, querulously. "What do you want,
anyhow? What do you mean by sneakin' in here and tappin' on a fellow's
shoulder--like a damn' woodpecker, by Jove! I don't know you."
There was in Colonel Musgrave's voice a curious tremor, when he spoke;
but to the eye he was unruffled, even faintly amused.
"I am the owner of this garden," he enunciated, with leisurely
distinctness, "and it is not my custom to permit gentlewomen to be
insulted in it. So I am afraid I must ask you to leave it."
"Now, see here," the man blustered, weakly, "we don't want any heroics,
you know. See here, you're her cousin, ain't you? By God, I'll leave it
to you, you know! She's treated me badly, don't you understand. She's a
jilt, you know. She's playin' fast and loose----"
He never got any further, for at this point Rudolph Musgrave took him by
the coat-collar and half-dragged, half-pushed him through the garden,
shaking him occasionally with a quiet emphasis. The colonel was angry,
and it was a matter of utter indifference to him that they were
trampling over flower-beds, and leaving havoc in their rear.
But when they had reached the side-entrance, he paused and opened it,
and then shoved his companion into an open field, where a number of
cows, fresh from the evening milking, regarded them with incurious eyes.
It was very quiet here, save for the occasional jangle of the cow-bells
and the far-off fifing of frogs in the marsh below.
"It would have been impossible, of course," said Colonel Musgrave, "for
me to have offered you any personal violence as long as you were, in a
manner, a guest of mine. This field, however, is the property of Judge
Willoughby, and here I feel at liberty to thrash you."
Then he thrashed the man who had annoyed Patricia Stapylton.
That thrashing was, in its way, a masterpiece. There was a certain
conscientiousness about it, a certain thoroughness of execution--a
certain plodding and painstaking carefulness, in a word, such as is
possible only to those who have spent years in guiding fat-witted
tourists among the antiquities of the Lichfield Historical Association.
"You ought to exercise more," Rudolph Musgrave admonished his victim,
when he had ended. "You are entirely too flabby now, you know. That path
yonder will take you to the hotel, where, I imagine, you are staying.
There is a train leaving Lichfield at six-fifteen, and if I were you, I
would be very careful not to miss that train. Good-evening. I am sorry
to have been compelled to thrash you, but I must admit I have enjoyed it
exceedingly."
Then he went back into the garden.
V
In the shadow of a white lilac-bush, Colonel Musgrave paused with an
awed face.
"Good Lord!" said he, aghast at the notion; "what would Agatha say if
she knew I had been fighting like a drunken truck-driver! Or, rather,
what would she refrain from saying! Only, she wouldn't believe it of me.
And, for the matter of that," Rudolph Musgrave continued, after a
moment's reflection, "I wouldn't have believed it of myself a week ago.
I think I am changing, somehow. A week ago I would have fetched in the
police and sworn out a warrant; and, if the weather had been as damp as
it is, I would have waited to put on my rubbers before I would have done
that much."
VI
He found her still in the summer-house, expectant of him, it seemed, her
lips parted, her eyes glowing. Rudolph Musgrave, looking down into twin
vivid depths, for a breathing-space, found time to rejoice that he had
refused to liken them to stars. Stars, forsooth!--and, pray, what paltry
sun, what irresponsible comet, what pallid, clinkered satellite, might
boast a purple splendor such as this? For all asterial scintillations,
at best, had but a clap-trap glitter; whereas the glow of Patricia's
eyes was a matter worthy of really serious attention.
"What have you done with him, Olaf?" the girl breathed, quickly.
"I reasoned with him," said Colonel Musgrave. "Oh, I found him quite
amenable to logic. He is leaving Lichfield this evening, I think."
Thereupon Miss Stapylton began to laugh. "Yes," said she, "you must have
remonstrated very feelingly. Your tie's all crooked, Olaf dear, and your
hair's all rumpled, and there's dust all over your coat. You would
disgrace a rag-bag. Oh, I'm glad you reasoned--that way! It wasn't
dignified, but it was dear of you, Olaf. Pevensey's a beast."
He caught his breath at this. "Pevensey!" he stammered; "the Earl of
Pevensey!--the man you are going to marry!"
"Dear me, no!" Miss Stapylton answered, with utmost unconcern; "I would
sooner marry a toad. Why, didn't you know, Olaf? I thought, of course,
you knew you had been introducing athletics and better manners among the
peerage! That sounds like a bill in the House of Commons, doesn't it?"
Then Miss Stapylton laughed again, and appeared to be in a state of
agreeable, though somewhat nervous, elation. "I wrote to him two days
ago," she afterward explained, "breaking off the engagement. So he came
down at once and was very nasty about it."
"You--you have broken your engagement," he echoed, dully; and continued,
with a certain deficiency of finesse, "But I thought you wanted to be a
countess?"
"Oh, you boor, you vulgarian!" the girl cried, "Oh, you do put things so
crudely, Olaf! You are hopeless."
She shook an admonitory forefinger in his direction, and pouted in the
most dangerous fashion.
"But he always seemed so nice," she reflected, with puckered brows,
"until to-day, you know. I thought he would be eminently suitable. I
liked him tremendously until--" and here, a wonderful, tender change
came into her face, a wistful quaver woke in her voice--"until I found
there was some one else I liked better."
"Ah!" said Rudolph Musgrave.
So, that was it--yes, that was it! Her head was bowed now--her glorious,
proud little head,--and she sat silent, an abashed heap of fluffy frills
and ruffles, a tiny bundle of vaporous ruchings and filmy tucks and
suchlike vanities, in the green dusk of the summer-house.
But he knew. He had seen her face grave and tender in the twilight, and
he knew.
She loved some man--some lucky devil! Ah, yes, that was it! And he knew
the love he had unwittingly spied upon to be august; the shamed
exultance of her face and her illumined eyes, the crimson banners her
cheeks had flaunted,--these were to Colonel Musgrave as a piece of
sacred pageantry; and before it his misery was awed, his envy went
posting to extinction.
Thus the stupid man reflected, and made himself very unhappy over it.
Then, after a little, the girl threw back her head and drew a deep
breath, and flashed a tremulous smile at him.
"Ah, yes," said she; "there are better things in life than coronets,
aren't there, Olaf?"
You should have seen how he caught up the word!
"Life!" he cried, with a bitter thrill of speech; "ah, what do I know of
life? I am only a recluse, a dreamer, a visionary! You must learn of
life from the men who have lived, Patricia. I haven't ever lived. I
have always chosen the coward's part. I have chosen to shut myself off
from the world, to posture in a village all my days, and to consider its
trifles as of supreme importance. I have affected to scorn that brave
world yonder where a man is proven. And, all the while, I was afraid of
it, I think. I was afraid of you before you came."
At the thought of this Rudolph Musgrave laughed as he fell to pacing up
and down before her.
"Life!" he cried, again, with a helpless gesture; and then smiled at
her, very sadly. "'Didn't I know there was something better in life than
grubbing after musty tribes and customs and folk-songs?'" he quoted.
"Why, what a question to ask of a professional genealogist! Don't you
realize, Patricia, that the very bread I eat is, actually, earned by the
achievements of people who have been dead for centuries? and in part, of
course, by tickling the vanity of living snobs? That constitutes a nice
trade for an able-bodied person as long as men are paid for emptying
garbage-barrels--now, doesn't it? And yet it is not altogether for the
pay's sake I do it," he added, haltingly. "There really is a fascination
about the work. You are really working out a puzzle,--like a fellow
solving a chess-problem. It isn't really work, it is amusement. And when
you are establishing a royal descent, and tracing back to czars and
Plantagenets and Merovingians, and making it all seem perfectly
plausible, the thing is sheer impudent, flagrant art, and _you_ are the
artist--" He broke off here and shrugged. "No, I could hardly make you
understand. It doesn't matter. It is enough that I have bartered youth
and happiness and the very power of living for the privilege of grubbing
in old county records."
He paused. It is debatable if he had spoken wisely, or had spoken even
in consonance with fact, but his outburst had, at least, the saving
grace of sincerity. He was pallid now, shaking in every limb, and in his
heart was a dull aching. She seemed so incredibly soft and little and
childlike, as she looked up at him with troubled eyes.
"I--I don't quite understand," she murmured. "It isn't as if you were an
old man, Olaf. It isn't as if--"
But he had scarcely heard her. "Ah, child, child!" he cried, "why did
you come to waken me? I was content in my smug vanities. I was content
in my ignorance. I could have gone on contentedly grubbing through my
musty, sleepy life here, till death had taken me, if only you had not
shown me what life might mean! Ah, child, child, why did you waken me?"
"I?" she breathed; and now the flush of her cheeks had widened,
wondrously.
"You! you!" he cried, and gave a wringing motion of his hands, for the
self-esteem of a complacent man is not torn away without agony. "Who
else but you? I had thought myself brave enough to be silent, but still
I must play the coward's part! That woman I told you of--that woman I
loved--was you! Yes, you, you!" he cried, again and again, in a sort of
frenzy.
And then, on a sudden, Colonel Musgrave began to laugh.
"It is very ridiculous, isn't it?" he demanded of her. "Yes, it is
very--very funny. Now comes the time to laugh at me! Now comes the time
to lift your brows, and to make keen arrows of your eyes, and of your
tongue a little red dagger! I have dreamed of this moment many and many
a time. So laugh, I say! Laugh, for I have told you that I love you. You
are rich, and I am a pauper--you are young, and I am old, remember,--and
I love you, who love another man! For the love of God, laugh at me and
have done--laugh! for, as God lives, it is the bravest jest I have ever
known!"
But she came to him, with a wonderful gesture of compassion, and caught
his great, shapely hands in hers.
"I--I knew you cared," she breathed. "I have always known you cared. I
would have been an idiot if I hadn't. But, oh, Olaf, I didn't know you
cared so much. You frighten me, Olaf," she pleaded, and raised a tearful
face to his. "I am very fond of you, Olaf dear. Oh, don't think I am not
fond of you." And the girl paused for a breathless moment. "I think I
might have married you, Olaf," she said, half-wistfully, "if--if it
hadn't been for one thing."
Rudolph Musgrave smiled now, though he found it a difficult business.
"Yes," he assented, gravely, "I know, dear. If it were not for the other
man--that lucky devil! Yes, he is a very, very lucky devil, child, and
he constitutes rather a big 'if,' doesn't he?"
Miss Stapylton, too, smiled a little. "No," said she, "that isn't quite
the reason. The real reason is, as I told you yesterday, that I quite
fail to see how you can expect any woman to marry you, you jay-bird, if
you won't go to the trouble of asking her to do so."
And, this time, Miss Stapylton did not go into the house.
VII
When they went in to supper, they had planned to tell Miss Agatha of
their earth-staggering secret at once. But the colonel comprehended, at
the first glimpse of his sister, that the opportunity would be
ill-chosen.
The meal was an awkward half-hour. Miss Agatha, from the head of the
table, did very little talking, save occasionally to evince views of
life that were both lachrymose and pugnacious. And the lovers talked
with desperate cheerfulness, so that there might be no outbreak so long
as Pilkins--preeminently ceremonious among butlers, and as yet inclined
to scoff at the notion that the Musgraves of Matocton were not divinely
entrusted to his guardianship,--was in the room.
Coming so close upon the heels of his high hour, this contretemps of
Agatha's having one of her "attacks," seemed more to Rudolph Musgrave
than a man need rationally bear with equanimity. Perhaps it was a trifle
stiffly that he said he did not care for any raspberries.
His sister burst into tears.
"That's all the thanks I get. I slave my life out, and what thanks do I
get for it? I never have any pleasure, I never put my foot out of the
house except to go to market,--and what thanks do I get for it? That's
what I want you to tell me with the first raspberries of the season.
That's what I want! Oh, I don't wonder you can't look me in the eye. And
I wish I was dead! that's what I wish!"
Colonel Musgrave did not turn at once toward Patricia, when his sister
had stumbled, weeping, from the dining-room.
"I--I am so sorry, Olaf," said a remote and tiny voice.
Then he touched her hand with his finger-tips, ever so lightly. "You
must not worry about it, dear. I daresay I was unpardonably brusque. And
Agatha's health is not good, so that she is a trifle irritable at times.
Why, good Lord, we have these little set-to's ever so often, and never
give them a thought afterwards. That is one of the many things the
future Mrs. Musgrave will have to get accustomed to, eh? Or does that
appalling prospect frighten you too much?"
And Patricia brazenly confessed that it did not. She also made a face at
him, and accused Rudolph Musgrave of trying to crawl out of marrying
her, which proceeding led to frivolities unnecessary to record, but
found delectable by the participants.
VIII
Colonel Musgrave was alone. He had lifted his emptied coffee-cup and he
swished the lees gently to and fro. He was curiously intent upon these
lees, considered them in the light of a symbol....
Then a comfortable, pleasant-faced mulattress came to clear the
supper-table. Virginia they called her. Virginia had been nurse in turn
to all the children of Rudolph Musgrave's parents; and to the end of her
life she appeared to regard the emancipation of the South's <DW64>s as
an irrelevant vagary of certain "low-down" and probably "ornery" Yankees
--as an, in short, quite eminently "tacky" proceeding which very
certainly in no way affected her vested right to tyrannize over the
Musgrave household.
"Virginia," said Colonel Musgrave, "don't forget to make up a fire in
the kitchen-stove before you go to bed. And please fill the kettle
before you go upstairs, and leave it on the stove. Miss Agatha is not
well to-night."
"Yaas, suh. I unnerstan', suh," Virginia said, sedately.
Virginia filled her tray, and went away quietly, her pleasant yellow
face as imperturbable as an idol's.
PART THREE - TERTIUS
"It is in many ways made plain to us
That love must grow like any common thing,
Root, bud, and leaf, ere ripe for garnering
The mellow fruitage front us; even thus
Must Helena encounter Theseus
Ere Paris come, and every century
Spawn divers queens who die with Antony
But live a great while first with Julius.
"Thus I have spoken the prologue of a play
Wherein I have no part, and laugh, and sit
Contented in the wings, whilst you portray
An amorous maid with gestures that befit
This lovely role,--as who knows better, pray,
Than I that helped you in rehearsing it?"
Horace Symonds. _Civic Voluntaries_.
I
When the Presidential campaign was at its height; when in various
sections of the United States "the boy orator of La Platte" was making
invidious remarks concerning the Republican Party, and in Canton (Ohio)
Mr. M.A. Hanna was cheerfully expressing his confidence as to the
outcome of it all; when the Czar and the Czarina were visiting President
Faure in Paris "amid unparalleled enthusiasm"; and when semi-educated
people were appraising, with a glibness possible to ignorance only, the
literary achievements of William Morris and George du Maurier, who had
just died:--at this remote time, Roger Stapylton returned to Lichfield.
For in that particular October Patricia's father, an accommodating
physician having declared old Roger Stapylton's health to necessitate a
Southern sojourn, leased the Bellingham mansion in Lichfield. It
happened that, by rare good luck, Tom Bellingham--of the Bellinghams of
Assequin, not the Bellinghams of Bellemeade, who indeed immigrated after
the War of 1812 and have never been regarded as securely established
from a social standpoint,--was at this time in pecuniary difficulties on
account of having signed another person's name to a cheque.
Roger Stapylton refurnished the house in the extreme degree of
Lichfieldian elegance. Colonel Musgrave was his mentor throughout the
process; and the oldest families of Lichfield very shortly sat at table
with the former overseer, and not at all unwillingly, since his dinners
were excellent and an infatuated Rudolph Musgrave--an axiom now in
planning any list of guests,--was very shortly to marry the man's
daughter.
In fact, the matter had been settled; and Colonel Musgrave had received
from Roger Stapylton an exuberantly granted charter of courtship.
This befell, indeed, upon a red letter day in Roger Stapylton's life.
The banker was in business matters wonderfully shrewd, as divers
transactions, since the signing of that half-forgotten contract whereby
he was to furnish a certain number of mules for the Confederate service,
strikingly attested: but he had rarely been out of the country wherein
his mother bore him; and where another nabob might have dreamed of an
earl, or even have soared aspiringly in imagination toward a
marchioness-ship for his only child, old Stapylton retained unshaken
faith in the dust-gathering creed of his youth.
He had tolerated Pevensey, had indeed been prepared to purchase him much
as he would have ordered any other expensive trinket or knickknack which
Patricia desired. But he had never viewed the match with enthusiasm.
Now, though, old Stapylton exulted. His daughter--half a Vartrey
already--would become by marriage a Musgrave of Matocton, no less. Pat's
carriage would roll up and down the oak-shaded avenue from which he had
so often stepped aside with an uncovered head, while gentlemen and
ladies cantered by; and it would be Pat's children that would play about
the corridors of the old house at whose doors he had lived so
long,--those awe-inspiring corridors, which he had very rarely entered,
except on Christmas Day and other recognized festivities, when, dressed
to the nines, the overseer and his uneasy mother were by immemorial
custom made free of the mansion, with every slave upon the big
plantation.
"They were good days, sir," he chuckled. "Heh, we'll stick to the old
customs. We'll give a dinner and announce it at dessert, just as your
honored grandfather did your Aunt Constantia's betrothal--"
For about the Musgraves of Matocton there could be no question. It was
the old man's delight to induce Rudolph Musgrave to talk concerning his
ancestors; and Stapylton soon had their history at his finger-tips. He
could have correctly blazoned every tincture in their armorial bearings
and have explained the origin of every rampant, counter-changed or
couchant beast upon the shield.
He knew it was the _Bona Nova_ in the November of 1619,--for the first
Musgrave had settled in Virginia, prior to his removal to
Lichfield,--which had the honor of transporting the forebear of this
family into America. Stapylton could have told you offhand which scions
of the race had represented this or that particular county in the House
of Burgesses, and even for what years; which three of them were
Governors, and which of them had served as officers of the State Line in
the Revolution; and, in fine, was more than satisfied to have his
daughter play Penelophon to Colonel Musgrave's debonair mature Cophetua.
In a word, Roger Stapylton had acquiesced to the transferal of his
daughter's affections with the peculiar equanimity of a properly reared
American parent. He merely stipulated that, since his business affairs
prevented an indefinite stay in Lichfield, Colonel Musgrave should
presently remove to New York City, where the older man held ready for
him a purely ornamental and remunerative position with the Insurance
Company of which Roger Stapylton was president.
But upon this point Rudolph Musgrave was obdurate.
He had voiced, and with sincerity, as you may remember, his desire to be
proven upon a larger stage than Lichfield afforded. Yet the sincerity
was bred of an emotion it did not survive. To-day, unconsciously,
Rudolph Musgrave was reflecting that he was used to living in Lichfield,
and would appear to disadvantage in a new surrounding, and very probably
would not be half so comfortable.
Aloud he said, in firm belief that he spoke truthfully: "I cannot
conscientiously give up the Library, sir. I realize the work may not
seem important in your eyes. Indeed, in anybody's eyes it must seem an
inadequate outcome of a man's whole life. But it unfortunately happens
to be the only kind of work I am capable of doing. And--if you will
pardon me, sir,--I do not think it would be honest for me to accept this
generous salary and give nothing in return."
But here Patricia broke in.
Patricia agreed with Colonel Musgrave in every particular. Indeed, had
Colonel Musgrave proclaimed his intention of setting up in life as an
assassin, Patricia would readily have asserted homicide to be the most
praiseworthy of vocations. As it was, she devoted no little volubility
and emphasis and eulogy to the importance of a genealogist in the
eternal scheme of things; and gave her father candidly to understand
that an inability to appreciate this fact was necessarily indicative of
a deplorably low order of intelligence.
Musgrave was to remember--long afterward--how glorious and dear this
brightly-, mettlesome and tiny woman had seemed to him in the
second display of temper he witnessed in Patricia. It was a revelation
of an additional and as yet unsuspected adorability.
Her father, though, said: "Pat, I've suspected for a long time it was
foolish of me to have a red-haired daughter." Thus he capitulated,--and
with an ineffable air of routine.
Colonel Musgrave was, in a decorous fashion, the happiest of living
persons.
II
Colonel Musgrave was, in a decorous fashion, the happiest of living
persons....
As a token of this he devoted what little ready money he possessed to
renovating Matocton, where he had not lived for twenty years. He rarely
thought of money, not esteeming it an altogether suitable subject for a
gentleman's meditations. And to do him justice, the reflection that old
Stapylton's wealth would some day be at Rudolph Musgrave's disposal was
never more than an agreeable minor feature of Patricia's entourage
whenever, as was very often, Colonel Musgrave fell to thinking of how
adorable Patricia was in every particular.
Yet there were times when he thought of Anne Charteris as well. He had
not seen her for a whole year now, for the Charterises had left
Lichfield shortly after the Pendomer divorce case had been settled, and
were still in Europe.
This was the evening during which Roger Stapylton had favorably received
his declaration; and Colonel Musgrave was remembering the time that he
and Anne had last spoken with a semblance of intimacy--that caustic
time when Anne Charteris had interrupted him in high words with her
husband, and circumstances had afforded to Rudolph Musgrave no choice
save to confess, to this too-perfect woman, of all created beings, his
"true relations" with Clarice Pendomer.
Even as yet the bitterness of that humiliation was not savorless....
It seemed to him that he could never bear to think of the night when
Anne had heard his stammerings through, and had merely listened, and in
listening had been unreasonably beautiful. So Godiva might have looked
on Peeping Tom, with more of wonder than of loathing, just at first....
It had been very hard to bear. But it seemed necessary. The truth would
have hurt Anne too much....
He noted with the gusto of a connoisseur how neatly the denouement of
this piteous farce had been prepared. His rage with Charteris; Anne's
overhearing, and misinterpretation of, a dozen angry words; that old
affair with Clarice--immediately before her marriage (one of how many
pleasurable gallantries? the colonel idly wondered, and regretted that
he had no Leporello to keep them catalogued for consultation)--and
George Pendomer's long-smoldering jealousy of Rudolph Musgrave: all
fitted in as neatly as the bits of a puzzle.
It had been the simplest matter in the world to shield John Charteris.
Yet, the colonel wished he could be sure it was an unadulterated desire
of protecting Anne which had moved him. There had been very certainly an
enjoyment all the while in reflecting how nobly Rudolph Musgrave was
behaving for the sake of "the only woman he had ever loved." Yes, one
had undoubtedly phrased it thus--then, and until the time one met
Patricia.
But Anne was different, and in the nature of things must always be a
little different, from all other people--even Patricia Stapylton.
Always in reverie the colonel would come back to this,--that Anne could
not be thought of, quite, in the same frame of mind wherein one
appraised other persons. Especially must he concede this curious
circumstance whenever, as to-night, he considered divers matters that
had taken place quite long enough ago to have been forgotten.
It was a foolish sort of a reverie, and scarcely worth the setting down.
It was a reverie of the kind that everyone, and especially everyone's
wife, admits to be mawkish and unprofitable; and yet, somehow, the next
still summer night, or long sleepy Sunday afternoon, or, perhaps, some
cheap, jigging and heartbreaking melody, will set a carnival of old
loves and old faces awhirl in the brain. One grows very sad over it, of
course, and it becomes apparent that one has always been ill-treated by
the world; but the sadness is not unpleasant, and one is quite willing
to forgive.
Yes,--it was a long, long time ago. It must have been a great number of
centuries. Matocton was decked in its spring fripperies of burgeoning,
and the sky was a great, pale turquoise, and the buttercups left a
golden dust high up on one's trousers. One had not become entirely
accustomed to long trousers then, and one was rather proud of them. One
was lying on one's back in the woods, where the birds were astir and
eager to begin their house-building, and twittered hysterically over the
potentialities of straws and broken twigs.
Overhead, the swelling buds of trees were visible against the sky, and
the branches were like grotesque designs on a Japanese plate. There was
a little clump of moss, very cool and soft, that just brushed one's
cheek.
One was thinking--really thinking--for the first time in one's life;
and, curiously enough, one was thinking about a girl, although girls
were manifestly of no earthly importance.
But Anne Willoughby was different. Even at the age when girls seemed
feckless creatures, whose aimings were inexplicable, both as concerned
existence in general, and, more concretely, as touched gravel-shooters
and snowballs, and whose reasons for bursting into tears were recondite,
one had perceived the difference. One wondered about it from time to
time.
Gradually, there awoke an uneasy self-conscious interest as to all
matters that concerned her, a mental pricking up of the ears when her
name was mentioned.
One lay awake o' nights, wondering why her hair curled so curiously
about her temples, and held such queer glowing tints in its depths when
sunlight fell upon it. One was uncomfortable and embarrassed and
Briarean-handed in her presence, but with her absence came the
overwhelming desire of seeing her again.
After a little, it was quite understood that one was in love with Anne
Willoughby....
It was a matter of minor importance that her father was the wealthiest
man in Fairhaven, and that one's mother was poor. One would go away into
foreign lands after a while, and come back with a great deal of
money,--lakes of rupees and pieces of eight, probably. It was very
simple.
But Anne's father had taken an unreasonable view of the matter, and
carried Anne off to a terrible aunt, who returned one's letters
unopened. That was the end of Anne Willoughby.
Then, after an interval--during which one fell in and out of love
assiduously, and had upon the whole a pleasant time,--Anne Charteris had
come to Lichfield. One had found that time had merely added poise and
self-possession and a certain opulence to the beauty which had caused
one's voice to play fantastic tricks in conference with Anne
Willoughby,--ancient, unforgotten conferences, wherein one had pointed
out the many respects in which she differed from all other women, and
the perfect feasibility of marrying on nothing a year.
Much as one loved Patricia, and great as was one's happiness, men did
not love as boys did, after all....
"'Ah, Boy, it is a dream for life too high,'" said Colonel Musgrave, in
his soul. "And now let's think of something sensible. Let's think about
the present political crisis, and what to give the groomsmen, and how
much six times seven is. Meanwhile, you are not the fellow in _Aux
Italiens_, you know; you are not bothered by the faint, sweet smell of
any foolish jasmine-flower, you understand, or by any equally foolish
hankerings after your lost youth. You are simply a commonplace,
every-day sort of man, not thoroughly hardened as yet to being engaged,
and you are feeling a bit pulled down to-night, because your liver or
something is out of sorts."
Upon reflection, Colonel Musgrave was quite sure that he was happy; and
that it was only his liver or something which was upset. But, at all
events, the colonel's besetting infirmity was always to shrink from
making changes; instinctively he balked against commission of any action
which would alter his relations with accustomed circumstances or
persons. It was very like Rudolph Musgrave that even now, for all the
glow of the future's bright allure, his heart should hark back to the
past and its absurd dear memories, with wistfulness.
And he found it, as many others have done, but cheerless sexton's work,
this digging up of boyish recollections. One by one, they come to
light--the brave hopes and dreams and aspirations of youth; the ruddy
life has gone out of them; they have shriveled into an alien, pathetic
dignity. They might have been one's great-grandfather's or Hannibal's or
Adam's; the boy whose life was swayed by them is quite as dead as these.
Amaryllis is dead, too. Perhaps, you drop in of an afternoon to talk
over old happenings. She is perfectly affable. She thinks it is time you
were married. She thinks it very becoming, the way you have stoutened.
And, no, they weren't at the Robinsons'; that was the night little
Amaryllis was threatened with croup.
Then, after a little, the lamps of welcome are lighted in her eyes, her
breath quickens, her cheeks mount crimson flags in honor of her lord,
her hero, her conqueror.
It is Mr. Grundy, who is happy to meet you, and hopes you will stay to
dinner. He patronizes you a trifle; his wife, you see, has told him all
about that boy who is as dead as Hannibal. You don't mind in the least;
you dine with Mr. and Mrs. Grundy, and pass a very pleasant evening.
Colonel Musgrave had dined often with the Charterises.
III
And then some frolic god, _en route_ from homicide by means of an
unloaded pistol in Chicago for the demolishment of a likely ship off
Palos, with the cooeperancy of a defective pistonrod, stayed in his
flight to bring Joe Parkinson to Lichfield.
It was Roger Stapylton who told the colonel of this advent, as the very
apex of jocularity.
"For you remember the Parkinsons, I suppose?"
"The ones that had a cabin near Matocton? Very deserving people, I
believe."
"And _their_ son, sir, wants to marry my daughter," said Mr.
Stapylton,--"_my_ daughter, who is shortly to be connected by marriage
with the Musgraves of Matocton! I don't know what this world will come
to next."
It was a treat to see him shake his head in deprecation of such anarchy.
Then Roger Stapylton said, more truculently: "Yes, sir! on account of a
boy-and-girl affair five years ago, this half-strainer, this poor-white
trash, has actually had the presumption, sir,--but I don't doubt that
Pat has told you all about it?"
"Why, no," said Colonel Musgrave. "She did not mention it this
afternoon. She was not feeling very well. A slight headache. I noticed
she was not inclined to conversation."
It had just occurred to him, as mildly remarkable, that Patricia had
never at any time alluded to any one of those countless men who must
have inevitably made love to her.
"Though, mind you, I don't say anything against Joe. He's a fine young
fellow. Paid his own way through college. Done good work in Panama and
in Alaska too. But--confound it, sir, the boy's a fool! Now I put it to
you fairly, ain't he a fool?" said Mr. Stapylton.
"Upon my word, sir, if his folly has no other proof than an adoration of
your daughter," the colonel protested, "I must in self-defense beg leave
to differ with you."
Yes, that was it undoubtedly. Patricia had too high a sense of honor to
exhibit these defeated rivals in a ridiculous light, even to him. It was
a revelation of an additional and as yet unsuspected adorability.
Then after a little further talk they separated. Colonel Musgrave left
that night for Matocton in order to inspect the improvements which were
being made there. He was to return to Lichfield on the ensuing
Wednesday, when his engagement to Patricia was to be announced--"just
as your honored grandfather did your Aunt Constantia's betrothal."
Meanwhile Joe Parkinson, a young man much enamored, who fought the world
by ordinary like Hal o' the Wynd, "for his own hand," was seeing
Patricia every day.
IV
Colonel Musgrave remained five days at Matocton, that he might put his
house in order against his nearing marriage. It was a pleasant sight to
see the colonel stroll about the paneled corridors and pause to chat
with divers deferential workmen who were putting the last touches there,
or to observe him mid-course in affable consultation with gardeners
anent the rolling of a lawn or the retrimming of a rosebush, and to mark
the bearing of the man so optimistically by goodwill toward the
solar system.
He joyed in his old home,--in the hipped roof of it, the mullioned
casements, the wide window-seats, the high and spacious rooms, the
geometrical gardens and broad lawns, in all that was quaint and
beautiful at Matocton,--because it would be Patricia's so very soon, the
lovely frame of a yet lovelier picture, as the colonel phrased it with a
flight of imagery.
Gravely he inspected all the portraits of his feminine ancestors that he
might decide, as one without bias, whether Matocton had ever boasted a
more delectable mistress. Equity--or in his fond eyes at
least,--demanded a negative. Only in one of these canvases, a
counterfeit of Miss Evelyn Ramsay, born a Ramsay of Blenheim, that had
married the common great-great-grandfather of both the colonel and
Patricia--Major Orlando Musgrave, an aide-de-camp to General Charles Lee
in the Revolution,--Rudolph Musgrave found, or seemed to find, dear
likenesses to that demented seraph who was about to stoop to his
unworthiness.
He spent much time before this portrait. Yes, yes! this woman had been
lovely in her day. And this bright, roguish shadow of her was lovely,
too, eternally postured in white patnet, trimmed with a vine of
rose- satin leaves, a pink rose in her powdered hair and a huge
ostrich plume as well.
Yet it was an adamantean colonel that remarked:
"My dear, perhaps it is just as fortunate as not that you have quitted
Matocton. For I have heard tales of you, Miss Ramsay. Oh, no! I honestly
do not believe that you would have taken kindlily to any young
person--not even in the guise of a great-great-grand-daughter,--to whom
you cannot hold a candle, madam. A fico for you, madam," said the most
undutiful of great-great-grandsons.
Let us leave him to his roseate meditations. Questionless, in the woman
he loved there was much of his own invention: but the circumstance is
not unhackneyed; and Colonel Musgrave was in a decorous fashion the
happiest of living persons.
Meanwhile Joe Parkinson, a young man much enamored, who fought the
world by ordinary, like Hal o' the Wynd "for his own hand," was seeing
Patricia every day.
V
Joe Parkinson--tall and broad-shouldered, tanned, resolute, chary of
speech, decisive in gesture, having close-cropped yellow hair and frank,
keen eyes like amethysts,--was the one alien present when Colonel
Musgrave came again into Roger Stapylton's fine and choicely-furnished
mansion.
This was on the evening Roger Stapylton gave the long-anticipated dinner
at which he was to announce his daughter's engagement. As much indeed
was suspected by most of his dinner-company, so carefully selected from
the aristocracy of Lichfield; and the heart of the former overseer, as
these handsome, courtly and sweet voiced people settled according to
their rank about his sumptuous table, was aglow with pride.
Then Rudolph Musgrave turned to his companion and said softly: "My dear,
you are like a wraith. What is it?"
"I have a headache," said Patricia. "It is nothing."
"You reassure me," the colonel gaily declared, "for I had feared it was
a heartache--"
She faced him. Desperation looked out of her purple eyes. "It is," the
girl said swiftly.
"Ah--?" Only it was an intake of the breath, rather than an
interjection. Colonel Musgrave ate his fish with deliberation. "Young
Parkinson?" he presently suggested.
"I thought I had forgotten him. I didn't know I cared--I didn't know I
_could_ care so much--" And there was a note in her voice which thrust
the poor colonel into an abyss of consternation.
"Remember that these people are your guests," he said, in perfect
earnest.
"--and I refused him this afternoon for the last time, and he is going
away to-morrow--"
But here Judge Allardyce broke in, to tell Miss Stapylton of the
pleasure with which he had _nolle prosequied_ the case against Tom
Bellingham.
"A son of my old schoolmate, ma'am," the judge explained. "A Bellingham
of Assequin. Oh, indiscreet of course--but, God bless my soul! when were
the Bellinghams anything else? The boy regretted it as much as anybody."
And she listened with almost morbid curiosity concerning the finer
details of legal intricacy.
Colonel Musgrave was mid-course in an anecdote which the lady upon the
other side of him found wickedly amusing.
He was very gay. He had presently secured the attention of the company
at large, and held it through a good half-hour; for by common consent
Rudolph Musgrave was at his best to-night, and Lichfield found his best
worth listening to.
"Grinning old popinjay!" thought Mr. Parkinson; and envied him and
internally noted, and with an unholy fervor cursed, the adroitness of
intonation and the discreetly modulated gesture with which the colonel
gave to every point of his merry-Andrewing its precise value.
The colonel's mind was working busily on matters oddly apart from those
of which he talked. He wanted this girl next to him--at whom he did not
look. He loved her as that whippersnapper yonder was not capable of
loving anyone. Young people had these fancies; and they outlived them,
as the colonel knew of his own experience. Let matters take their course
unhindered, at all events by him. For it was less his part than that of
any other man alive to interfere when Rudolph Musgrave stood within a
finger's reach of, at worst, his own prosperity and happiness.
He would convey no note to Roger Stapylton. Let the banker announce the
engagement. Let the young fellow go to the devil. Colonel Musgrave would
marry the girl and make Patricia, at worst, content. To do otherwise,
even to hesitate, would be the emptiest quixotism....
Then came the fatal thought, "But what a gesture!" To fling away his
happiness--yes, even his worldly fortune,--and to do it smilingly!
Patricia must, perforce, admire him all her life.
Then as old Stapylton stirred in his chair and broke into a wide
premonitory smile, Colonel Musgrave rose to his feet. And of that
company Clarice Pendomer at least thought of how like he was to the boy
who had fought the famous duel with George Pendomer some fifteen years
ago.
Ensued a felicitous speech. Rudolph Musgrave was familiar with his
audience. And therefore:
Colonel Musgrave alluded briefly to the pleasure he took in addressing
such a gathering. He believed no other State in the 'Union could have
afforded an assembly of more distinguished men and fairer women. But the
fact was not unnatural; they might recall the venerable saying that
blood will tell? Well, it was their peculiar privilege to represent
to-day that sturdy stock which, when this great republic was in the
pangs of birth, had with sword and pen and oratory discomfited the
hirelings of England and given to history the undying names of several
Revolutionary patriots,--all of whom he enumerated with the customary
pause after each cognomen to allow for the customary applause.
And theirs, too, was the blood of those heroic men who fought more
recently beneath the stars and bars, as bravely, he would make bold to
say, as Leonidas at Thermopylae, in defense of their loved Southland.
Right, he conceded, had not triumphed here. For hordes of brutal
soldiery had invaded the fertile soil, the tempest of war had swept the
land and left it desolate. The South lay battered and bruised, and pros
trate in blood, the "Niobe of nations," as sad a victim of ingratitude
as King Lear.
The colonel touched upon the time when buzzards, in the guise of
carpet-baggers, had battened upon the recumbent form; and spoke
slightingly of divers persons of antiquity as compared with various
Confederate leaders, whose names were greeted with approving nods and
ripples of polite enthusiasm.
But the South, and in particular the grand old Commonwealth which they
inhabited, he stated, had not long sat among the ruins of her temples,
like a sorrowing priestess with veiled eyes and a depressed soul,
mourning for that which had been. Like the fabled Phoenix, she had risen
from the ashes of her past. To-day she was once more to be seen in her
hereditary position, the brightest gem in all that glorious galaxy of
States which made America the envy of every other nation. Her
battlefields converted into building lots, tall factories smoked where
once a holocaust had flamed, and where cannon had roared you heard
to-day the tinkle of the school bell. Such progress was without a
parallel.
Nor was there any need for him, he was assured, to mention the
imperishable names of their dear homeland's poets and statesmen of
to-day, the orators and philanthropists and prominent business-men who
jostled one another in her splendid, new asphalted streets, since all
were quite familiar to his audience,--as familiar, he would venture to
predict, as they would eventually be to the most cherished recollections
of Macaulay's prophesied New Zealander, when this notorious antipodean
should pay his long expected visit to the ruins of St. Paul's.
In fine, by a natural series of transitions, Colonel Musgrave thus
worked around to "the very pleasing duty with which our host, in view of
the long and intimate connection between our families, has seen fit to
honor me"--which was, it developed, to announce the imminent marriage of
Miss Patricia Stapylton and Mr. Joseph Parkinson.
It may conservatively be stated that everyone was surprised.
Old Stapylton had half risen, with a purple face.
The colonel viewed him with a look of bland interrogation.
There was silence for a heart-beat.
Then Stapylton lowered his eyes, if just because the laws of caste had
triumphed, and in consequence his glance crossed that of his daughter,
who sat motionless regarding him. She was an unusually pretty girl, he
thought, and he had always been inordinately proud of her. It was not
pride she seemed to beg him muster now. Patricia through that moment was
not the fine daughter the old man was sometimes half afraid of. She was,
too, like a certain defiant person--oh, of an incredible beauty, such
as women had not any longer!--who had hastily put aside her bonnet and
had looked at a young Roger Stapylton in much this fashion very long
ago, because the minister was coming downstairs, and they would
presently be man and wife,--provided always her pursuing brothers did
not arrive in time....
Old Roger Stapylton cleared his throat.
Old Roger Stapylton said, half sheepishly: "My foot's asleep, that's
all. I beg everybody's pardon, I'm sure. Please go on"--he had come
within an ace of saying "Mr. Rudolph," and only in the nick of time did
he continue, "Colonel Musgrave."
So the colonel continued in time-hallowed form, with happy allusions to
Mr. Parkinson's anterior success as an engineer before he came "like a
young Lochinvar to wrest away his beautiful and popular fiancee from us
fainthearted fellows of Lichfield"; touched of course upon the colonel's
personal comminglement of envy and rage, and so on, as an old bachelor
who saw too late what he had missed in life; and concluded by proposing
the health of the young couple.
This was drunk with all the honors.
VI
Upon what Patricia said to the colonel in the drawing-room, what Joe
Parkinson blurted out in the hall, and chief of all, what Roger
Stapylton asseverated to Rudolph Musgrave in the library, after the
other guests had gone, it is unnecessary to dwell in this place. To each
of these in various fashions did Colonel Musgrave explain such reasons
as, he variously explained, must seem to any gentleman sufficient cause
for acting as he had done; but most candidly, and even with a touch of
eloquence, to Roger Stapylton.
"You are like your grandfather, sir, at times," the latter said,
inconsequently enough, when the colonel had finished.
And Rudolph Musgrave gave a little bowing gesture, with an entire
gravity. He knew it was the highest tribute that Stapylton could pay to
any man.
"She's a daughter any father might be proud of," said the banker, also.
He removed his cigar from his mouth and looked at it critically. "She's
rather like her mother sometimes," he said carelessly. "Her mother made
a runaway match, you may remember--Damn' poor cigar, this. But no, you
wouldn't, I reckon. I had branched out into cotton then and had a little
place just outside of Chiswick--"
So that, all in all, Colonel Musgrave returned homeward not entirely
dissatisfied.
VII
The colonel sat for a long while before his fire that night. The room
seemed less comfortable than he had ever known it. So many of his books
and pictures and other furnishings had been already carried to Matocton
that the walls were a little bare. Also there was a formidable pile of
bills upon the table by him,--from contractors and upholsterers and
furniture-houses, and so on, who had been concerned in the late
renovation of Matocton,--the heralds of a host he hardly saw his way to
dealing with.
He had flung away a deal of money that evening, with something which to
him was dearer. Had you attempted to condole with him he would not have
understood you.
"But what would you have had a gentleman do, sir?" Colonel Musgrave
would have said, in real perplexity.
Besides, it was, in fact, not sorrow that he felt, rather it was
contentment, when he remembered the girl's present happiness; and what
alone depressed the colonel's courtly affability toward the universe at
large was the queer, horrible new sense of being somehow out of touch
with yesterday's so comfortable world, of being out-moded, of being
almost old.
"Eh, well!" he said; "I am of a certain age undoubtedly."
By an odd turn the colonel thought of how his friends of his own class
and generation had honestly admired the after-dinner speech which he had
made that evening. And he smiled, but very tenderly, because they were
all men and women whom he loved.
"The most of us have known each other for a long while. The most of us,
in fact, are of a certain age.... I think no people ever met the sorry
problem that we faced. For we were born the masters of a leisured,
ordered world; and by a tragic quirk of destiny were thrust into a quite
new planet, where we were for a while the inferiors, and after that just
the competitors of yesterday's slaves.
"We couldn't meet the new conditions. Oh, for the love of heaven, let us
be frank, and confess that we have not met them as things practical go.
We hadn't the training for it. A man who has not been taught to swim may
rationally be excused for preferring to sit upon the bank; and should he
elect to ornament his idleness with protestations that he is
self-evidently an excellent swimmer, because once upon a time his
progenitors were the only people in the world who had the slightest
conception of how to perform a natatorial masterpiece, the thing is
simply human nature. Talking chokes nobody, worse luck.
"And yet we haven't done so badly. For the most part we have sat upon
the bank our whole lives long. We have produced nothing--after
all--which was absolutely earth-staggering; and we have talked a deal of
clap-trap. But meanwhile we have at least enhanced the comeliness of our
particular sand-bar. We have lived a courteous and tranquil and
independent life thereon, just as our fathers taught us. It may be--in
the final outcome of things--that will be found an even finer pursuit
than the old one of producing Presidents.
"Besides, we have produced ourselves. We have been gentlefolk in spite
of all, we have been true even in our iniquities to the traditions of
our race. No, I cannot assert that these traditions always square with
ethics or even with the Decalogue, for we have added a very complex
Eleventh Commandment concerning honor. And for the rest, we have
defiantly embroidered life, and indomitably we have converted the
commonest happening of life into a comely thing. We have been artists if
not artizans."
There was upon the table a large photograph in sepia of Patricia
Stapylton. He studied this now. She was very beautiful, he thought.
"'Nor thou detain her vesture's hem'--" said the colonel aloud. "Oh,
that infernal Yankee understood, even though he was born in Boston!" And
this as coming from a Musgrave of Matocton, may fairly be considered as
a sweeping tribute to the author of _Give All to Love_.
Colonel Musgrave was intent upon the portrait.... So! she had chosen at
last between himself and this young fellow, a workman born of workmen,
who went about the world building bridges and canals and tunnels and
such, in those far countries which were to Colonel Musgrave just so many
gray or pink or fawn- splotches on the map. It seemed to Colonel
Musgrave almost an allegory.
So Colonel Musgrave filled a glass with the famed Lafayette madeira of
Matocton, and solemnly drank yet another toast. He loved to do, as you
already know, that which was colorful.
"To this new South," he said. "To this new South that has not any longer
need of me or of my kind.
"To this new South! She does not gaze unwillingly, nor too complacently,
upon old years, and dares concede that but with loss of manliness may
any man encroach upon the heritage of a dog or of a trotting-horse, and
consider the exploits of an ancestor to guarantee an innate and personal
excellence.
"For to her all former glory is less a jewel than a touchstone, and with
her portion of it daily she appraises her own doing, and without vain
speech. And her high past she values now, in chief, as fit foundation of
that edifice whereon she labors day by day, and with augmenting
strokes."
* * * * *
And yet--"It may be he will serve you better. But, oh, it isn't
possible that he should love you more than I," said Colonel Musgrave of
Matocton.
The man was destined to remember that utterance--and, with the
recollection, to laugh not altogether in either scorn or merriment.
PART FOUR - APPRECIATION
"You have chosen; and I cry content thereto,
And cry your pardon also, and am reproved
In that I took you for a woman I loved
Odd centuries ago, and would undo
That curious error. Nay, your eyes are blue,
Your speech is gracious, but you are not she,
And I am older--and changed how utterly!--
I am no longer I, you are not you.
"Time, destined as we thought but to befriend
And guerdon love like ours, finds you beset
With joys and griefs I neither share nor mend
Who am a stranger; and we two are met
Nor wholly glad nor sorry; and the end
Of too much laughter is a faint regret."
R.E. TOWNSEND. _Sonnets for Elena._
I
Next morning Rudolph Musgrave found the world no longer an impassioned
place, but simply a familiar habitation,--no longer the wrestling-ground
of big emotions, indeed, but undoubtedly a spot, whatever were its other
pretensions to praise, wherein one was at home. He breakfasted on ham
and eggs, in a state of tolerable equanimity; and mildly wondered at
himself for doing it.
The colonel was deep in a heraldic design and was whistling through his
teeth when Patricia came into the Library. He looked up, with the
outlines of a frown vanishing like pencilings under the india-rubber of
professional courtesy,--for he was denoting _or_ at the moment, which is
fussy work, as it consists exclusively of dots.
Then his chair scraped audibly upon the floor as he pushed it from him.
It occurred to Rudolph Musgrave after an interval that he was still
half-way between sitting and standing, and that his mouth was open....
He could hear a huckster outside on Regis Avenue. The colonel never
forgot the man was crying "Fresh oranges!"
"He kissed me, Olaf. Yes, I let him kiss me, even after he had asked me
if he could. No sensible girl would ever do that, of course. And then I
knew--"
Patricia was horribly frightened.
"And afterwards the jackass-fool made matters worse by calling me 'his
darling.' There is no more hateful word in the English language than
'darling.' It sounds like castor-oil tastes, or a snail looks after you
have put salt on him."
The colonel deliberated this information; and he appeared to understand.
"So Parkinson has gone the way of Pevensey,--. and of I wonder how many
others? Well, may Heaven be very gracious to us both!" he said. "For I
am going to do it."
Then composedly he took up the telephone upon his desk and called Roger
Stapylton.
"I want you to come at once to Dr. Rabbet's,--yes, the rectory, next
door to St. Luke's. Patricia and I are to be married there in half an
hour. We are on our way to the City Hall to get the license now.... No,
she might change her mind again, you see.... I have not the least notion
how it happened. I don't care.... Then you will have to be rude to him
or else not see your only daughter married.... Kindly permit me to
repeat, sir, that I don't care about that or anything else. And for the
rest, Patricia was twenty-one last December."
The colonel hung up the receiver. "And now," he said, "we are going to
the City Hall."
"Are you?" said Patricia, with courteous interest. "Well, my way lies
uptown. I have to stop in at Greenberg's and get a mustard plaster for
the parrot."
He had his hat by this. "It isn't cool enough for me to need an
overcoat, is it?"
"I think you must be crazy," she said, sharply.
"Of course I am. So I am going to marry you."
"Let me go--! Oh, and I had thought you were a gentleman--."
"I fear that at present I am simply masculine." He became aware that his
hands, in gripping both her shoulders, were hurting the girl.
"Come now," he continued, "will you go quietly or will I have to carry
you?"
She said, "And you would, too--." She spoke in wonder, for Patricia had
glimpsed an unguessed Rudolph Musgrave.
His hands went under her arm-pits and he lifted her like a feather. He
held her thus at arm's length.
"You--you adorable whirligig!" he laughed. "I am a stronger animal than
you. It would be as easy for me to murder you as it would be for you to
kill one of those flies on the window-pane. Do you quite understand that
fact, Patricia?"
"Oh, but you are an idiot--."
"In wanting you, my dear?"
"Please put me down."
She thoroughly enjoyed her helplessness. He saw it, long before he
lowered her.
"Why, not so much in that," said Miss Stapylton, "because inasmuch as I
am a woman of superlative charm, of course you can't help yourself. But
how do you know that Dr. Rabbet may not be somewhere else, harrying a
defenseless barkeeper, or superintending the making of dress-shirt
protectors for the Hottentots, or doing something else clerical, when we
get to the rectory?"
After an irrelevant interlude she stamped her foot.
"I don't care what you say, I won't marry an atheist. If you had the
least respect for his cloth, Olaf, you would call him up and
arrange--Oh, well! whatever you want to arrange--and permit me to powder
my nose without being bothered, because I don't want people to think you
are marrying a second helping to butter, and I never did like that
Baptist man on the block above, anyhow. And besides," said Patricia, as
with the occurrence of a new view-point, "think what a delicious scandal
it will create!"
II
Patricia spoke the truth. By supper-time Lichfield had so industriously
embroidered the Stapylton dinner and the ensuing marriage with
hypotheses and explanations and unparented rumors that none of the
participants in the affair but could advantageously have exchanged
reputations with Benedict Arnold or Lucretia Borgia, had Lichfield
believed a tithe of what Lichfield was repeating.
A duel was of course anticipated between Mr. Parkinson and Colonel
Musgrave, and the colonel indeed offered, through Major Wadleigh, any
satisfaction which Mr. Parkinson might desire.
The engineer, with garnishments of profanity, considered dueling to be a
painstakingly-described absurdity and wished "the old popinjay" joy of
his bargain.
Lichfield felt that only showed what came of treating poor-white trash
as your equals, and gloried in the salutary moral.
III
Meanwhile the two originators of so much Lichfieldian diversion were not
unhappy.
But indeed it were irreverent even to try to express the happiness of
their earlier married life ...
They were an ill-matched couple in so many ways that no long-headed
person could conceivably have anticipated--in the outcome--more than
decorous tolerance of each other. For apart from the disparity in age
and tastes and rearing, there was always the fact to be weighed that in
marrying the only child of a wealthy man Rudolph Musgrave was making
what Lichfield called "an eminently sensible match"--than which, as
Lichfield knew, there is no more infallible recipe for discord.
In this case the axiom seemed, after the manner of all general rules, to
bulwark itself with an exception. Colonel Musgrave continued to emanate
an air of contentment which fell perilously short of fatuity; and that
Patricia was honestly fond of him was evident to the most impecunious of
Lichfield's bachelors.
True, curtains had been lifted, a little by a little. Patricia could
hardly have told you at what exact moment it was that she discovered
Miss Agatha--who continued of course to live with them--was a
dipsomaniac. Very certainly Rudolph Musgrave was not Patricia's
informant; it is doubtful if the colonel ever conceded his sister's
infirmity in his most private meditations; so that Patricia found the
cause of Miss Agatha's "attacks" to be an open secret of which everyone
in the house seemed aware and of which by tacit agreement nobody ever
spoke. It bewildered Patricia, at first, to find that as concerned
Lichfield at large any over-indulgence in alcohol by a member of the
Musgrave family was satisfactorily accounted for by the matter-of-course
statement that the Musgraves usually "drank,"--just as the Allardyces
notoriously perpetuated the taint of insanity, and the Townsends were
proverbially unable "to let women alone," and the Vartreys were
deplorably prone to dabble in literature. These things had been for a
long while just as they were to-day; and therefore (Lichfield estimated)
they must be reasonable.
Then, too, Patricia would have preferred to have been rid of the old
mulatto woman Virginia, because it was through Virginia that Miss Agatha
furtively procured intoxicants. But Rudolph Musgrave would not consider
Virginia's leaving. "Virginia's faithfulness has been proven by too many
years of faithful service" was the formula with which he dismissed the
suggestion ... Afterward Patricia learned from Miss Agatha of the wrong
that had been done Virginia by Olaf's uncle, Senator Edward Musgrave,
the noted ante-bellum orator, and understood that Olaf--without, of
course, conceding it to himself, because that was Olaf's way--was trying
to make reparation. Patricia respected the sentiment, and continued to
fret under its manifestation.
Miss Agatha also told Patricia of how the son of Virginia and Senator
Musgrave had come to a disastrous end--"lynched in Texas, I believe,
only it may not have been Texas. And indeed when I come to think of it,
I don't believe it was, because I know we first heard of it on a Monday,
and Virginia couldn't do the washing that week and I had to send it out.
And for the usual crime, of course. It simply shows you how much better
off the <DW54>s were before the War," Miss Agatha said.
Patricia refrained from comment, not being willing to consider the
deduction strained. For love is a contagious infection; and loving
Rudolph Musgrave so much, Patricia must perforce love any person whom he
loved as conscientiously as she would have strangled any person with
whom he had flirted.
And yet, to Patricia, it was beginning to seem that Patricia Musgrave
was not living, altogether, in that Lichfield which John Charteris has
made immortal--"that nursery of Free Principles" (according to the
_Lichfield Courier-Herald_) "wherein so many statesmen,
lieutenants-general and orators were trained to further the faith of
their fathers, to thrill the listening senates, draft constitutions, and
bruise the paws of the British lion."
IV
It may be remembered that Lichfield had asked long ago, "But who, pray,
are the Stapyltons?" It was characteristic of Colonel Musgrave that he
went about answering the question without delay. The Stapletons--for
"Stapylton" was a happy innovation of Roger Stapylton's dead wife--the
colonel knew to have been farmers in Brummell County, and Brummell
Courthouse is within an hour's ride, by rail, of Lichfield.
So he set about his labor of love.
And in it he excelled himself. The records of Brummell date back to 1750
and are voluminous; but Rudolph Musgrave did not overlook an item in any
Will Book, or in any Orders of the Court, that pertained, however
remotely, to the Stapletons. Then he renewed his labors at the
courthouse of the older county from which Brummell was formed in 1750,
and through many fragmentary, evil-odored and unindexed volumes
indefatigably pursued the family's fortune back to the immigration of
its American progenitor in 1619,--and, by the happiest fatality, upon
the same _Bona Nova_ which enabled the first American Musgrave to grace
the Colony of Virginia with his presence. It could no longer be said
that the wife of a Musgrave of Matocton lacked an authentic and
tolerably ancient pedigree.
The colonel made a book of his Stapyltonian researches which he
vaingloriously proclaimed to be the stupidest reading within the ample
field of uninteresting printed English. Patricia was allowed to see no
word of it until the first ten copies had come from the printer's, very
splendid in green "art-vellum" and stamped with the Stapylton
coat-of-arms in gold.
She read the book. "It is perfectly superb," was her verdict. "It is as
dear as remembered kisses after death and as sweet as a plaintiff in a
breach-of-promise suit. Only I would have preferred it served with a few
kings and dukes for parsley. The Stapletons don't seem to have been
anything but perfectly respectable mediocrities."
The colonel smiled. At the bottom of his heart he shared Patricia's
regret that the Stapylton pedigree was unadorned by a potentate, because
nobody can stay unimpressed by a popular superstition, however crass the
thing may be. But for all this, an appraisal of himself and his own
achievements profusely showed high lineage is not invariably a guarantee
of excellence; and so he smiled and said:
"There are two ends to every stick. It was the Stapletons and others of
their sort, rather than any soft-handed Musgraves, who converted a
wilderness, a little by a little, into the America of to-day. The task
was tediously achieved, and without ostentation; and always the ship had
its resplendent figure-head, as always it had its hidden, nay! grimy,
engines, which propelled the ship. And, however direfully America may
differ from Utopia, to have assisted in the making of America is no mean
distinction. We Musgraves and our peers, I sometimes think, may possibly
have been just gaudy autumn leaves which happened to lie in the path of
a high wind. And to cut a gallant figure in such circumstances does not
necessarily prove the performer to be a _rara avis_, even though he
rides the whirlwind quite as splendidly as any bird existent."
Patricia fluttered, and as lightly and irresponsibly as a wren might
have done, perched on his knee.
"No! there is really something in heredity, after all. Now, you are a
Musgrave in every vein of you. It always seems like a sort of flippancy
for you to appear in public without a stock and a tarnished gilt frame
with most of the gilt knocked off and a catalogue-number tucked in the
corner." Patricia spoke without any regard for punctuation. "And I am so
unlike you. I am only a Stapylton. I do hope you don't mind my being
merely a Stapylton, Olaf, because if only I wasn't too modest to even
think of alluding to the circumstance, I would try to tell you about the
tiniest fraction of how much a certain ravishingly beautiful
half-strainer loves you, Olaf, and the consequences would be
deplorable."
"My dear----" he began.
"Ouch!" said Patricia; "you are tickling me. You don't shave half as
often as you used to, do you? No, nowadays you think you have me safe
and don't have to bother about being attractive. If I had a music-box I
could put your face into it and play all sorts of tunes, only I prefer
to look at it. You are a slattern and a jay-bird and a joy forever. And
besides, the first Stapleton seems to have blundered somehow into the
House of Burgesses, so that entitles me to be a Colonial Dame on my
father's side, too, doesn't it, Olaf?"
The colonel laughed. "Madam Vanity!" said he, "I repeat that to be
descended of a line of czars or from a house of emperors is, at the
worst, an empty braggartism, or, at best--upon the plea of heredity--a
handy palliation for iniquity; and to be descended of sturdy and honest
and clean-blooded folk is beyond doubt preferable, since upon quite
similar grounds it entitles one to hope that even now, 'when their
generation is gone, when their play is over, when their panorama is
withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world,' there may yet survive
of them 'some few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have
retained some happy stamp from the disposition of their parents.'"
Patricia--with eyes widened in admiration at his rhetoric,--had turned
an enticing shade of pink.
"I am glad of that," she said.
She snuggled so close he could not see her face now. She was to all
appearances attempting to twist the top-button from his coat.
"I am very glad that it entitles one to hope--about the
children--Because--"
The colonel lifted her a little from him. He did not say anything. But
he was regarding her half in wonder and one-half in worship.
She, too, was silent. Presently she nodded.
He kissed her as one does a very holy relic.
It was a moment to look back upon always. There was no period in Rudolph
Musgrave's life when he could not look back upon this instant and exult
because it had been his.
* * * * *
Only, Patricia found out afterward, with an inexplicable disappointment,
that her husband had not been talking extempore, but was freely quoting
his "Compiler's Foreword" just as it figured in the printed book.
One judges this posturing, so inevitable of detection, to have been as
significant of much in Rudolph Musgrave as was the fact of its belated
discovery characteristic of Patricia.
Yet she had read this book about her family from purely normal motives:
first, to make certain how old her various cousins were; secondly, to
gloat over any traces of distinction such as her ancestry afforded;
thirdly, to note with what exaggerated importance the text seemed to
accredit those relatives she did not esteem, and mentally to annotate
each page with unprintable events "which _everybody_ knew about"; and
fourthly, to reflect, as with a gush of steadily augmenting love, how
dear and how unpractical it was of Olaf to have concocted these
date-bristling pages--so staunch and blind in his misguided gratitude
toward those otherwise uninteresting people who had rendered possible
the existence of a Patricia.
V
Matters went badly with Patricia in the ensuing months. Her mother's
blood told here, as Colonel Musgrave saw with disquietude. He knew the
women of his race had by ordinary been unfit for childbearing; indeed,
the daughters of this famous house had long, in a grim routine,
perished, just as Patricia's mother had done, in their first maternal
essay. There were many hideous histories the colonel could have told you
of, unmeet to be set down, and he was familiar with this talk of pelvic
anomalies which were congenital. But he had never thought of Patricia,
till this, as being his kinswoman, and in part a Musgrave.
And even now the Stapylton blood that was in her pulled Patricia through
long weeks of anguish. Surgeons dealt with her very horribly in a famed
Northern hospital, whither she had been removed. By her obdurate
request--and secretly, to his own preference, since it was never in his
power to meet discomfort willingly--Colonel Musgrave had remained in
Lichfield. Patricia knew that officious people would tell him her life
could be saved only by the destruction of an unborn boy.
She never questioned her child would be a boy. She knew that Olaf wanted
a boy.
"Oh, even more than he does me, daddy. And so he mustn't know, you see,
until it is all over. Because Olaf is such an ill-informed person that
he really believes he prefers me."
"Pat," her father inconsequently said, "I'm proud of you! And--and, by
God, if I _want_ to cry, I guess I am old enough to know my own mind!
And I'll help you in this if you'll only promise not to die in spite of
what these damn' doctors say, because you're _mine_, Pat, and so you
realize a bargain is a bargain."
"Yes--I am really yours, daddy. It is just my crazy body that is a
Musgrave," Patricia explained. "The real me is an unfortunate Stapylton
who has somehow got locked up in the wrong house. It is not a desirable
residence, you know, daddy. No modern improvements, for instance. But I
have to live in it!... Still, I have not the least intention of dying,
and I solemnly promise that I won't."
So these two hoodwinked Rudolph Musgrave, and brought it about by
subterfuge that his child was born. At most he vaguely understood that
Patricia was having rather a hard time of it, and steadfastly drugged
this knowledge by the performance of trivialities. He was eating a
cucumber sandwich at the moment young Roger Musgrave came into the
world, and by that action very nearly accomplished Patricia's death.
VI
And the gods cursed Roger Stapylton with such a pride in, and so great a
love for, his only grandson that the old man could hardly bear to be out
of the infant's presence. He was frequently in Lichfield nowadays; and
he renewed his demands that Rudolph Musgrave give up the
exhaustively-particularized librarianship, so that "the little coot"
would be removed to New York and all three of them be with Roger
Stapylton always.
Patricia had not been well since little Roger's birth.
It was a peaked and shrewish Patricia, rather than Rudolph Musgrave, who
fought out the long and obstinate battle with Roger Stapylton.
She was jealous at the bottom of her heart. She would not have anyone,
not even her father, be too fond of what was preeminently hers; the
world at large, including Rudolph Musgrave, was at liberty to adore her
boy, as was perfectly natural, but not to meddle: and in fine, Patricia
was both hysterical and vixenish whenever a giving up of the Library
work was suggested.
The old man did not quarrel with her. And with Roger Stapylton's
loneliness in these days, and the long thoughts it bred, we have nothing
here to do. But when he died, stricken without warning, some five years
after Patricia's marriage, his will was discovered to bequeath
practically his entire fortune to little Roger Musgrave when the child
should come of age; and to Rudolph Musgrave, as Patricia's husband, what
was a reasonable income when judged by Lichfield's unexacting standards
rather than by Patricia's anticipations. In a word, Patricia found that
she and the colonel could for the future count upon a little more than
half of the income she had previously been allowed by Roger Stapylton.
"It isn't fair!" she said. "It's monstrous! And all because you were so
obstinate about your picayune Library!"
"Patricia--" he began.
"Oh, I tell you it's absurd, Olaf! The money logically ought to have
been left to me. And here I will have to come to you for every penny of
_my_ money. And Heaven knows I have had to scrimp enough to support us
all on what I used to have--Olaf," Patricia said, in another voice,
"Olaf! why, what is it, dear?"
"I was reflecting," said Colonel Musgrave, "that, as you justly observe,
both Agatha and I have been practically indebted to you for our support
these past five years--"
VII
It must be enregistered, not to the man's credit, but rather as a simple
fact, that it was never within Colonel Musgrave's power to forget the
incident immediately recorded.
He forgave; when Patricia wept, seeing how leaden- his handsome
face had turned, he forgave as promptly and as freely as he was learning
to pardon the telling of a serviceable lie, or the perpetration of an
occasional barbarism in speech, by Patricia. For he, a Musgrave of
Matocton, had married a Stapylton; he had begun to comprehend that their
standards were different, and that some daily conflict between these
standards was inevitable.
And besides, as it has been veraciously observed, the truth of an insult
is the barb which prevents its retraction. Patricia spoke the truth:
Rudolph Musgrave and all those rationally reliant upon Rudolph Musgrave
for support, had lived for some five years upon the money which they
owed to Patricia. He saw about him other scions of old families who
accepted such circumstances blithely: but, he said, he was a Musgrave
of Matocton; and, he reflected, in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed
is necessarily very unhappy.
He did not mean to touch a penny of such moneys as Roger Stapylton had
bequeathed to him; for the colonel considered--now--it was a man's duty
personally to support his wife and child and sister. And he vigorously
attempted to discharge this obligation, alike by virtue of his salary at
the Library, and by spasmodic raids upon his tiny capital, and--chief of
all--by speculation in the Stock Market.
Oddly enough, his ventures were through a long while--for the most
part--successful. Here he builded a desperate edifice whose foundations
were his social talents; and it was with quaint self-abhorrence he often
noted how the telling of a smutty jest or the insistence upon a
manifestly superfluous glass of wine had purchased from some properly
tickled magnate a much desiderated "tip."
And presently these tips misled him. So the colonel borrowed from
"Patricia's account."
And on this occasion he guessed correctly.
And then he stumbled upon such a chance for reinvestment as does not
often arrive. And so he borrowed a trifle more in common justice to
Patricia....
VIII
When those then famous warriors, Colonel Gaynor and Captain Green, were
obstinately fighting extradition in Quebec; when in Washington the
Senate was wording a suitable resolution wherewith to congratulate Cuba
upon that island's brand-new independence; and when Messieurs
Fitzsimmons and Jeffries were making amicable arrangements in San
Francisco to fight for the world's championship:--at this remote time,
in Chicago (on the same day, indeed, that in this very city Mr. S.E.
Gross was legally declared the author of a play called Cyrano de
Bergerac), the Sons of the Colonial Governors opened their tenth
biennial convention. You may depend upon it that Colonel Rudolph
Musgrave represented the Lichfield chapter.
It was two days later the telegram arrived. It read:
_Agatha very ill come to me roger in perfect health._
PATRICIA.
He noted how with Stapyltonian thrift Patricia telegraphed ten words
precisely....
And when he had reached home, late in the evening, the colonel, not
having taken his bunch of keys with him, laid down his dress-suit case
on the dark porch, and reached out one hand to the door-bell. He found
it muffled with some flimsy, gritty fabric. He did not ring.
Upon the porch was a rustic bench. He sat upon it for a quarter of an
hour--precisely where he had first talked with Agatha about Patricia's
first coming to Lichfield.... Once the door of a house across the street
was opened, with a widening gush of amber light wherein he saw three
women fitting wraps about them. One of them was adjusting a lace scarf
above her hair.
"No, we're not a _bit_ afraid--Just around the corner, you know--_Such_
a pleasant evening----" Their voices carried far in the still night.
Rudolph Musgrave was not thinking of anything. Presently he went around
through the side entrance, and thus came into the kitchen, where the old
mulattress, Virginia, was sitting alone. The room was very hot.... In
Agatha's time supper would have been cooked upon the gas-range in the
cellar, he reflected.... Virginia had risen and made as though to take
his dress-suit case, her pleasant yellow face as imperturbable as an
idol's.
"No--don't bother, Virginia," said Colonel Musgrave.
He met Patricia in the dining-room, on her way to the kitchen. She had
not chosen--as even the most sensible of us will instinctively decline
to do--to vex the quiet of a house wherein death was by ringing a bell.
Holding his hand in hers, fondling it as she talked, Patricia told how
three nights before Miss Agatha had been "queer, you know," at supper.
Patricia had not liked to leave her, but it was the night of the Woman's
Club's second Whist Tournament. And Virginia had promised to watch Miss
Agatha. And, anyhow, Miss Agatha had gone to bed before Patricia left
the house, and _anybody_ would have thought she was going to sleep all
night. And, in fine, Patricia's return at a drizzling half-past eleven
had found Miss Agatha sitting in the garden, in her night-dress only,
weeping over fancied grievances--and Virginia asleep in the kitchen. And
Agatha had died that afternoon of pneumonia.
Even in the last half-stupor she was asking always when would Rudolph
come? Patricia told him....
Rudolph Musgrave did not say anything. Without any apparent emotion he
put Patricia aside, much as he did the dress-suit case which he had
forgotten to lay down until Patricia had ended her recital.
He went upstairs--to the front room, Patricia's bedroom. Patricia
followed him.
Agatha's body lay upon the bed, with a sheet over all. The undertaker's
skill had arranged everything with smug and horrible tranquillity.
Rudolph Musgrave remembered he was forty-six years old; and when in all
these years had there been a moment when Agatha--the real Agatha--had
not known that what he had done was self-evidently correct, because
otherwise Rudolph would not have done it?
"I trust you enjoyed your whist-game, Patricia."
"Well, I couldn't help it. I'm not running a sanitarium. I wasn't
responsible for her eternal drinking."
The words skipped out of either mouth like gleeful little devils.
Then both were afraid, and both were as icily tranquil as the thing upon
the bed. You could not hear anything except the clock upon the mantel.
Colonel Musgrave went to the mantel, opened the clock, and with an odd
deliberation removed the pendulum from its hook. Followed one metallic
gasp, as of indignation, and then silence.
He spoke, still staring at the clock, his back turned to Patricia. "You
must be utterly worn out. You had better go to bed."
He shifted by the fraction of an inch the old-fashioned "hand-"
daguerreotype of his father in Confederate uniform. "Please don't wear
that black dress again. It is no cause for mourning that we are rid of
an encumbrance."
Behind him, very far away, it seemed, he heard Patricia wailing,
"Olaf----!"
Colonel Musgrave turned without any haste. "Please go," he said, and
appeared to plead with her. "You must be frightfully tired. I am sorry
that I was not here. I seem always to evade my responsibilities,
somehow--"
Then he began to laugh. "It _is_ rather amusing, after all. Agatha was
the most noble person I have ever known. The--this habit of hers to
which you have alluded was not a part of her. And I loved Agatha. And I
suppose loving is not altogether dependent upon logic. In any event, I
loved Agatha. And when I came back to her I had come home,
somehow--wherever she might be at the time. That has been true, oh, ever
since I can remember--"
He touched the dead hand now. "Please go!" he said, and he did not look
toward Patricia. "For Agatha loved me better than she did God, you know.
The curse was born in her. She had to pay for what those dead,
soft-handed Musgraves did. That is why her hands are so cold now. She
had to pay for the privilege of being a Musgrave, you see. But then we
cannot always pick and choose as to what we prefer to be."
"Oh, yes, of course, it is all my fault. Everything is my fault. But God
knows what would have become of you and your Agatha if it hadn't been
for me. Oh! oh!" Patricia wailed. "I was a child and I hadn't any better
sense, and I married you, and you've been living off my money ever
since! There hasn't been a Christmas present or a funeral wreath bought
in this house since I came into it I didn't pick out and pay for out of
my own pocket. And all the thanks I get for it is this perpetual
fault-finding, and I wish I was dead like this poor saint here. She
spent her life slaving for you. And what thanks did she get for it? Oh,
you ought to go down on your knees, Rudolph Musgrave--!"
"Please leave," he said.
"I will leave when I feel like it, and not a single minute before, and
you might just as well understand as much. You _have_ been living off my
money. Oh, you needn't go to the trouble of lying. And she did too. And
she hated me, she always hated me, because I had been fool enough to
marry you, and she carried on like a lunatic more than half the time,
and I always pretended not to notice it, and this is my reward for
trying to behave like a lady."
Patricia tossed her head. "Yes, and you needn't look at me as if I were
some sort of a bug you hadn't ever seen before and didn't approve of,
because I've seen you try that high-and-mighty trick too often for it to
work with me."
Patricia stood now beneath the Stuart portrait of young Gerald Musgrave.
She had insisted, long ago, that it be hung in her own bedroom--"because
it was through that beautiful boy we first got really acquainted, Olaf."
The boy smiles at you from the canvas, smiles ambiguously, as the
colonel now noted.
"I think you had better go," said Colonel Musgrave. "Please go,
Patricia, before I murder you."
She saw that he was speaking in perfect earnest.
IX
Rudolph Musgrave sat all night beside the body. He had declined to speak
with innumerable sympathetic cousins--Vartreys and Fentons and
Allardyces and Musgraves, to the fifth and sixth remove--who had come
from all quarters, with visiting-cards and low-voiced requests to be
informed "if there is anything we can possibly do."
Rudolph Musgrave sat all night beside the body. He had not any strength
for anger now, and hardly for grief, Agatha had been his charge; and the
fact that he had never plucked up courage to allude to her practises was
now an enormity in which he could not quite believe. His cowardice and
its fruitage confronted him, and frightened him into a panic frenzy of
remorse.
Agatha had been his charge; and he had entrusted the stewardship to
Patricia. Between them--that Patricia might have her card-game, that he
might sit upon a platform for an hour or two with a half-dozen other
pompous fools--they had let Agatha die. There was no mercy in him for
Patricia or for himself. He wished Patricia had been a man. Had any man
--an emperor or a coal-heaver, it would not have mattered--spoken as
Patricia had done within the moment, here, within arm's reach of the
poor flesh that had been Agatha's, Rudolph Musgrave would have known his
duty. But, according to his code, it was not permitted to be
discourteous to a woman....
He caught himself with grotesque meanness wishing that Agatha had been
there,--privileged by her sex where he was fettered,--she who was so
generous of heart and so fiery of tongue at need; and comprehension that
Agatha would never abet or adore him any more smote him anew.
* * * * *
And chance reserved for him more poignant torture. Next day, while
Rudolph Musgrave was making out the list of honorary pall-bearers, the
postman brought a letter which had been forwarded from Chicago. It was
from Agatha, written upon the morning of that day wherein later she had
been, as Patricia phrased it, "queer, you know."
He found it wildly droll to puzzle out those "crossed" four sheets of
trivialities written in an Italian hand so minute and orderly that the
finished page suggested a fly-screen. He had so often remonstrated with
Agatha about her penuriousness as concerned stationery.
"Selina Brice & the Rev'd Henry Anstruther, who now has a church in
Seattle, have announced their engagement. Stanley Haggage has gone to
Alabama to marry Leonora Bright, who moved from here a year ago. They
are both as poor as church mice, & I think marriage in such a case an
unwise step for anyone. It brings cares & anxieties enough any way,
without starting out with poverty to increase and render deeper every
trouble...."
Such was the tenor of Agatha's last letter, of the last self-expression
of that effigy upstairs who (you could see) knew everything and was not
discontent.
Here the dead spoke, omniscient; and told you that Stanley Haggage had
gone to Alabama, and that marriage brought new cares and anxieties.
"I cannot laugh," said Rudolph Musgrave, aloud. "I know the jest
deserves it. But I cannot laugh, because my upper lip seems to be made
of leather and I can't move it. And, besides, I loved Agatha to a degree
which only You and I have ever known of. She never understood quite how
I loved her. Oh, won't You make her understand just how I loved her? For
Agatha is dead, because You wanted her to be dead, and I have never told
her how much I loved her, and now I cannot ever tell her how much I
loved her. Oh, won't You please show me that You have made her
understand? or else have me struck by lightning? or do _anything_....?"
Nothing was done.
X
And afterward Rudolph Musgrave and his wife met amicably, and without
reference to their last talk. Patricia wore black-and-white for some six
months, and Colonel Musgrave accepted the compromise tacitly. All passed
with perfect smoothness between them; and anyone in Lichfield would have
told you that the Musgraves were a model couple.
She called him "Rudolph" now.
"Olaf is such a silly-sounding nickname for two old married people, you
know," Patricia estimated.
The colonel negligently said that he supposed it did sound odd.
"Only I don't think Clarice Pendomer would care about coming," he
resumed,--for the two were discussing an uncompleted list of the people
Patricia was to invite to their first house-party.
"And for heaven's sake, why not? We always have her to everything."
He could not tell her it was because the Charterises were to be among
their guests. So he said: "Oh, well--!"
"Mrs. C.B. Pendomer, then"--Patricia wrote the name with a flourish.
"Oh, you jay-bird, I'm not jealous. Everybody knows you never had any
more morals than a tom-cat on the back fence. It's a lucky thing the boy
didn't take after you, isn't it? He doesn't, not a bit. No, Harry
Pendomer is the puniest black-haired little wretch, whereas your other
son, sir, resembles his mother and is in consequence a ravishingly
beautiful person of superlative charm--"
He was staring at her so oddly that she paused. So Patricia was familiar
with that old scandal which linked his name with Clarice Pendomer's! He
was wondering if Patricia had married him in the belief that she was
marrying a man who, appraised by any standards, had acted infamously.
"I was only thinking you had better ask Judge Allardyce, Patricia. You
see, he is absolutely certain not to come--"
* * * * *
This year the Musgraves had decided not to spend the spring alone
together at Matocton, as they had done the four preceding years.
"It looks so silly," as Patricia pointed out.
And, besides, a house-party is the most economical method,--as she also
pointed out, being born a Stapylton--of paying off your social
obligations, because you can always ask so many people who, you know,
have made other plans, and cannot accept.
* * * * *
"So we will invite Judge Allardyce, of course," said Patricia. "I had
forgotten his court met in June. Oh, and Peter Blagden too. It had
slipped my mind his uncle was dead...."
"I learned this morning Mrs. Haggage was to lecture in Louisville on the
sixteenth. She was reading up in the Library, you see--"
"Rudolph, you are the lodestar of my existence. I will ask her to come
on the fourteenth and spend a week. I never could abide the hag, but she
has such a--There! I've made a big blot right in the middle of
'darling,' and spoiled a perfectly good sheet of paper!... You'd better
mail it at once, though, because the evening-paper may have something in
it about her lecture."
XI
Rudolph--"
"Why--er--yes, dear?"
This was after supper, and Patricia was playing solitaire. Her husband
was reading the paper.
"Agatha told me all about Virginia, you know--"
Here Colonel Musgrave frowned. "It is not a pleasant topic."
"You jay-bird, you behave entirely too much as if you were my
grandfather. As I was saying, Agatha told me all about your uncle and
Virginia," Patricia hurried on. "And how she ran away afterwards, and
hid in the woods for three days, and came to your father's plantation,
and how your father bought her, and how her son was born, and how her
son was lynched--"
"Now, really, Patricia! Surely there are other matters which may be more
profitably discussed."
"Of course. Now, for instance, why is the King of Hearts the only one
that hasn't a moustache?" Patricia peeped to see what cards lay beneath
that monarch, and upon reflection moved the King of Spades into the
vacant space. She was a devotee of solitaire and invariably cheated at
it.
She went on, absently: "But don't you see? That <DW52> boy was your own
first cousin, and he was killed for doing exactly what his father had
done. Only they sent the father to the Senate and gave him columns of
flubdub and laid him out in state when he died--and they poured kerosene
upon the son and burned him alive. And I believe Virginia thinks that
wasn't fair."
"What do you mean?"
"I honestly believe Virginia hates the Musgraves. She is only a <DW64>,
of course, but then she was a mother once--Oh, yes! all I need is a
black eight--" Patricia demanded, "Now look at your brother Hector--the
awfully dissipated one that died of an overdose of opiates. When it
happened wasn't Virginia taking care of him?"
"Of course. She is an invaluable nurse."
"And nobody else was here when Agatha went out into the rain. Now, what
if she had just let Agatha go, without trying to stop her? It would have
been perfectly simple. So is this. All I have to do is to take them off
now."
Colonel Musgrave negligently returned to his perusal of the afternoon
paper. "You are suggesting--if you will overlook my frankness--the most
deplorable sort of nonsense, Patricia."
"I know exactly how Balaam felt," she said, irrelevantly, and fell to
shuffling the cards. "You don't, and you won't, understand that Virginia
is a human being. In any event, I wish you would get rid of her."
"I couldn't decently do that," said Rudolph Musgrave, with careful
patience. "Virginia's faithfulness has been proven by too many years of
faithful service. Nothing more strikingly attests the folly of freeing
the <DW64> than the unwillingness of the better class of slaves to leave
their former owners--"
"Now you are going to quote a paragraph or so from your Gracious Era. As
if I hadn't read everything you ever wrote! You are a fearful humbug in
some ways, Rudolph."
"And you are a red-headed rattlepate, madam. But seriously, Patricia,
you who were reared in the North are strangely unwilling to concede that
we of the South are after all best qualified to deal with the <DW64>
Problem. We know the <DW64> as you cannot ever know him."
"You! Oh, God ha' mercy on us!" mocked Patricia. "There wasn't any <DW64>
Problem hereabouts, you beautiful idiot, so long as there were any
<DW64>s. Why, to-day there is hardly one full-blooded <DW64> in
Lichfield. There are only a thousand or so of mulattoes who share the
blood of people like your Uncle Edward. And for the most part they take
after their white kin, unfortunately. And there you have the Lichfield
<DW64> Problem in a nutshell. It is a venerable one and fully set forth
in the Bible. You needn't attempt to argue with me, because you are a
ninnyhammer, and I am a second Nestor. The Holy Scriptures are perfectly
explicit as to what happens to the heads of the children and their teeth
too."
"I wish you wouldn't jest about such matters--"
"Because it isn't lady-like? But, Rudolph, you know perfectly well that
I am not a lady."
"My dear!" he cried, in horror that was real, "and what on earth have I
said even to suggest--"
"Oh, not a syllable; it isn't at all the sort of thing that your sort
_says_ ... And I am not your sort. I don't know that I altogether wish I
were. But _if_ I were, it would certainly make things easier," Patricia
added sharply.
"My dear--!" he again protested.
"Now, candidly, Rudolph"--relinquishing the game, she fell to shuffling
the cards--"just count up the number of times this month that my--oh,
well! I really don't know what to call it except my deplorable omission
in failing to be born a lady--has seemed to you to yank the very last
rag off the gooseberry-bush?"
He scoffed. "What nonsense! Although, of course, Patricia--"
She nodded, mischief in her brightly- tiny face. "Yes, that is
just your attitude, you beautiful idiot."
"--although, of course--now, quite honestly, Patricia, I have
occasionally wished that you would not speak of sacred and--er,
physical and sociological matters in exactly the tone in which--well! in
which you sometimes do speak of them. It may sound old-fashioned, but I
have always believed that decency is quite as important in mental
affairs as it is in physical ones, and that as a consequence, a
gentlewoman should always clothe her thoughts with at least the same
care she accords her body. Oh, don't misunderstand me! Of course it
doesn't do any harm, my dear, between us. But outside--you see, for
people to know that you think about such things must necessarily give
them a false opinion of you."
Patricia meditated.
She said, with utter solemnity, "Anathema maranatha! oh, hell to damn!
may the noses of all respectable people be turned upside down and
jackasses dance eternally upon their grandmothers' graves!"
"Patricia--!" cried a shocked colonel.
"I mean every syllable of it. No, Rudolph; _I_ can't help it if the
vinaigretted beauties of your boyhood were unabridged dictionaries of
prudery. You see, I know almost all the swearwords there are. And I read
the newspapers, and medical books, and even the things that boys chalk
up on fences. In consequence I am not a bit whiteminded, because if you
use your mind at all it gets more or less dingy, just like using
anything else."
He could not help but laugh, much as he disapproved. Patricia fluttered
and, as a wren might have done, perched presently upon his knee.
"Rudolph, can't you laugh more often, and not devote so much time to
tracing out the genealogies of those silly people, and being so
tediously beautiful and good?" she asked, and with a hint of
seriousness. "Rudolph, you don't know how I would adore you if you would
rob a church or cut somebody's throat in an alley, and tell me all about
it because you knew I wouldn't betray you. You are so infernally
respectable in everything you do! How did you come to bully me that day
at the Library? It seems almost as if those two were different people...
doesn't it, Rudolph?"
"My dear," the colonel said whimsically, "I am afraid we are rather like
the shepherdess and the chimney-sweep of the fable I read you very long
ago. We climbed up so far that we could see the stars, once, very long
ago, Patricia, and we have come back to live upon the parlor table. I
suppose it happens to all the little china people."
She took his meaning. Each was aware of an odd sense of intimacy.
"Everything we have to be glad for now, Rudolph, is the rivet in
grandfather's neck. It is rather a fiasco, isn't it?"
"Eh, there are all sorts of rivets, Patricia. And the thing one cannot
do because one is what one is, need not be necessarily a cause for
grief."
XII
It was excellent to see Jack Charteris again, as Colonel Musgrave did
within a few days of this. Musgrave was unreasonably fond of the
novelist and frankly confessed it would be as preposterous to connect
Charteris with any of the accepted standards of morality as it would be
to judge an artesian-well from the standpoint of ethics.
Anne was not yet in Lichfield. She had broken the journey to visit a
maternal grand-aunt and some Virginia cousins, in Richmond, Charteris
explained, and was to come thence to Matocton.
"And so you have acquired a boy and, by my soul, a very handsome wife,
Rudolph?"
"It is sufficiently notorious," said Colonel Musgrave. "Yes, we are
quite absurdly happy." He laughed and added: "Patricia--but you don't
know her droll way of putting things--says that the only rational
complaint I can advance against her is her habit of rushing into a
hospital every month or so and having a section or two of her person
removed by surgeons. It worries me,--only, of course, it is not the
sort of thing you can talk about. And, as Patricia says, it _is_ an
unpleasant thing to realize that your wife is not leaving you through
the ordinary channels of death or of type-written decrees of the court,
but only in vulgar fractions, as it were--"
"Please don't be quite so brutal, Rudolph. It is not becoming in a
Musgrave of Matocton to speak of women in any tone other than the most
honeyed accents of chivalry."
"Oh, I was only quoting Patricia," the colonel largely said,
"and--er--Jack," he continued. "By the way, Jack, Clarice Pendomer will
be at Matocton--"
"I rejoice in her good luck," said Charteris, equably.
"--and--well! I was wondering--?"
"I can assure you that there will be no--trouble. That skeleton is
safely locked in its closet, and the key to that closet is missing--more
thanks to you. You acted very nobly in the whole affair, Rudolph. I wish
I could do things like that. As it is, of course, I shall always detest
you for having been able to do it."
Charteris said, thereafter: "I shall always envy you, though, Rudolph.
No other man I know has ever attained the good old troubadourish ideal
of _domnei_--that love which rather abhors than otherwise the notion of
possessing its object. I still believe it was a distinct relief to a
certain military officer, whose name we need not mention, when Anne
decided not to marry you."
The colonel grinned, a trifle consciously. "Well, Anne meant youth, you
comprehend, and all the things we then believed in, Jack. It would have
been decidedly difficult to live up to such a contract, and--as it
were--to fulfil every one of the implied specifications!"
"And yet"--here Charteris flicked his cigarette--"Anne ruled in the
stead of Aline Van Orden. And Aline, in turn, had followed Clarice
Pendomer. And before the coming of Clarice had Pauline Romeyne, whom
time has converted into Polly Ashmeade, reigned in the land--"
"Don't be an ass!" the colonel pleaded; and then observed,
inconsequently: "I can't somehow quite realize Aline is dead. Lord,
Lord, the letters that I wrote to her! She sent them all back, you know,
in genuine romantic fashion, after we had quarreled. I found those
boyish ravings only the other day in my father's desk at Matocton, and
skimmed them over. I shall read them through some day and appropriately
meditate over life's mysteries that are too sad for tears."
He meditated now.
"It wouldn't be quite equitable, Jack," the colonel summed it up, "if
the Aline I loved--no, I don't mean the real woman, the one you and all
the other people knew, the one that married the enterprising brewer and
died five years ago--were not waiting for me somewhere. I can't express
just what I mean, but you will understand, I know--?"
"That heaven is necessarily run on a Mohammedan basis? Why, of course,"
said Mr. Charteris. "Heaven, as I apprehend it, is a place where we
shall live eternally among those ladies of old years who never
condescended actually to inhabit any realm more tangible than that of
our boyish fancies. It is the obvious definition; and I defy you to
evolve a more enticing allurement toward becoming a deacon."
"You romancers are privileged to talk nonsense anywhere," the colonel
estimated, "and I suppose that in the Lichfield you have made famous,
Jack, you have a double right."
"Ah, but I never wrote a line concerning Lichfield. I only wrote about
the Lichfield whose existence you continue to believe in, in spite of
the fact that you are actually living in the real Lichfield," Charteris
returned. "The vitality of the legend is wonderful."
He cocked his head to one side--an habitual gesture with Charteris--and
the colonel noted, as he had often done before, how extraordinarily
reminiscent Jack was of a dried-up, quizzical black parrot. Said
Charteris:
"I love to serve that legend. I love to prattle of 'ole Marster' and
'ole Miss,' and throw in a sprinkling of 'mockin'-buds' and 'hants' and
'horg-killing time,' and of sweeping animadversions as to all 'free
<DW65>s'; and to narrate how 'de quality use ter cum'--you spell it
c-u-m because that looks so convincingly like dialect--'ter de gret
hous.' Those are the main ingredients. And, as for the unavoidable
love-interest--" Charteris paused, grinned, and pleasantly resumed:
"Why, jes arter dat, suh, a hut Yankee cap'en, whar some uv our folks
done shoot in de laig, wuz lef on de road fer daid--a quite notorious
custom on the part of all Northern armies--un Young Miss had him fotch
up ter de gret hous, un nuss im same's he one uv de fambly, un dem two
jes fit un argufy scanlous un never spicion huccum dey's in love wid
each othuh till de War's ovuh. And there you are! I need not mention
that during the tale's progress it is necessary to introduce at least
one favorable mention of Lincoln, arrange a duel 'in de low grouns'
immediately after day-break, and have the family silver interred in the
back garden, because these points will naturally suggest themselves."
"Jack, Jack!" the colonel cried, "it is an ill bird that fouls its own
nest."
"But, believe me, I don't at heart," said Charteris, in a queer earnest
voice. "There is a sardonic imp inside me that makes me jeer at the
commoner tricks of the trade--and yet when I am practising that trade,
when I am writing of those tender-hearted, brave and gracious men and
women, and of those dear old <DW54>s, I very often write with tears in
my eyes. I tell you this with careful airiness because it is true and
because it would embarrass me so horribly if you believed it."
Then he was off upon another tack. "And wherein, pray, have I harmed
Lichfield by imagining a dream city situated half way between Atlantis
and Avalon and peopled with superhuman persons--and by having called
this city Lichfield? The portrait did not only flatter Lichfield, it
flattered human nature. So, naturally, it pleased everybody. Yes, that,
I take it, is the true secret of romance--to induce the momentary
delusion that humanity is a superhuman race, profuse in aspiration, and
prodigal in the exercise of glorious virtues and stupendous vices. As a
matter of fact, all human passions are depressingly chicken-hearted, I
find. Were it not for the police court records, I would pessimistically
insist that all of us elect to love one person and to hate another with
very much the same enthusiasm that we display in expressing a preference
for rare roast beef as compared with the outside slice. Oh, really,
Rudolph, you have no notion how salutary it is to the self-esteem of us
romanticists to run across, even nowadays, an occasional breach of the
peace. For then sometimes--when the coachman obligingly cuts the
butler's throat in the back-alley, say--we actually presume to think for
a moment that our profession is almost as honest as that of making
counterfeit money...."
The colonel did not interrupt his brief pause of meditation. Then the
novelist said:
"Why, no; if I were ever really to attempt a tale of Lichfield, I would
not write a romance but a tragedy. I think that I would call my tragedy
_Futility_, for it would mirror the life of Lichfield with unengaging
candor; and, as a consequence, people would complain that my tragedy
lacked sustained interest, and that its participants were inconsistent;
that it had no ordered plot, no startling incidents, no high endeavors,
and no especial aim; and that it was equally deficient in all
time-hallowed provocatives of either laughter or tears. For very few
people would understand that a life such as this, when rightly viewed,
is the most pathetic tragedy conceivable."
"Oh, come, now, Jack! come, recollect that your reasoning powers are
almost as worthy of employment as your rhetorical abilities! We are not
quite so bad as that, you know. We may be a little behind the times in
Lichfield; we certainly let well enough alone, and we take things pretty
much as they come; but we meddle with nobody, and, after all, we don't
do any especial harm."
"We don't do anything whatever in especial, Rudolph. That would be
precisely the theme of my story of the real Lichfield if I were ever
bold enough to write it. There seems to be a sort of blight upon
Lichfield. Oh, yes! it would be unfair, perhaps, to contrast it with the
bigger Southern cities, like Richmond and Atlanta and New Orleans; but
even the inhabitants of smaller Southern towns are beginning to buy
excursion tickets, and thereby ascertain that the twentieth century has
really begun. Yes, it is only in Lichfield I can detect the raw stuff of
a genuine tragedy; for, depend upon it, Rudolph, the most pathetic
tragedy in life is to get nothing in particular out of it."
"But, for my part, I don't see what you are driving at," the colonel
stoutly said.
And Charteris only laughed. "And I hardly expected you to do so,
Rudolph--or not yet, at least."
PART FIVE - SOUVENIR
"I am contented by remembrances--
Dreams of dead passions, wraiths of vanished times,
Fragments of vows, and by-ends of old rhymes--
Flotsam and jetsam tumbling in the seas
Whereon, long since, put forth our argosies
Which, bent on traffic in the Isles of Love,
Lie foundered somewhere in some firth thereof,
Encradled by eternal silences."
"Thus, having come to naked bankruptcy,
Let us part friends, as thrifty tradesmen do
When common ventures fail, for it may be
These battered oaths and rhymes may yet ring true
To some fair woman's hearing, so that she
Will listen and think of love, and I of you."
F. Ashcroft Wheeler. _Revisions_.
I
When the _Reliance_, the _Constitution_ and the _Columbia_ were holding
trial races off Newport to decide which one of these yachts should
defend the _America's_ cup; when the tone of the Japanese press as to
Russia's actions in Manchuria was beginning to grow ominous; when the
Jews of America were drafting a petition to the Czar; and when it was
rumored that the health of Pope Leo XIII was commencing to fail:--at
this remote time, the Musgraves gave their first house-party.
And at this period Colonel Musgrave noted and admired the apparent
unconcern with which John Charteris and Clarice Pendomer encountered at
Matocton. And at this period Colonel Musgrave noted with approval the
intimacy which was, obviously, flourishing between the little novelist
and Patricia.
Also Colonel Musgrave had presently good reason to lament a contretemps,
over which he was sulking when Mrs. Pendomer rustled to her seat at the
breakfast-table, with a shortness of breath that was partly due to the
stairs, and in part attributable to her youthful dress, which fitted a
trifle too perfectly.
"Waffles?" said Mrs. Pendomer. "At my age and weight the first is an
experiment and the fifth an amiable indiscretion of which I am
invariably guilty. Sugar, please." She yawned, and reached a
generously-proportioned arm toward the sugar-bowl. "Yes, that will do,
Pilkins."
Colonel Musgrave--since the remainder of his house-party had already
breakfasted--raised his fine eyes toward the chandelier, and sighed, as
Pilkins demurely closed the dining-room door.
Leander Pilkins--butler for a long while now to the Musgraves of
Matocton--would here, if space permitted, be the subject of an encomium.
Leander Pilkins was in Lichfield considered to be, upon the whole, the
handsomest man whom Lichfield had produced; for this quadroon's skin was
like old ivory, and his profile would have done credit to an emperor.
His terrapin is still spoken of in Lichfield as people in less favored
localities speak of the Golden Age, and his mayonnaise (boasts
Lichfield) would have compelled an Olympian to plead for a second
helping. For the rest, his deportment in all functions of butlership is
best described as super-Chesterfieldian; and, indeed, he was generally
known to be a byblow of Captain Beverley Musgrave's, who in his day was
Lichfield's arbiter as touched the social graces. And so, no more of
Pilkins.
Mrs. Pendomer partook of chops. "Is this remorse," she queried, "or a
convivially induced requirement for bromides? At this unearthly hour of
the morning it is very often difficult to disentangle the two."
"It is neither," said Colonel Musgrave, and almost snappishly.
Followed an interval of silence. "Really," said Mrs. Pendomer, and as
with sympathy, "one would think you had at last been confronted with one
of your thirty-seven pasts--or is it thirty-eight, Rudolph?"
Colonel Musgrave frowned disapprovingly at her frivolity; he swallowed
his coffee, and buttered a superfluous potato. "H'm!" said he; "then you
know?"
"I know," sighed she, "that a sleeping past frequently suffers from
insomnia."
"And in that case," said he, darkly, "it is not the only sufferer."
Mrs. Pendomer considered the attractions of a third waffle--a mellow
blending of autumnal yellows, fringed with a crisp and irresistible
brown, that, for the moment, put to flight all dreams and visions of
slenderness.
"And Patricia?" she queried, with a mental hiatus.
Colonel Musgrave flushed.
"Patricia," he conceded, with mingled dignity and sadness, "is, after
all, still in her twenties----"
"Yes," said Mrs. Pendomer, with a dryness which might mean anything or
nothing; "she _was_ only twenty-one when she married you."
"I mean," he explained, with obvious patience, "that at her age she--not
unnaturally--takes an immature view of things. Her unspoiled purity,"
he added, meditatively, "and innocence and general unsophistication are,
of course, adorable, but I can admit to thinking that for a journey
through life they impress me as excess baggage."
"Patricia," said Mrs. Pendomer, soothingly, "has ideals. And ideals,
like a hare-lip or a mission in life, should be pitied rather than
condemned, when our friends possess them; especially," she continued,
buttering her waffle, "as so many women have them sandwiched between
their last attack of measles and their first imported complexion. No one
of the three is lasting, Rudolph."
"H'm!" said he.
There was another silence. The colonel desperately felt that matters
were not advancing.
"H'm!" said she, with something of interrogation in her voice.
"See here, Clarice, I have known you----"
"You have not!" cried she, very earnestly; "not by five years!"
"Well, say for some time. You are a sensible woman----"
"A man," Mrs. Pendomer lamented, parenthetically, "never suspects a
woman of discretion, until she begins to lose her waist."
"--and I am sure that I can rely upon your womanly tact, and finer
instincts,--and that sort of thing, you know--to help me out of a deuce
of a mess."
Mrs. Pendomer ate on, in an exceedingly noncommittal fashion, as he
paused, inquiringly.
"She has been reading some letters," said he, at length; "some letters
that I wrote a long time ago."
"In the case of so young a girl," observed Mrs. Pendomer, with perfect
comprehension, "I should have undoubtedly recommended a judicious
supervision of her reading-matter."
"She was looking through an old escritoire," he explained; "Jack
Charteris had suggested that some of my father's letters--during the
War, you know--. might be of value--"
He paused, for Mrs. Pendomer appeared on the verge of a question.
But she only said, "So it was Mr. Charteris who suggested Patricia's
searching the desk. Ah, yes! And then--?"
"And it was years ago--and just the usual sort of thing, though it may
have seemed from the letters--Why, I hadn't given the girl a thought,"
he cried, in virtuous indignation, "until Patricia found the
letters--and read them!"
"Naturally," she assented--"yes,--just as I read George's."
The smile with which she accompanied this remark, suggested that both
Mr. Pendomer's correspondence and home life were at times of an
interesting nature.
"I had destroyed the envelopes when she returned them," continued
Colonel Musgrave, with morose confusion of persons. "Patricia doesn't
even know who the girl was--her name, somehow, was not mentioned."
"'Woman of my heart'--'Dearest girl in all the world,'" quoted Mrs.
Pendomer, reminiscently, "and suchlike tender phrases, scattered in with
a pepper-cruet, after the rough copy was made in pencil, and dated just
'Wednesday,' or 'Thursday,' of course. Ah, you were always very careful,
Rudolph," she sighed; "and now that makes it all the worse, because--as
far as all the evidence goes--these letters may have been returned
yesterday."
"Why--!" Colonel Musgrave pulled up short, hardly seeing his way clear
through the indignant periods on which he had entered. "I declined,"
said he, somewhat lamely, "to discuss the matter with her, in her
present excited and perfectly unreasonable condition."
Mrs. Pendomer's penciled eyebrows rose, and her lips--which were quite
as red as there was any necessity for their being--twitched.
"Hysterics?" she asked.
"Worse!" groaned Colonel Musgrave; "patient resignation under unmerited
affliction!"
He had picked up a teaspoon, and he carefully balanced it upon his
forefinger.
"There were certain phrases in these letters which were, somehow,
repeated in certain letters I wrote to Patricia the summer we were
engaged, and--not to put too fine a point upon it--she doesn't like it."
Mrs. Pendomer smiled, as though she considered this not improbable; and
he continued, with growing embarrassment and indignation:
"She says there must have been others"--Mrs. Pendomer's smile grew
reminiscent--"any number of others; that she is only an incident in my
life. Er--as you have mentioned, Patricia has certain notions--Northern
idiocies about the awfulness of a young fellow's sowing his wild oats,
which you and I know perfectly well he is going to do, anyhow, if he is
worth his salt. But she doesn't know it, poor little girl. So she won't
listen to reason, and she won't come downstairs--which," lamented
Rudolph Musgrave, plaintively, "is particularly awkward in a
house-party."
He drummed his fingers, for a moment, on the table.
"It is," he summed up, "a combination of Ibsen and hysterics, and
of--er, rather declamatory observations concerning there being one law
for the man and another for the woman, and Patricia's realization of the
mistake we both made--and all that sort of nonsense, you know, exactly
as if, I give you my word, she were one of those women who want to
vote." The colonel, patently, considered that feminine outrageousness
could go no farther. "And she is taking menthol and green tea and
mustard plasters and I don't know what all, in bed, prior to--to----"
"Taking leave?" Mrs. Pendomer suggested.
"Er--that was mentioned, I believe," said Colonel Musgrave. "But of
course she was only talking."
Mrs. Pendomer looked about her; and, without, the clean-shaven lawns
and trim box-hedges were very beautiful in the morning sunlight; within,
the same sunlight sparkled over the heavy breakfast service, and gleamed
in the high walnut panels of the breakfast-room. She viewed the
comfortable appointments about her a little wistfully, for Mrs.
Pendomer's purse was not over-full.
"Of course," said she, as in meditation, "there was the money."
"Yes," said Rudolph Musgrave, slowly; "there was the money."
He sprang to his feet, and drew himself erect. Here was a moment he must
give its full dramatic value.
"Oh, no, Clarice, my marriage may have been an eminently sensible one,
but I love my wife. Oh, believe me, I love her very tenderly, poor
little Patricia! I have weathered some forty-seven birthdays; and I have
done much as other men do, and all that--there have been flirtations and
suchlike, and--er--some women have been kinder to me than I deserved.
But I love her; and there has not been a moment since she came into my
life I haven't loved her, and been--" he waved his hands now impotently,
almost theatrically--"sickened at the thought of the others."
Mrs. Pendomer's foot tapped the floor whilst he spoke. When he had made
an ending, she inclined her head toward him.
"Thank you!" said Mrs. Pendomer.
Colonel Musgrave bit his lip; and he flushed.
"That," said he, hastily, "was different."
But the difference, whatever may have been its nature, was seemingly a
matter of unimportance to Mrs. Pendomer, who was in meditation. She
rested her ample chin on a much-bejeweled hand for a moment; and, when
Mrs. Pendomer raised her face, her voice was free from affectation.
"You will probably never understand that this particular July day is a
crucial point in your life. You will probably remember it, if you
remember it at all, simply as that morning when Patricia found some
girl-or-another's old letters, and behaved rather unreasonably about
them. It was the merest trifle, you will think.... John Charteris
understands women better than you do, Rudolph."
"I need not pretend at this late day to be as clever as Jack," the
colonel said, in some bewilderment. "But why not more succinctly state
that the Escurial is not a dromedary, although there are many flies in
France? For what on earth has Jack to do with crucial points and July
mornings?"
"Why, I suppose, I only made bold to introduce his name for the sake of
an illustration, Rudolph. For the last person in the world to realize,
precisely, why any woman did anything is invariably the woman who did
it.... Yet there comes in every married woman's existence that time when
she realizes, suddenly, that her husband has a past which might be
taken as, in itself, a complete and rounded life--as a life which had
run the gamut of all ordinary human passions, and had become familiar
with all ordinary human passions a dishearteningly long while before she
ever came into that life. A woman never realizes that of her lover,
somehow. But to know that your husband, the father of your child, has
lived for other women a life in which you had no part, and never can
have part!--she realizes that, at one time or another, and--and it
sickens her." Mrs. Pendomer smiled as she echoed his phrase, but her
eyes were not mirthful.
"Ah, she hungers for those dead years, Rudolph, and, though you devote
your whole remaining life to her, nothing can ever make up for them; and
she always hates those shadowy women who have stolen them from her. A
woman never, at heart, forgives the other women who have loved her
husband, even though she cease to care for him herself. For she
remembers--ah, you men forget so easily, Rudolph! God had not invented
memory when he created Adam; it was kept for the woman."
Then ensued a pause, during which Rudolph Musgrave smiled down upon her,
irresolutely; for he abhorred "a scene," as his vernacular phrased it,
and to him Clarice's present manner bordered upon both the scenic and
the incomprehensible.
"Ah!--you women!" he temporized.
There was a glance from eyes whose luster time and irregular living had
conspired to dim.
"Ah!--you men!" Mrs. Pendomer retorted. "And there we have the tragedy
of life in a nutshell!"
Silence lasted for a while. The colonel was finding this matutinal talk
discomfortably opulent in pauses.
"Rudolph, and has it never occurred to you that in marrying Patricia you
swindled her?"
And naturally his eyebrows lifted.
"Because a woman wants love."
"Well, well! and don't I love Patricia?"
"I dare say that you think you do. Only you have played at loving so
long you are really unable to love anybody as a girl has every right to
be loved in her twenties. Yes, Rudolph, you are being rather subtly
punished for the good times you have had. And, after all, the saddest
punishment is something that happens in us, not something which happens
to us."
"I wish you wouldn't laugh, Clarice----"
"I wish I didn't have to. For I would get far more comfort out of
crying, and I don't dare to, because of my complexion. It comes in a
round pasteboard box nowadays, you know, Rudolph, with French
mendacities all over the top--and my eyebrows come in a fat crayon, and
the healthful glow of my lips comes in a little porcelain tub."
Mrs. Pendomer was playing with a teaspoon now, and a smile hovered about
the aforementioned lips.
"And yet, do you remember, Rudolph," said she, "that evening at
Assequin, when I wore a blue gown, and they were playing _Fleurs
d'Amour_, and--you said--?"
"Yes"--there was an effective little catch in his voice--"you were a
wonderful girl, Clarice--'my sunshine girl,' I used to call you. And
blue was always your color; it went with your eyes so exactly. And those
big sleeves they wore then--those tell-tale, crushable sleeves!--they
suited your slender youthfulness so perfectly! Ah, I remember it as
though it were yesterday!"
Mrs. Pendomer majestically rose to her feet.
"It was pink! And it was at the Whitebrier you said--what you said!
And--and you don't deserve anything but what you are getting," she
concluded, grimly.
"I--it was so long ago," Rudolph Musgrave apologized, with mingled
discomfort and vagueness.
"Yes," she conceded, rather sadly; "it was so long--oh, very long ago!
For we were young then, and we believed in things, and--and Jack
Charteris had not taken a fancy to me--" She sighed and drummed her
fingers on the table. "But women have always helped and shielded you,
haven't they, Rudolph? And now I am going to help you too, for you have
shown me the way. You don't deserve it in the least, but I'll do it."
II
Thus it shortly came about that Mrs. Pendomer mounted, in meditative
mood, to Mrs. Musgrave's rooms; and that Mrs. Pendomer, recovering her
breath, entered, without knocking, into a gloom where cologne and
menthol and the odor of warm rubber contended for mastery. For Patricia
had decided that she was very ill indeed, and was sobbing softly in bed.
Very calmly, Mrs. Pendomer opened a window, letting in a flood of fresh
air and sunshine; very calmly, she drew a chair--a substantial
arm-chair--to the bedside, and, very calmly, she began:
"My dear, Rudolph has told me of this ridiculous affair, and--oh, you
equally ridiculous girl!"
She removed, with deft fingers, a damp and clinging bandage from about
Patricia's head, and patted the back of Patricia's hand, placidly.
Patricia was by this time sitting erect in bed, and her coppery hair was
thick about her face, which was colorless; and, altogether, she was very
rigid and very indignant and very pretty, and very, very young.
"How dare he tell you--or anybody else!" she cried.
"We are such old friends, remember," Mrs. Pendomer pleaded, and
rearranged the pillows, soothingly, about her hostess; "and I want to
talk to you quietly and sensibly."
Patricia sank back among the pillows, and inhaled the fresh air, which,
in spite of herself, she found agreeable. "I--somehow, I don't feel very
sensible," she murmured, half sulky and half shame-faced.
Mrs. Pendomer hesitated for a moment, and then plunged into the heart of
things. "You are a woman, dear," she said, gently, "though heaven knows
it must have been only yesterday you were playing about the nursery--and
one of the facts we women must face, eventually, is that man is a
polygamous animal. It is unfortunate, perhaps, but it is true.
Civilization may veneer the fact, but nothing will ever override it, not
even in these new horseless carriages. A man may give his wife the best
that is in him--his love, his trust, his life's work--but it is only the
best there is left. We give our hearts; men dole out theirs, as people
feed bread to birds, with a crumb for everyone. His wife has the
remnant. And the best we women can do is to remember we are credibly
informed that half a loaf is preferable to no bread at all."
Her face sobered, and she added, pensively: "We might contrive a better
universe, we sister women, but this is not permitted us. So we must take
it as it is."
Patricia stirred, as talking died away. "I don't believe it," said she;
and she added, with emphasis: "And, anyhow, I hate that nasty trollop!"
"Ah, but you do believe it." Mrs. Pendomer's voice was insistent. "You
knew it years before you went into long frocks. That knowledge is, I
suppose, a legacy from our mothers."
Patricia frowned, petulantly, and then burst into choking sobs. "Oh!"
she cried, "it's damnable! Some other woman has had what I can never
have. And I wanted it so!--that first love that means everything--the
love he gave her when I was only a messy little girl, with pig-tails and
too many hands and feet! Oh, that--that hell-cat! She's had everything!"
There was an interval, during which Mrs. Pendomer smiled crookedly, and
Patricia continued to sob, although at lengthening intervals. Then, Mrs.
Pendomer lifted the packet of letters lying on the bed, and cleared her
throat.
"H'm!" said she; "so this is what caused all the trouble? You don't
mind?"
And, considering silence as equivalent to acquiescence, she drew out a
letter at hazard, and read aloud:
"'Just a line, woman of all the world, to tell you ... but what have I
to tell you, after all? Only the old, old message, so often told that it
seems scarcely worth while to bother the postman about it. Just three
words that innumerable dead lips have whispered, while life was yet good
and old people were unreasonable and skies were blue--three words that
our unborn children's children will whisper to one another when we too
have gone to help the grasses in their growing or to nourish the
victorious, swaying hosts of some field of daffodils. Just three
words--that is my message to you, my lady.... Ah, it is weary waiting
for a sight of your dear face through these long days that are so much
alike and all so empty and colorless! My heart grows hungry as I think
of your great, green eyes and of the mouth that is like a little wound.
I want you so, O dearest girl in all the world! I want you.... Ah, time
travels very slowly that brings you back to me, and, meanwhile, I can
but dream of you and send you impotent scrawls that only vex me with
their futility. For my desire of you--'
"The remainder," said Mrs. Pendomer, clearing her throat once more,
"appears to consist of insanity and heretical sentiments, in about equal
proportions, all written at the top of a boy's breaking voice. It isn't
Colonel Musgrave's voice--quite--is it?"
During the reading, Patricia, leaning on one elbow, had regarded her
companion with wide eyes and flushed cheeks. "Now, you see!" she cried
indignantly; "he loved her! He was simply crazy about her."
"Why, yes." Mrs. Pendomer replaced the letter, carefully, almost
caressingly, among its companions. "My dear, it was years ago. I think
time has by this wreaked a vengeance far more bitter than you could ever
plan on the woman who, after all, never thought to wrong you. For the
bitterest of all bitter things to a woman--to some women, at least--is
to grow old."
She sighed, and her well-manicured fingers fretted for a moment with the
counterpane.
"Ah, who will write the tragedy of us women who were 'famous Southern
beauties' once? We were queens of men while our youth lasted, and
diarists still prattle charmingly concerning us. But nothing was
expected of us save to be beautiful and to condescend to be made much
of, and that is our tragedy. For very few things, my dear, are more
pitiable than the middle-age of the pitiful butterfly woman, whose mind
cannot--cannot, because of its very nature--reach to anything higher!
Middle-age strips her of everything--the admiration, the flattery, the
shallow merriment--all the little things that her little mind longs
for--and other women take her place, in spite of her futile, pitiful
efforts to remain young. And the world goes on as before, and there is a
whispering in the moonlit garden, and young people steal off for wholly
superfluous glasses of water, and the men give her duty dances, and she
is old--ah, so old!--under the rouge and inane smiles and dainty
fripperies that caricature her lost youth! No, my dear, you needn't envy
this woman! Pity her, my dear!" pleaded Clarice Pendomer, and with a
note of earnestness in her voice.
"Such a woman," said Patricia, with distinctness, "deserves no pity."
"Well," Mrs. Pendomer conceded, drily, "she doesn't get it. Probably,
because she always grows fat, from sheer lack of will-power to resist
sloth and gluttony--the only agreeable vices left her; and by no stretch
of the imagination can a fat woman be converted into either a pleasing
or heroic figure."
Mrs. Pendomer paused for a breathing-space, and smiled, though not very
pleasantly.
"It is, doubtless," said she, "a sight for gods--and quite certainly for
men--to laugh at, this silly woman striving to regain a vanished
frugality of waist. Yes, I suppose it is amusing--but it is also
pitiful. And it is more pitiful still if she has ever loved a man in the
unreasoning way these shallow women sometimes do. Men age so slowly; the
men a girl first knows are young long after she has reached
middle-age--yes, they go on dancing cotillions and talking nonsense in
the garden, long after she has taken to common-sense shoes. And the man
is still young--and he cares for some other woman, who is young and has
all that she has lost--and it seems so unfair!" said Mrs. Pendomer.
Patricia regarded her for a moment. The purple eyes were alert, their
glance was hard. "You seem to know all about this woman," Patricia
began, in a level voice. "I have heard, of course, what everyone in
Lichfield whispers about you and Rudolph. I have even teased Rudolph
about it, but until to-day I had believed it was a lie."
"It is often a mistake to indulge in uncommon opinions," said Mrs.
Pendomer. "You get more fun and interest out of it, I don't deny, but
the bill, my dear, is unconscionable."
"So! you confess it!"
"My dear, and who am I to stand aside like a coward and see you make a
mountain of this boy-and-girl affair--an affair which Rudolph and I had
practically forgotten--oh, years ago!--until to-day? Why--why, you
_can't_ be jealous of me!" Mrs. Pendomer concluded, half-mockingly.
Patricia regarded her with deliberation.
In the windy sunlight, Mrs. Pendomer was a well-preserved woman, but,
unmistakably, preserved; moreover, there was a great deal of her, and
her nose was in need of a judicious application of powder, of which
there was a superfluity behind her ears. Was this the siren Patricia had
dreaded? Patricia clearly perceived that, whatever had been her
husband's relations with this woman, he had been manifestly entrapped
into the imbroglio--a victim to Mrs. Pendomer's inordinate love of
attention, which was, indeed, tolerably notorious; and Patricia's anger
against Rudolph Musgrave gave way to a rather contemptuous pity and a
half-maternal remorse for not having taken better care of him.
"No," answered Mrs. Pendomer, to her unspoken thought; "no woman could
be seriously jealous of me. Yes, I dare say, I am _passee_ and vain and
frivolous and--harmless. But," she added, meditatively, "you hate me,
just the same."
"My dear Mrs. Pendomer----" Patricia began, with cool courtesy; then
hesitated. "Yes," she conceded; "I dare say, it is unreasonable--but I
do hate you like the very old Nick."
"Why, then," spoke Mrs. Pendomer, with cheerfulness, "everything is as
it should be." She rose and smiled. "I am sorry to say I must be leaving
Matocton to-day; the Ullwethers are very pressing, and I really don't
know how to get out of paying them a visit----"
"So sorry to lose you," cooed Patricia; "but, of course, you know best.
I believe some very good people are visiting the Ullwethers nowadays?"
She extended the letters, blandly. "May I restore your property?" she
queried, with utmost gentleness.
"Thanks!" Clarice Pendomer took them, and kissed her hostess, not
without tenderness, on the brow. "My dear, be kind to Rudolph. He--he is
rather an attractive man, you know,--and other women are kind to him. We
of Lichfield have always said that he and Jack Charteris were the most
dangerous men that even Lichfield has ever produced----"
"Why, do people really find Mr. Charteris particularly attractive?"
Patricia demanded, so quickly and so innocently that Mrs. Pendomer could
not deny herself the glance of a charlatan who applauds his fellow's
legerdemain.
And Patricia .
"Oh, well--! You know how Lichfield gossips," said Mrs. Pendomer.
III
Colonel Musgrave had smoked a preposterous number of unsatisfying
cigarettes on the big front porch of Matocton whilst Mrs. Pendomer was
absent on her mission; and on her return, flushed and triumphant, he
rose in eloquent silence.
"I've done it, Rudolph," said Mrs. Pendomer.
"Done what?" he queried, blankly.
"Restored what my incomprehensible lawyers call the _status quo_;
achieved peace with honor; carried off the spoils of war; and--in
short--arranged everything," answered Mrs. Pendomer, and sank into a
rustic chair, which creaked admonishingly. "And all," she added,
bringing a fan into play, "without a single falsehood. _I_ am not to
blame if Patricia has jumped at the conclusion that these letters were
written to me."
"My word!" said Rudolph Musgrave, "your methods of restoring domestic
peace to a distracted household are, to say the least, original!" He
seated himself, and lighted another cigarette.
"Oh, well, Patricia is not deaf, you know, and she has lived in
Lichfield quite a while." Mrs. Pendomer said abruptly, "I have half a
mind to tell you some of the things I know about Aline Van Orden."
"Please don't," said Colonel Musgrave, "for I would inevitably beard you
on my own porch and smite you to the door-mat. And I am hardly young
enough for such adventures."
"And poor Aline is dead! And the rest of us are middle-aged now,
Rudolph, and we go in to dinner with the veterans who call us 'Madam,'
and we are prominent in charitable enterprises.... But there was a time
when we were not exactly hideous in appearance, and men did many mad
things for our sakes, and we never lose the memory of that time.
Pleasant memories are among the many privileges of women. Yes," added
Mrs. Pendomer, meditatively, "we derive much the same pleasure from them
a <DW36> does from rearranging the athletic medals he once won, or a
starving man from thinking of the many excellent dinners he has eaten;
but we can't and we wouldn't part with them, nevertheless."
Rudolph Musgrave, however, had not honored her with much attention, and
was puzzling over the more or less incomprehensible situation; and,
perceiving this, she ran on, after a little:
"Oh, it worked--it worked beautifully! You see, she would always have
been very jealous of that other woman; but with me it is different. She
has always known that scandalous story about you and me. And she has
always known me as I am--a frivolous and--say, corpulent, for it is a
more dignified word--and generally unattractive chaperon; and she can't
think of me as ever having been anything else. Young people never really
believe in their elders' youth, Rudolph; at heart, they think we came
into the world with crow's-feet and pepper-and-salt hair, all complete.
So, she is only sorry for you now--rather as a mother would be for a
naughty child; as for me, she isn't jealous--but," sighed Mrs. Pendomer,
"she isn't over-fond of me."
Colonel Musgrave rose to his feet. "It isn't fair," said he; "the
letters were distinctly compromising. It isn't fair you should shoulder
the blame for a woman who was nothing to you. It isn't fair you should
be placed in such a false position."
"What matter?" pleaded Mrs. Pendomer. "The letters are mine to burn, if
I choose. I have read one of them, by the way, and it is almost word for
word a letter you wrote me a good twenty years ago. And you re-hashed it
for Patricia's benefit too, it seems! You ought to get a mimeograph. Oh,
very well! It doesn't matter now, for Patricia will say nothing--or not
at least to you," she added.
"Still----" he began.
"Ah, Rudolph, if I want to do a foolish thing, why won't you let me?
What else is a woman for? They are always doing foolish things. I have
known a woman to throw a man over, because she had seen him without a
collar; and I have known another actually to marry a man, because she
happened to be in love with him. I have known a woman to go on wearing
pink organdie after she has passed forty, and I have known a woman to go
on caring for a man who, she knew, wasn't worth caring for, long after
he had forgotten. We are not brave and sensible, like you men. So why
not let me be foolish, if I want to be?"
"If," said Colonel Musgrave in some perplexity, "I understand one word
of this farrago, I will be--qualified in various ways."
"But you don't have to understand," she pleaded.
"You mean--?" he asked.
"I mean that I was always fond of Aline, anyhow."
"Nonsense!" And he was conscious, with vexation, that he had undeniably
flushed.
"I mean, then, I am a woman, and _I_ understand. Everything is as near
what it should be as is possible while Patricia is seeing so much of--we
will call it the artistic temperament." Mrs. Pendomer shrugged. "But if
I went on in that line you would believe I was jealous. And heaven knows
I am not the least bit so--with the unavoidable qualification that,
being a woman, I can't help rising superior to common-sense."
He said, "You mean Jack Charteris--? But what on earth has he to do with
these letters?"
"I don't mean any proper names at all. I simply mean you are not to undo
my work. It would only signify trouble and dissatisfaction and giving up
all this"--she waved her hand lightly toward the lawns of
Matocton,--"and it would mean our giving you up, for, you know, you
haven't any money of your own, Rudolph. Ah, Rudolph, we can't give you
up! We need you to lead our Lichfield germans, and to tell us naughty
little stories, and keep us amused. So _please_ be sensible, Rudolph."
"Permit me to point out I firmly believe that silence is the perfectest
herald of joy," observed Colonel Musgrave. "Only I do _not_ understand
why you should have dragged John Charteris's name into this ludicrous
affair----"
"You really do not understand----?"
But Colonel Musgrave's handsome face declared very plainly that he did
not.
"Well," Mrs. Pendomer reflected, "I dare say it is best, upon the whole,
you shouldn't. And now you must excuse me, for I am leaving for the
Ullwethers' to-day, and I shan't ever be invited to Matocton again, and
I must tell my maid to pack up. She is a little fool and it will break
her heart to be leaving Pilkins. All human beings are tediously alike.
But, allowing ample time for her to dispose of my best lingerie and of
her unavoidable lamentations, I ought to make the six-forty-five. I have
noticed that one usually does--somehow," said Mrs. Pendomer, and seemed
to smack of allegories.
And yet it may have been because she knew--as who knew
better?--something of that mischief's nature which was now afoot.
IV
The colonel burned the malefic letters that afternoon. Indeed, the
episode set him to ransacking the desk in which Patricia had found
them--a desk which, as you have heard, was heaped with the miscellaneous
correspondence of the colonel's father dating back a half-century and
more. Much curious matter the colonel discovered there, for "Wild Will"
Musgrave's had been a full-blooded career. And over one packet of
letters, in particular, the colonel sat for a long while with an
unwontedly troubled face.
PART SIX - BYWAYS
"Cry _Kismet!_ and take heart. Eros is gone,
Nor may we follow to that loftier air
Olympians breathe. Take heart, and enter where
A lighter Love, vine-crowned, laughs i' the sun,
Oblivious of tangled webs ill-spun
By ancient wearied weavers, for it may be
His guidance leads to lovers of such as we
And hearts so credulous as to be won.
"Cry _Kismet!_ Put away vain memories
Of all old sorrows and of all old joys,
And learn that life is never quite amiss
So long as unreflective girls and boys
Remember that young lips were meant to kiss,
And hold that laughter is a seemly noise."
PAUL VANDERHOFFEN. _Egeria Answers._
I
Patricia sat in the great maple-grove that stands behind Matocton, and
pondered over a note from her husband, who was in Lichfield
superintending the appearance of the July number of the _Lichfield
Historical Association's Quarterly Magazine_. Mr. Charteris lay at
her feet, glancing rapidly over a lengthy letter, which was from his
wife, in Richmond.
The morning mail was just in, and Patricia had despatched Charteris for
her letters, on the plea that the woods were too beautiful to leave, and
that Matocton, in the unsettled state which marks the end of the week in
a house-party, was intolerable.
She, undoubtedly, was partial to the grove, having spent the last ten
mornings there. Mr. Charteris had overrated her modest literary
abilities so far as to ask her advice in certain details of his new
book, which was to appear in the autumn, and they had found a vernal
solitude, besides being extremely picturesque, to be conducive to the
forming of really matured opinions. Moreover, she was assured that none
of the members of the house-party would misunderstand her motives;
people were so much less censorious in the country; there was something
in the pastoral purity of Nature, seen face to face, which brought out
one's noblest instincts, and put an end to all horrid gossip and
scandal-mongering.
Didn't Mrs. Barry-Smith think so? And what was her real opinion of that
rumor about the Hardresses, and was the woman as bad as people said she
was? Thus had Patricia spoken in the privacy of her chamber, at that
hour when ladies do up their hair for the night, and discourse of
mysteries. It is at this time they are said to babble out their hearts
to one another; and so, beyond doubt, this must have been the real state
of the case.
As Patricia admitted, she had given up bridge and taken to literature
only during the past year. She might more honestly have said within the
last two weeks. In any event, she now conversed of authors with a fitful
persistence like that of an ill-regulated machine. Her comments were
delightfully frank and original, as she had an unusually good memory. Of
two books she was apt to prefer the one with the wider margin, and she
was becoming sufficiently familiar with a number of poets to quote them
inaccurately.
We have all seen John Charteris's portraits, and most of us have read
his books--or at least, the volume entitled _In Old Lichfield_, which
caused the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_ to apostrophize its author as a
"Child of Genius! whose ardent soul has sounded the mysteries of life,
whose inner vision sweeps over ever widening fields of thought, and
whose chiseled phrases continue patriotically to perpetuate the beauty
of Lichfield's past." But for present purposes it is sufficient to say
that this jewelsmith of words was slight and dark and hook-nosed, and
that his hair was thin, and that he was not ill-favored. It may be of
interest to his admirers--a growing cult--to add that his reason for
wearing a mustache in a period of clean-shaven faces was that, without
it, his mouth was not pleasant to look upon.
"Heigho!" Patricia said, at length, with a little laugh; "it is very
strange that both of our encumbrances should arrive on the same day!"
"It is unfortunate," Mr. Charteris admitted, lazily; "but the blessed
state of matrimony is liable to these mishaps. Let us be thankful that
my wife's whim to visit her aunt has given us, at least, two perfect,
golden weeks. Husbands are like bad pennies; and wives resemble the cat
whose adventures have been commemorated by one of our really popular
poets. They always come back."
Patricia communed with herself, and to Charteris seemed, as she sat in
the chequered sunlight, far more desirable than a married woman has any
right to be.
"I wish--" she began, slowly. "Oh, but, you know, it was positively
criminal negligence not to have included a dozen fairies among my
sponsors."
"I too have desiderated this sensible precaution," said Charteris, and
laughed his utter comprehension. "But, after all," he said, and snapped
his fingers gaily, "we still have twenty-four hours, Patricia! Let us
forget the crudities of life, and say foolish things to each other. For
I am pastorally inclined this morning, Patricia; I wish to lie at your
feet and pipe amorous ditties upon an oaten reed. Have you such an
article about you, Patricia?"
He drew a key-ring from his pocket, and pondered over it.
"Or would you prefer that I whistle into the opening of this door-key,
to the effect that we must gather our rose-buds while we may, for Time
is still a-flying, fa-la, and that a drear old age, not to mention our
spouses, will soon descend upon us, fa-la-di-leero? A door-key is not
Arcadian, Patricia, but it makes a very creditable noise."
"Don't be foolish, _mon ami_!" she protested, with an indulgent smile.
"I am unhappy."
"Unhappy that I have chanced to fall in love with you, Patricia? It is
an accident which might befall any really intelligent person."
She shrugged her shoulders, ruefully.
"I have done wrong to let you talk to me as you have done of late.
I--oh, Jack, I am afraid!"
Mr. Charteris meditated. Somewhere in a neighboring thicket a bird
trilled out his song--a contented, half-hushed song that called his mate
to witness how infinitely blest above all other birds was he. Mr.
Charteris heard him to the end, and languidly made as to applaud; then
Mr. Charteris raised his eyebrows.
"Of your husband, Patricia?" he queried.
"I--Rudolph doesn't bother about me nowadays sufficiently to--notice
anything."
Mr. Charteris smiled. "Of my wife, Patricia?"
"Good gracious, no! I have not the least doubt you will explain matters
satisfactorily to your wife, for I have always heard that practise makes
perfect."
Mr. Charteris laughed--a low and very musical laugh.
"Of me, then, Patricia?"
"I--I think it is rather of myself I am afraid. Oh, I hate you when you
smile like that! You have evil eyes, Jack! Stop it! Quit hounding me
with your illicit fascinations." The hand she had raised in threatening
fashion fell back into her lap, and she shrugged her shoulders once
more. "My nerves are somewhat upset by the approaching prospect of
connubial felicity, I suppose. Really, though, _mon ami_, your conceit
is appalling."
Charteris gave vent to a chuckle, and raised the door-key to his lips.
"When you are quite through your histrionic efforts," he suggested,
apologetically, "I will proceed with my amorous pipings. Really,
Patricia, one might fancy you the heroine of a society drama, working up
the sympathies of the audience before taking to evil ways. Surely, you
are not about to leave your dear, good, patient husband, Patricia?
Heroines only do that on dark and stormy nights, and in an opera
toilette; wearing her best gown seems always to affect a heroine in that
way."
Mr. Charteris, at this point, dropped the key-ring, and drew nearer to
her; his voice sank to a pleading cadence.
"We are in Arcadia, Patricia; virtue and vice are contraband in this
charming country, and must be left at the frontier. Let us be adorably
foolish and happy, my lady, and forget for a little the evil days that
approach. Can you not fancy this to be Arcadia, Patricia?--it requires
the merest trifle of imagination. Listen very carefully, and you will
hear the hoofs of fauns rustling among the fallen leaves; they are
watching us, Patricia, from behind every tree-bole. They think you a
dryad--the queen of all the dryads, with the most glorious eyes and hair
and the most tempting lips in all the forest. After a little, shaggy,
big-thewed ventripotent Pan will grow jealous, and ravish you away from
me, as he stole Syrinx from her lover. You are very beautiful, Patricia;
you are quite incredibly beautiful. I adore you, Patricia. Would you
mind if I held your hand? It is a foolish thing to do, but it is
preeminently Arcadian."
She heard him with downcast eyes; and her cheeks flushed a pink color
that was agreeable to contemplation.
"Do--do you really care for me, Jack?" she asked, softly; then cried,
"No, no, you needn't answer--because, of course, you worship me madly,
unboundedly, distractedly. They all do, but you do it more convincingly.
You have been taking lessons at night-school, I dare say, at all sorts
of murky institutions. And, Jack, really, cross my heart, I always
stopped the others when they talked this way. I tried to stop you, too.
You know I did?"
She raised her lashes, a trifle uncertainly, and withdrew her hand from
his, a trifle slowly. "It is wrong--all horribly wrong. I wonder at
myself, I can't understand how in the world I can be such a fool about
you. I must not be alone with you again. I must tell my
husband--everything," she concluded, and manifestly not meaning a word
of what she said.
"By all means," assented Mr. Charteris, readily. "Let's tell my wife,
too. It will make things so very interesting."
"Rudolph would be terribly unhappy," she reflected.
"He would probably never smile again," said Mr. Charteris. "And my
wife--oh, it would upset Anne, quite frightfully! It is our altruistic,
nay, our bounden duty to save them from such misery."
"I--I don't know what to do!" she wailed.
"The obvious course," said he, after reflection, "is to shake off the
bonds of matrimony, without further delay. So let's elope, Patricia."
Patricia, who was really unhappy, took refuge in flippancy, and laughed.
"I make it a rule," said she, "never to elope on Fridays. Besides, now
I think of it, there is, Rudolph--Ah, Rudolph doesn't care a button's
worth about me, I know. The funny part is that he doesn't know it. He
has simply assumed he is devoted to me, because all respectable people
are devoted to their wives. I can assure you, _mon ami_, he would be a
veritable Othello, if there were any scandal, and would infinitely
prefer the bolster to the divorce-court. He would have us followed and
torn apart by wild policemen."
Mr. Charteris meditated for a moment.
"Rudolph, as you are perfectly aware, would simply deplore the terribly
lax modern notions in regard to marriage and talk to newspaper reporters
about this much--" he measured it between thumb and forefinger
--"concerning the beauty and chivalry of the South. He would
do nothing more. I question if Rudolph Musgrave would ever in any
circumstances be capable of decisive action."
"Ah, don't make fun of Rudolph!" she cried, quickly. "Rudolph can't help
it if he is conscientious and in consequence rather depressing to live
with. And for all that he so often plays the jackass-fool about women,
like Grandma Pendomer, he is a man, Jack--a well-meaning, clean and
dunderheaded man! You aren't; you are puny and frivolous, and you sneer
too much, and you are making a fool of me, and--and that's why I like
you, I suppose. Oh, I wish I were good! I have always tried to be good,
and there doesn't seem to be a hatpin in the world that makes a halo
sit comfortably. Now, Jack, you know I've tried to be good! I've never
let you kiss me, and I've never let you hold my hand--until to-day--
and--and----"
Patricia paused, and laughed.
"But we were talking of Rudolph," she said, with a touch of weariness.
"Rudolph has all the virtues that a woman most admires until she
attempts to live in the same house with them."
"I thank you," said Mr. Charteris, "for the high opinion you entertain
of my moral character." He bestowed a reproachful sigh upon her, and
continued: "At any rate, Rudolph Musgrave has been an unusually lucky
man--the luckiest that I know of."
Patricia had risen as if to go. She turned her big purple eyes on him
for a moment.
"You--you think so?" she queried, hesitatingly.
Afterward she spread out her hands in a helpless gesture, and laughed
for no apparent reason, and sat down again.
"Why?" said Patricia.
It took Charteris fully an hour to point out all the reasons.
Patricia told him very frankly that she considered him to be talking
nonsense, but she seemed quite willing to listen.
II
Sunset was approaching on the following afternoon when Rudolph Musgrave,
fresh from Lichfield,--whither, as has been recorded, the bringing out
of the July number of the _Lichfield Historical Associations Quarterly
Magazine_ had called him,--came out on the front porch at Matocton. He
had arrived on the afternoon train, about an hour previously, in time to
superintend little Roger's customary evening transactions with an
astounding quantity of bread and milk; and, Roger abed, his father,
having dressed at once for supper, found himself ready for that meal
somewhat in advance of the rest of the house-party.
Indeed, only one of them was visible at this moment--a woman, who was
reading on a rustic bench some distance from the house, and whose back
was turned to him. The poise of her head, however, was not unfamiliar;
also, it is not everyone who has hair that is like a nimbus of
thrice-polished gold.
Colonel Musgrave threw back his shoulders, and drew a deep breath.
Subsequently, with a fine air of unconcern, he inspected the view from
the porch, which was, in fact, quite worthy of his attention.
Interesting things have happened at Matocton--many events that have been
preserved in the local mythology, not always to the credit of the old
Musgraves, and a few which have slipped into a modest niche in history.
It was, perhaps, on these that Colonel Musgrave pondered so intently.
Once the farthingaled and red-heeled gentry came in sluggish barges to
Matocton, and the broad river on which the estate faces was thick with
bellying sails; since the days of railroads, one approaches the mansion
through the maple-grove in the rear, and enters ignominiously by the
back-door.
The house stands on a considerable elevation. The main portion, with its
hipped roof and mullioned windows, is very old, but the two wings that
stretch to the east and west are comparatively modern, and date back
little over a century. Time has mellowed them into harmony with the
major part of the house, and the kindly Virginia creeper has done its
utmost to conceal the fact that they are constructed of plebeian bricks
which were baked in this country; but Matocton was Matocton long before
these wings were built, and a mere affair of yesterday, such as the
Revolution, antedates them. They were not standing when Tarleton paid
his famous visit to Matocton.
In the main hall, you may still see the stairs up which he rode on
horseback, and the slashes which his saber hacked upon the hand-rail.
To the front of the mansion lies a close-shaven lawn, dotted with
sundry oaks and maples; and thence, the formal gardens descend in six
broad terraces. There is when summer reigns no lovelier spot than this
bright medley of squares and stars and triangles and circles--all Euclid
in flowerage--which glow with multitudinous colors where the sun
strikes. You will find no new flowers at Matocton, though. Here are
verbenas, poppies, lavender and marigolds, sweet-william, hollyhocks and
columbine, phlox, and larkspur, and meadowsweet, and heart's-ease, just
as they were when Thomasine Musgrave, Matocton's first chatelaine, was
wont to tend them; and of all floral parvenus the gardens are innocent.
Box-hedges mark the walkways.
The seventh terrace was, until lately, uncultivated, the trees having
been cleared away to afford pasturage. It is now closely planted with
beeches, none of great size, and extends to a tangled thicket of
fieldpines and cedar and sassafras and blackberry bushes, which again
masks a drop of some ten feet to the river.
The beach here is narrow; at high tide, it is rarely more than fifteen
feet in breadth, and is in many places completely submerged. Past this,
the river lapses into the horizon line without a break, save on an
extraordinarily clear day when Bigelow's Island may be seen as a dim
smudge upon the west.
All these things, Rudolph Musgrave regarded with curiously deep interest
for one who had seen them so many times before. Then, with a shrug of
the shoulders, he sauntered forward across the lawn. He had planned
several appropriate speeches, but, when it came to the point of giving
them utterance, he merely held out his hand in an awkward fashion, and
said:
"Anne!"
She looked up from her reading.
She did this with two red-brown eyes that had no apparent limits to
their depth. Her hand was soft; it seemed quite lost in the broad palm
of a man's hand.
"Dear Rudolph," she said, as simply as though they had parted yesterday,
"it's awfully good to see you again."
Colonel Musgrave cleared his throat, and sat down beside her.
A moment later Colonel Musgrave cleared his throat once more.
Then Mrs. Charteris laughed. It was a pleasant laugh--a clear, rippling
carol of clean mirth that sparkled in her eyes, and dimpled in her
wholesome cheeks.
"So! do you find it very, very awkward?"
"Awkward!" he cried. Their glances met in a flash of comprehension which
seemed to purge the air. Musgrave was not in the least self-conscious
now. He laughed, and lifted an admonitory forefinger.
"Oh, good Cynara," he said, "I am not what I was. And so I cannot do it,
my dear--I really cannot possibly live up to the requirements of being a
Buried Past. In a proper story-book or play, I would have to come back
from New Zealand or the Transvaal, all covered with glory and epaulets,
and have found you in the last throes of consumption: instead, you have
fattened, Anne, which a Buried Past never does, and which shows a sad
lack of appreciation for my feelings. And I--ah, my dear, I must confess
that my hair is growing gray, and that my life has not been entirely
empty without you, and that I ate and enjoyed two mutton-chops at
luncheon, though I knew I should see you to-day. I am afraid we are
neither of us up to heroics, Anne. So let's be sensible and comfy, my
dear."
"You brute!" she cried--not looking irreparably angry, yet not without a
real touch of vexation; "don't you know that every woman cherishes the
picture of her former lovers sitting alone in the twilight, and growing
lackadaisical over undying memories and faded letters? And you--you
approach me, after I don't dare to think how many years, as calmly as if
I were an old schoolmate of your mother's, and attempt to talk to me
about mutton-chops! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Rudolph
Musgrave. You might, at least, have started a little at seeing me, and
have clasped your hand to your heart, and have said, 'You, you!' or
something of the sort. I had every right to expect it."
Mrs. Charteris pouted, and then trifled for a moment with the pages of
her book.
"And--and I want to tell you that I am sorry for the way I spoke to
you--that night," she swiftly said. Anne did not look at him. "Women
don't understand things that are perfectly simple to men, I suppose--I
mean--that is, Jack said--"
"That you ought to apologize? It was very like him"--and Colonel
Musgrave smiled to think how like John Charteris it was. "Jack is quite
wonderful," he observed.
She looked up, saying impulsively, "Rudolph, you don't know how happy he
makes me."
"Heartless woman, and would you tempt me to end the tragedy of my life
with a Shakesperian fifth act of poisonings and assassination? I spurn
you, temptress. For, after all, it was an unpleasantly long while ago we
went mad for each other," Musgrave announced, and he smiled. "I fancy
that the boy and girl we knew of are as dead now as Nebuchadnezzar.
'Marian's married, and I sit here alive and merry at'--well, not at
forty year, unluckily--"
"If you continue in that heartless strain, I shall go into the house,"
Mrs. Charteris protested.
Her indignation was exaggerated, but it was not altogether feigned;
women cannot quite pardon a rejected suitor who marries and is content.
They wish him all imaginable happiness and prosperity, of course; and
they are honestly interested in his welfare; but it seems unexpectedly
callous in him. And besides his wife is so perfectly commonplace.
Mrs. Charteris, therefore, added, with emphasis: "I am really
disgracefully happy."
"Glad to hear it," said Musgrave, placidly. "So am I."
"Oh, Rudolph, Rudolph, you are hopeless!" she sighed. "And you used to
make such a nice lover!"
Mrs. Charteris looked out over the river, which was like melting gold,
and for a moment was silent.
"I was frightfully in love with you, Rudolph," she said, as half in
wonder. "After--after that horrible time when my parents forced us to
behave rationally, I wept--oh, I must have wept deluges! I firmly
intended to pine away to an early grave. And that second time I liked
you too, but then--there was Jack, you see."
"H'm!" said Colonel Musgrave; "yes, I see."
"I want you to continue to be friends with Jack," she went on, and her
face lighted up, and her voice grew tender. "He has the artistic
temperament, and naturally that makes him sensitive, and a trifle
irritable at times. It takes so little to upset him, you see, for he
feels so acutely what he calls the discords of life. I think most men
are jealous of his talents; so they call him selfish and finicky and
conceited. He isn't really, you know. Only, he can't help feeling a
little superior to the majority of men, and his artistic temperament
leads him to magnify the lesser mishaps of life--such as the steak being
overdone, or missing a train. Oh, really, a thing like that worries him
as much as the loss of a fortune, or a death in the family, would upset
anyone else. Jack says there are no such things as trifles in a
harmonious and well-proportioned life, and I suppose that's true to men
of genius. Of course, I am rather a Philistine, and I grate on him at
times--that is, I used to, but he says I have improved wonderfully. And
so we are ridiculously happy, Jack and I."
Musgrave cast about vainly for an appropriate speech. Then he
compromised with his conscience, and said: "Your husband is a very
clever man."
"Isn't he?" She had flushed for pleasure at hearing him praised. Oh,
yes, Anne loved Jack Charteris! There was no questioning that; it was
written in her face, was vibrant in her voice as she spoke of him.
"Now, really, Rudolph, aren't his books wonderful? I don't appreciate
them, of course, for I'm not clever, but I know you do. I don't see why
men think him selfish. I know better. You have to live with Jack to
really appreciate him. And every day I discover some new side of his
character that makes him dearer to me. He's so clever--and so noble.
Why, I remember--Well, before Jack made his first hit with _Astaroth's
Lackey_, he lived with his sister. They hadn't any money, and, of
course, Jack couldn't be expected to take a clerkship or anything like
that, because business details make his head ache, poor boy. So, his
sister taught school, and he lived with her. They were very happy--his
sister simply adores him, and I am positively jealous of her
sometimes--but, unfortunately, the bank in which she kept her money
failed one day. I remember it was just before he asked me to marry him,
and told me, in his dear, laughing manner, that he hadn't a penny in
the world, and that we would have to live on bread and cheese and
kisses. Of course, I had a plenty for us both, though, so we weren't
really in danger of being reduced to that. Well, I wanted to make his
sister an allowance. But Jack pointed out, with considerable reason,
that one person could live very comfortably on an income that had
formerly supported two. He said it wasn't right I should be burdened
with the support of his family. Jack was so sensitive, you see, lest
people might think he was making a mercenary marriage, and that his
sister was profiting by it. Now, I call that one of the noblest things I
ever heard of, for he is devotedly attached to his sister, and,
naturally, it is a great grief to him to see her compelled to work for a
living. His last book was dedicated to her, and the dedication is one of
the most tender and pathetic things I ever read."
Musgrave was hardly conscious of what she was saying. She was not
particularly intelligent, this handsome, cheery woman, but her voice,
and the richness and sweetness of it, and the vitality of her laugh,
contented his soul.
Anne was different; the knowledge came again to him quite simply that
Anne was different, and in the nature of things must always be a little
different from all other people--even Patricia Musgrave. He had no
desire to tell Anne Charteris of this, no idea that it would affect in
any way the tenor of his life. He merely accepted the fact that she was,
after all, Anne Willoughby, and that her dear presence seemed, somehow,
to strengthen and cheer and comfort and content beyond the reach of
expression.
Yet Musgrave recognized her lack of cleverness, and liked and admired
her none the less. A vision of Patricia arose--a vision of a dainty,
shallow, Dresden-china face with a surprising quantity of vivid hair
about it. Patricia was beautiful; and Patricia was clever, in her
pinchbeck way. But Rudolph Musgrave doubted very much if her mocking
eyes now ever softened into that brooding, sacred tenderness he had seen
in Anne's eyes; and he likewise questioned if a hurried, happy thrill
ran through Patricia's voice when Patricia spoke of her husband.
"You have unquestionably married an unusual man," Musgrave said. "I--by
Jove, you know, I fancy my wife finds him almost as attractive as you
do."
"Ah, Rudolph, I can't fancy anyone whom--whom you loved caring for
anyone else. Don't I remember, sir, how irresistible you can be when you
choose?"
Anne laughed, and raised plump hands to heaven.
"Really, though, women pursue him to a perfectly indecent extent. I have
to watch over him carefully; not that I distrust him, of course,
for--dear Jack!--he is so devoted to me, and cares so little for other
women, that Joseph would seem in comparison only a depraved _roue_. But
the _women_--why, Rudolph, there was an Italian countess at Rome--the
impudent minx!--who actually made me believe--However, Jack
explained all that, after I had made both a spectacle and a nuisance of
myself, and he had behaved so nobly in the entire affair that for days
afterwards I was positively limp with repentance. Then in Paris that
flighty Mrs. Hardress--but he explained that, too. Some women are
shameless, Rudolph," Mrs. Charteris concluded, and sighed her pity for
them.
"Utterly so," Musgrave assented, gravely.
He was feeling a thought uncomfortable. To him the place had grown
portentous. The sun was low, and the long shadows of the trees were
black on the dim lawn. People were assembling for supper, and passing to
and fro under low-hanging branches; and the gaily- gowns of the
women glimmered through a faint blue haze like that with which Boucher
and Watteau and Fragonard loved to veil, and thereby to make wistful,
somehow, the antics of those fine parroquet-like manikins who figure in
their _fetes galantes._
Inside the house, someone was playing an unpleasant sort of air on the
piano--an air which was quite needlessly creepy and haunting and
insistent. It all seemed like a grim bit out of a play. The tenderness
and pride that shone in Anne's eyes as she boasted of her happiness
troubled Rudolph Musgrave. He had a perfectly unreasonable desire to
carry her away, by force, if necessary, and to protect her from clever
people, and to buy things for her.
"So, I am an old, old married woman now, and--and I think in some ways
I suit Jack better than a more brilliant person might. I am glad your
wife has taken a fancy to him. And I want you to profit by her example.
Jack says she is one of the most attractive women he ever met. He asked
me to-day why I didn't do my hair like hers. She must make you very
happy, Rudolph?"
"My wife," Colonel Musgrave said, "is in my partial opinion, a very
clever and very beautiful woman."
"Yes; cleverness and beauty are sufficient to make any man happy, I
suppose," Anne hazarded. "Jack says, though--_Are_ cleverness and beauty
the main things in life, Rudolph?"
"Undoubtedly," he protested.
"Now, that," she said, judicially, "shows the difference in men. Jack
says a man loves a woman, not for her beauty or any other quality she
possesses, but just because she is the woman he loves and can't help
loving."
"Ah! I dare say that is the usual reason. Yes," said Colonel
Musgrave,--"because she is the woman he loves and cannot help loving!"
Anne clapped her hands. "Ah, so I have penetrated your indifference at
last, sir!"
Impulsively, she laid her hand upon his arm, and spoke with earnestness.
"Dear Rudolph, I am so glad you've found the woman you can really love.
Jack says there is only one possible woman in the world for each man,
and that only in a month of Sundays does he find her."
"Yes." said Musgrave. He had risen, and was looking down in friendly
fashion into her honest, lovely eyes. "Yes, there is only one possible
woman. And--yes, I think I found her, Anne, some years ago."
III
Thus it befell that all passed smoothly with Rudolph Musgrave and Anne
Charteris, with whom he was not in the least in love any longer (he
reflected), although in the nature of things she must always seem to him
a little different from all other people.
And it befell, too, that the following noon--this day being a Sunday,
warm, clear, and somnolent--Anne Charteris and Rudolph Musgrave sat upon
the lawn before Matocton, and little Roger Musgrave was with them. In
fact, these two had been high-handedly press-ganged by this small despot
to serve against an enemy then harassing his majesty's equanimity and by
him, revilingly, designated as Nothing-to-do.
And so Anne made for Roger--as she had learned to do for her dead
son--in addition to a respectable navy of paper boats, a vast number of
"boxes" and "Nantucket sinks" and "picture frames" and "footballs." She
had used up the greater part of a magazine before the imp grew tired of
her novel accomplishments.
For as he invidiously observed, "I can make them for myself now, most
as good as you, only I always tear the bottom of the boat when you pull
it out, and my sinks are kind of wobbly. And besides, I've made up a
story just like your husband gets money for doing. And if I had a
quarter I would buy that green and yellow snake in the toy-store window
and wiggle it at people and scare them into fits."
"Sonnikins," said Colonel Musgrave, "suppose you tell us the story, and
then we will see if it is really worth a quarter, and try to save you
from this unblushing mendicancy."
"Well, God bless Father and Mother and little cousins--Oh, no, that's
what I say at night." Roger's voice now altered, assuming shrill
singsong cadences. His pensive gravity would have appeared excessive if
manifested by the Great Sphinx. "What I meant to say was that once upon
a time when the Battle of Gettysburg was going on and houses were being
robbed and burned, and my dear grandfather was being shot through the
heart, a certain house, where the richest man in town lived, was having
feast and merriment, never dreaming of any harm, or thinking of their
little child Rachel, who was on the front porch watching the battle and
screaming with joy at every man that fell dead. One dark-faced man was
struck with a bullet and was hurt. He saw the child laughing at him and
his heart was full of revenge. So that night, when all had gone to bed,
the old dark-faced man went softly in the house and got the little girl
and set the house on fire. And he carried her out in the mountains, and
is that worth a quarter?"
"Good heavens, no!" said Anne. "How dare you leave us in such harrowing
suspense?"
"Well, a whole lot more happened, because all the while Rachel was
asleep. When she woke up, she did not know where under the sun she was.
So she walked along for about an hour and came to a little village, and
after a few minutes she came to a large rock, and guess who she met? She
met her father, and when he saw her he hugged her so hard that when he
got through she did not have any breath left in her. And they walked
along, and after a while they came to the wood, and it was now about six
o'clock, and it was very dark, and just then nine robbers jumped out
from behind the trees, and they took a pistol and shot Rachel's father,
and the child fainted. Her papa was dead, so she dug a hole and buried
him, and went right back home. And of course that was all, and if I had
that snake, I wouldn't try to scare you with it, father, anyhow."
So Colonel Musgrave gave his son a well-earned coin, as the colonel
considered, and it having been decreed, "Now, father, _you_ tell a
story," obediently read aloud from a fat red-covered book. The tale was
of the colonel's selecting, and it dealt with a shepherdess and a
chimney-sweep.
"And so," the colonel perorated, "the little china people remained
together, and were thankful for the rivet in grandfather's neck, and
continued to love each other until they were broken to pieces--And
the tale is a parable, my son. You will find that out some day. I wish
you didn't have to."
"But is that all, father?"
"You will find it rather more than enough, sonnikins, when you begin to
interpret. Yes, that is all. Only you are to remember always that they
climbed to the very top of the chimney, where they could see the stars,
before they decided to go back and live upon the parlor table under the
brand-new looking-glass. For the stars are disconcertingly unconcerned
when you have climbed to them, and so altogether unimpressed by your
achievement that it is the nature of all china people to slink home
again, precisely as your Rachel did--and as Mrs. Charteris will assure
you."
"I?" said Anne. "Now, honestly, Rudolph, I was thinking you ought not to
let him sit upon the grass, because he really has a cold. And if I were
you, I would give him a good dose of castor-oil to-night. Some people
give it in lemon-juice, I know, but I found with my boy that peppermint
is rather less disagreeable. And you could easily send somebody over to
the store at the station----"
Anne broke off short. "Was I being inadequate again? I am sorry, but
with children you never know what a cold may lead to, and I really do
not believe it good for him to sit in this damp grass."
"Sonnikins," said Rudolph Musgrave, "you had better climb up into my
lap, before you and I are Podsnapped from the universe by the only
embodiment of common-sense just now within our reach."
He patted the boy's head and latterly resumed: "I am afraid of you,
Anne. Whenever I am imagining vain things or stitching romantic
possibilities, like embroideries, about the fabric of my past, I always
find the real you in my path, as undeniable as a gas-bill. I don't
believe you ever dare to think, because there is no telling what it
might lead to. You are simply unassailably armored by the courage of
other people's convictions."
Her candid eyes met his over the boy's bright head. "And what in the
world are you talking about?"
"I am lamenting. I am rending the air and beating my breast on account
of your obstinate preference for being always in the right. I do wish
you would endeavor to impersonate a human being a trifle more
convincingly----"
But the great gong, booming out for luncheon, interrupted him at this
point, and Colonel Musgrave was never permitted to finish his complaint
against Anne's unimaginativeness.
IV
On that same Sunday morning, while Anne Charteris and Rudolph Musgrave
contended with little Roger's boredom on the lawn before Matocton,
Patricia and Charteris met by accident on the seventh terrace of the
gardens. Patricia had mentioned casually at the breakfast-table that she
intended to spend the forenoon on this terrace unsabbatically making
notes for a paper on "The Symbolism of Dante," which she was to read
before the Lichfield Woman's Club in October; but Mr. Charteris had not
overheard her.
He was seated on the front porch, working out a somewhat difficult point
in his new book, when it had first occurred to him that this particular
terrace would be an inspiring and appropriate place in which to think
the matter over, undisturbed, he said. And it was impossible he should
have known that anyone was there, as the seventh terrace happens to be
the only one that, being planted with beech-trees, is completely
screened from observation. From the house, you cannot see anything that
happens there.
It was a curious accident, though. It really seemed, now that Patricia
had put an ending to their meetings in the maple-grove, Fate was
conspiring to bring them together.
However, as Mr. Charteris pointed out, there could be no possible
objection to this conspiracy, since they had decided that their
friendship was to be of a purely platonic nature. It was a severe trial
to him, he confessed, to be forced to put aside certain dreams he had
had of the future--mad dreams, perhaps, but such as had seemed very dear
and very plausible to his impractical artistic temperament.
Still, it heartened him to hope that their friendship--since it was to
be no more--might prove a survival, or rather a veritable renaissance,
of the beautiful old Greek spirit in such matters. And, though the blind
chance that mismanaged the world had chained them to uncongenial, though
certainly well-meaning, persons, this was no logical reason why he and
Patricia should be deprived of the pleasures of intellectual
intercourse. Their souls were too closely akin.
For Mr. Charteris admitted that his soul was Grecian to the core, and
out of place and puzzled and very lonely in a sordid, bustling world;
and he assured Patricia--she did not object if he called her
Patricia?--that her own soul possessed all the beauty and purity and
calm of an Aphrodite sculptured by Phidias. It was such a soul as Horace
might have loved, as Theocritus might have hymned in glad Greek song.
Patricia flushed, and dissented somewhat.
"Frankly, _mon ami_," she said, "you are far too attractive for your
company to be quite safe. You are such an adept in the nameless little
attentions that women love--so profuse with lesser sugar-plums of speech
and action--that after two weeks one's husband is really necessary as an
antidote. Sugar-plums are good, but, like all palatable things,
unwholesome. So I shall prescribe Rudolph's company for myself, to ward
off an attack of moral indigestion. I am very glad he has come
back--really glad," she added, conscientiously. "Poor old Rudolph! what
between his interminable antiquities and those demented sections of the
alphabet--What are those things, _mon ami_, that are always going up and
down in Wall Street?"
"Elevators?" Mr. Charteris suggested.
"Oh, you jay-bird! I mean those N.P.'s and N.Y.C.'s and those other
letters that are always having flurries and panics and passed dividends.
They keep him incredibly busy."
And she sighed, tolerantly. Patricia had come within the last two weeks
to believe that she was neglected, if not positively ill-treated, by her
husband; and she had no earthly objection to Mr. Charteris thinking
likewise. Her face expressed patient resignation now, as they walked
under the close-matted foliage of the beech-trees, which made a
pleasant, sun-flecked gloom about them.
Patricia removed her hat--the morning really was rather close--and
paused where a sunbeam fell upon her copper- hair, and glorified
her wistful countenance. She sighed once more, and added a finishing
touch to the portrait of a _femme incomprise_.
"Pray, don't think, _mon ami_," she said very earnestly, "that I am
blaming Rudolph! I suppose no wife can ever hope to have any part in her
husband's inner life."
"Not in her own husband's, of course," said Charteris, cryptically.
"No, for while a woman gives her heart all at once, men crumble theirs
away, as one feeds bread to birds--a crumb to this woman, a crumb to
that--and such a little crumb, sometimes! And his wife gets what is left
over."
"Pray, where did you read that?" said Charteris.
"I didn't read it anywhere. It was simply a thought that came to me,"
Patricia lied, gently. "But don't let's try to be clever. Cleverness is
always a tax, but before luncheon it is an extortion. Personally, it
makes me feel as if I had attended a welsh-rabbit supper the night
before. Your wife must be very patient."
"My wife," cried Charteris, in turn resolved to screen an unappreciative
mate, "is the most dear and most kind-hearted among the Philistines. And
yet, at times, I grant you--"
"Oh, but, of course!" Patricia said impatiently. "I don't for a moment
question that your wife is an angel."
"And why?" His eyebrows lifted, and he smiled.
"Why, wasn't it an angel," Patricia queried, all impishness now, "who
kept the first man and woman out of paradise?"
"If--if I thought you meant that----!" he cried; and then he shrugged
his shoulders. "My wife's virtues merit a better husband than Fate has
accorded her. Anne is the best woman I have ever known."
Patricia was not unnaturally irritated. After all, one does not take the
trouble to meet a man accidentally in a plantation of young beech-trees
in order to hear him discourse of his wife's good qualities; and
besides, Mr. Charteris was speaking in a disagreeably solemn manner,
rather as if he fancied himself in a cathedral.
Therefore Patricia cast down her eyes again, and said:
"Men of genius are so rarely understood by their wives."
"We will waive the question of genius." Mr. Charteris laughed heartily,
but he had flushed with pleasure.
"I suppose," he continued, pacing up and down with cat-like fervor,
"that matrimony is always more or less of a compromise--like two
convicts chained together trying to catch each other's gait. After a
while, they succeed to a certain extent; the chain is still heavy, of
course, but it does not gall them as poignantly as it used to do. And I
fear the artistic temperament is not suited to marriage; its capacity
for suffering is too great."
Mr. Charteris caught his breath in shuddering fashion, and he paused
before Patricia. After a moment he grasped her by both wrists.
"We are chained fast enough, my lady," he cried, bitterly, "and our
sentence is for life! There are green fields yonder, but our allotted
place is here in the prison-yard. There is laughter yonder in the
fields, and the scent of wild flowers floats in to us at times when we
are weary, and the whispering trees sway their branches over the
prison-wall, and their fruit is good to look on, and they hang within
reach--ah, we might reach them very easily! But this is forbidden fruit,
my lady; and it is not included in our wholesome prison-fare. And so
don't think of it! We have been happy, you and I, for a little. We
might--don't think of it! Don't dare think of it! Go back and help your
husband drag his chain; it galls him as sorely as it does you. It galls
us all. It is the heaviest chain was ever forged; but we do not dare
shake it off!"
"I--oh, Jack, Jack, don't you dare to talk to me like that! We must be
brave. We must be sensible." Patricia, regardless of her skirts, sat
down upon the ground, and produced a pocket-handkerchief. "I--oh, what
do you mean by making me so unhappy?" she demanded, indignantly.
"Ah, Patricia," he murmured, as he knelt beside her, "how can you hope
to have a man ever talk to you in a sane fashion? You shouldn't have
such eyes, Patricia! They are purple and fathomless like the ocean, and
when a man looks into them too long his sanity grows weak, and sinks
and drowns in their cool depths, and the man must babble out his foolish
heart to you. Oh, but indeed, you shouldn't have such eyes, Patricia!
They are dangerous, and to ask anybody to believe in their splendor is
an insult to his intelligence, and besides, they are much too bright to
wear in the morning. They are bad form, Patricia."
"We must be sensible," she babbled. "Your wife is here; my husband is
here. And we--we aren't children or madmen, Jack dear. So we really must
be sensible, I suppose. Oh, Jack," she cried, upon a sudden; "this isn't
honorable!"
"Why, no! Poor little Anne!"
Mr. Charteris's eyes grew tender for a moment, because his wife, in a
fashion, was dear to him. Then he laughed, very musically.
"And how can a man remember honor, Patricia, when the choice lies
between honor and you? You shouldn't have such hair, Patricia! It is a
net spun out of the raw stuff of fire and blood and of portentous
sunsets; and its tendrils have curled around what little honor I ever
boasted, and they hold it fast, Patricia. It is dishonorable to love
you, but I cannot think of that when I am with you and hear you speak.
And when I am not with you, just to remember that dear voice is enough
to set my pulses beating faster. Oh, Patricia, you shouldn't have such a
voice!"
Charteris broke off in speech. "'Scuse me for interruptin'," the old
mulattress Virginia was saying, "but Mis' Pilkins sen' me say lunch
raydy, Miss Patrisy."
Virginia seemed to notice nothing out-of-the-way. Having delivered her
message, she went away quietly, her pleasant yellow face as
imperturbable as an idol's. But Patricia shivered.
"She frightens me, _mon ami_. Yes, that old woman always gives me
gooseflesh, and I don't know why--because she is as deaf as a post--and
I simply can't get rid of her. She is a sort of symbol--she, and how
many others, I wonder!... Oh, well, let's hurry."
So Mr. Charteris was never permitted to finish his complaint against
Patricia's voice.
It was absolutely imperative they should be on time for luncheon; for,
as Patricia pointed out, the majority of people are censorious and lose
no opportunity for saying nasty things. They are even capable of
sneering at a purely platonic friendship which is attempting to preserve
the beautiful old Greek spirit.
* * * * *
She was chattering either of her plans for the autumn, or of Dante and
the discovery of his missing cantos, or else of how abominably Bob
Townsend had treated Rosalind Jemmett, and they had almost reached the
upper terrace--little Roger, indeed, his red head blazing in the
sunlight, was already sidling by shy instalments toward them--when
Patricia moaned inconsequently and for no ascertainable cause fainted.
It was the first time for four years she had been guilty of such an
indiscretion, she was shortly afterward explaining to various members of
the Musgraves' house-party. It was the heat, no doubt. But since
everybody insisted upon it, she would very willingly toast them in
another bumper of aromatic spirits of ammonia.
"Just look at that, Rudolph! you've spilt it all over your coat sleeve.
I do wish you would try to be a little less clumsy. Oh, well, I'm spruce
as a new penny now. So let's all go to luncheon."
V
Patricia had not been in perfect health for a long while. It seemed to
her, in retrospect, that ever since the agonies of little Roger's birth
she had been the victim of what she described as "a sort of
all-overishness." Then, too, as has been previously recorded, Patricia
had been operated upon by surgeons, and more than once....
"Good Lord!" as she herself declared, "it has reached the point that
when I see a turkey coming to the dinner-table to be carved I can't help
treating it as an ingenue."
Yet for the last four years she had never fainted, until this. It
disquieted her. Then, too, awoke faint pricking memories of certain
symptoms ... which she had not talked about ...
Now they alarmed her; and in consequence she took the next morning's
train to Lichfield.
VI
Mrs. Ashmeade, who has been previously quoted, now comes into the story.
She is only an episode. Still, her intervention led to peculiar
results--results, curiously enough, in which she was not in the least
concerned. She simply comes into the story for a moment, and then goes
out of it; but her part is an important one.
She is like the watchman who announces the coming of Agamemnon;
Clytemnestra sharpens her ax at the news, and the fatal bath is prepared
for the _anax andron_. The tragedy moves on; the house of Atreus falls,
and the wrath of implacable gods bellows across the heavens; meanwhile,
the watchman has gone home to have tea with his family, and we hear no
more of him. There are any number of morals to this.
Mrs. Ashmeade comes into the story on the day Patricia went to
Lichfield, and some weeks after John Charteris's arrival at Matocton.
Since then, affairs had progressed in a not unnatural sequence. Mr.
Charteris, as we have seen, attributed it to Fate; and, assuredly, there
must be a special providence of some kind that presides over country
houses--a freakish and whimsical providence, which hugely rejoices in
confounding one's sense of time and direction.
Through its agency, people unaccountably lose their way in the simplest
walks, and turn up late and embarrassed for luncheon. At the end of the
evening, it brings any number of couples blinking out of the dark, with
no idea the clock was striking more than half-past nine.
And it delights in sending one into the garden--in search of roses or
dahlias or upas-trees or something of the sort, of course--and thereby
causing one to encounter the most unlikely people, and really, quite the
last person one would have thought of meeting, as all frequenters of
house-party junketings will assure you. And thus is this special
house-party providence responsible for a great number of marriages, and,
it may be, for a large percentage of the divorce cases; for, if you
desire very heartily to see anything of another member of a house-party,
this lax-minded and easy-going providence will somehow always bring the
event about in a specious manner, and without any apparent thought of
the consequences.
And the Musgraves' house-party was no exception.
Mrs. Ashmeade, for reasons of her own, took daily note of this. The
others were largely engrossed by their own affairs; they did not
seriously concern themselves about the doings of their fellow-guests.
And, besides, if John Charteris manifestly sought the company of
Patricia Musgrave, her husband did not appear to be exorbitantly
dissatisfied or angry or even lonely; and, be this as it might, the fact
remained that Celia Reindan was at this time more than a little
interested in Teddy Anstruther; and Felix Kennaston was undeniably very
attentive to Kathleen Saumarez; and Tom Gelwix was quite certainly
devoting the major part of his existence to sitting upon the beach with
Rosalind Jemmett.
For, in Lichfield at all events, everyone's house has at least a pane or
so of glass in it; and, if indiscriminate stone-throwing were ever to
become the fashion, there is really no telling what damage might ensue.
And so had Mrs. Ashmeade been a younger woman--had time and an adoring
husband not rendered her as immune to an insanity _a deux_ as any of us
may hope to be upon this side of saintship or senility--why, Mrs.
Ashmeade would most probably have remained passive, and Mrs. Ashmeade
would never have come into this story at all.
As it was, she approached Rudolph Musgrave with a fixed purpose this
morning as he smoked an after-breakfast cigarette on the front porch of
Matocton. And,
"Rudolph," said Mrs. Ashmeade, "are you blind?"
"You mean--?" he asked, and he broke off, for he had really no
conception of what she meant.
And Mrs. Ashmeade said, "I mean Patricia and Charteris. Did you think I
was by any chance referring to the man in the moon and the Queen of
Sheba?"
If ever amazement showed in a man's eyes, it shone now in Rudolph
Musgrave's. After a little, the pupils widened in a sort of terror. So
this was what Clarice Pendomer had been hinting at.
"Nonsense!" he cried. "Why--why, it is utter, preposterous, Bedlamite
nonsense!" He caught his breath in wonder at the notion of such a jest,
remembering a little packet of letters hidden in his desk. "It--oh, no,
Fate hasn't quite so fine a sense of humor as that. The thing is
incredible!" Musgrave laughed, and flushed. "I mean----"
"I don't think you need tell me what you mean," said Mrs. Ashmeade. She
sat down in a large rocking-chair, and fanned herself, for the day was
warm. "Of course, it is officious and presumptuous and disagreeable of
me to meddle. I don't mind your thinking that. But Rudolph, don't make
the mistake of thinking that Fate ever misses a chance of humiliating us
by showing how poor are our imaginations. The gipsy never does. She is a
posturing mountebank, who thrives by astounding humanity."
Mrs. Ashmeade paused, and her eyes were full of memories, and very wise.
"I am only a looker-on at the tragic farce that is being played here,"
she continued, after a little, "but lookers-on, you know, see most of
the game. They are not playing fairly with you, Rudolph. When people set
about an infringement of the Decalogue they owe it to their self-respect
to treat with Heaven as a formidable antagonist. To mark the cards is
not enough. They are not playing fairly, my dear, and you ought to know
it."
He walked up and down the porch once or twice, with his hands behind
him; then he stopped before Mrs. Ashmeade, and smiled down at her.
Without, many locusts shrilled monotonously.
"No, I do not think you are officious or meddling or anything of the
sort, I think you are one of the best and kindest-hearted women in the
world. But--bless your motherly soul, Polly! the thing is utterly
preposterous. Of course, Patricia is young, and likes attention, and it
pleases her to have men admire her. That, Polly, is perfectly natural.
Why, you wouldn't expect her to sit around under the trees, and read
poetry with her own husband, would you? We have been married far too
long for that, Patricia and I. She thinks me rather prosy and stupid at
times, poor girl, because--well, because, in point of fact, I am. But,
at the bottom of her heart--Oh, it's preposterous! We are the best
friends in the world, I tell you! It is simply that she and Jack have a
great deal in common--"
"You don't understand John Charteris. I do," said Mrs. Ashmeade,
placidly. "Charteris is simply a baby with a vocabulary. His moral
standpoint is entirely that of infancy. It would be ludicrous to
describe him as selfish, because he is selfishness incarnate. I
sometimes believe it is the only characteristic the man possesses. He
reaches out his hand and takes whatever he wants, just as a baby would,
quite simply, and as a matter of course. He wants your wife now, and he
is reaching out his hand to take her. He probably isn't conscious of
doing anything especially wrong; he is always so plausible in whatever
he does that he ends by deceiving himself, I suppose. For he is always
plausible. It is worse than useless to argue any matter with him,
because he invariably ends by making you feel as if you had been caught
stealing a hat. The only argument that would get the better of John
Charteris is knocking him down, just as spanking is the only argument
which ever gets the better of a baby. Yes, he is very like a
baby--thoroughly selfish and thoroughly dependent on other people; only,
he is a clever baby who exaggerates his own helplessness in order to
appeal to women. He has a taste for women. And women naturally like him,
for he impresses them as an irresponsible child astray in an artful and
designing world. They want to protect him. Even I do, at times. It is
really maternal, you know; we would infinitely prefer for him to be soft
and little, so that we could pick him up, and cuddle him. But as it is,
he is dangerous. He believes whatever he tells himself, you see."
Her voice died away, and Mrs. Ashmeade fanned herself in the fashion
addicted by perturbed women who, nevertheless, mean to have their say
out--slowly and impersonally, and quite as if she was fanning some one
else through motives of charity.
"I don't question," Musgrave said, at length, "that Jack is the highly
estimable character you describe. But--oh, it is all nonsense, Polly!"
he cried, with petulance, and with a tinge--if but the merest nuance
--of conviction lacking in his voice.
The fan continued its majestic sweep from the shade into the sunlight,
and back again into the shadow. Without, many locusts shrilled
monotonously.
"Rudolph, I know what you meant by saying that Fate hadn't such a fine
sense of humor."
"My dear madam, it was simply thrown out, in the heat of
conversation--as an axiom----"
For a moment the fan paused; then went on as before. It was never
charged against Pauline Ashmeade, whatever her shortcomings, that she
was given to unnecessary verbiage.
Colonel Musgrave was striding up and down, divided between a disposition
to swear at the universe at large and a desire to laugh at it. Somehow,
it did not occur to him to doubt what she had told him. He comprehended
now that, chafing under his indebtedness in the affair of Mrs. Pendomer,
Charteris would most naturally retaliate by making love to his
benefactor's wife, because the colonel also knew John Charteris. And for
the rest, it was useless to struggle against a Fate that planned such
preposterous and elaborate jokes; one might more rationally depend on
Fate to work out some both ludicrous and horrible solution, he
reflected, remembering a little packet of letters hidden in his desk.
Nevertheless, he paused after a while, and laughed, with a tolerable
affectation of mirth.
"I say--I--and what in heaven's name, Polly, prompted you to bring me
this choice specimen of a mare's-nest?"
"Because I am fond of you, I suppose. Isn't one always privileged to be
disagreeable to one's friends? We have been friends a long while, you
know."
Mrs. Ashmeade was looking out over the river now, but she seemed to see
a great way, a very great way, beyond its glaring waters, and to be
rather uncertain as to whether what she beheld there was of a humorous
or pathetic nature.
"Rudolph, do you remember that evening--the first summer that I knew
you--at Fortress Monroe, when we sat upon the pier so frightfully late,
and the moon rose out of the bay, and made a great, solid-looking,
silver path that led straight over the rim of the world, and you talked
to me about--about what, now?"
"Oh, yes, yes!--I remember perfectly! One of the most beautiful evenings
I ever saw. I remember it quite distinctly. I talked--I--and what, in
the Lord's name, did I talk about, Polly?"
"Ah, men forget! A woman never forgets when she is really friends with a
man. I know now you were telling me about Anne Charteris, for you have
been in love with her all your life, Rudolph, in your own particular
half-hearted and dawdling fashion. Perhaps that is why you have had so
many affairs. You plainly found the run of women so unimportant that it
put every woman on her pride to prove she was different. Yes, I
remember. But that night I thought you were trying to make love to me,
and I was disappointed in you, and--yes, rather pleased. Women are all
vain and perfectly inconsistent. But then, girl-children always take
after their fathers."
Mrs. Ashmeade rose from her chair. Her fan shut with a snap.
"You were a dear boy, Rudolph, when I first knew you--and what I liked
was that you never made love to me. Of all the boys I have known and
helped to form, you were the only sensible one--the only one who never
presumed. That was rather clever of you, Rudolph. It would have been
ridiculous, for even arithmetically I am older than you.
"Wouldn't it have been ridiculous, Rudolph?" she demanded, suddenly.
"Not in the least," Musgrave protested, in courteous wise. "You--why,
Polly, you were a wonderfully handsome woman. Any boy----"
"Oh, yes!--I was. I'm not now, am I, Rudolph?" Mrs. Ashmeade threw back
her head and laughed naturally. "Ah, dear boy that was, it is unfair,
isn't it, for an old woman to seize upon you in this fashion, and insist
on your making love to her? But I will let you off. You don't have to do
it."
She caught her skirts in her left hand, preparatory to going, and her
right hand rested lightly on his arm. She spoke in a rather peculiar
voice.
"Yes," she said, "the boy was a very, very dear boy, and I want the man
to be equally brave and--sensible."
Musgrave stared after her. "I wonder--I wonder--? Oh, no, that
couldn't be," he said, and wearily.
"There must be some preposterous situations that don't come about."
* * * * *
And afterward he strolled across the lawn, where the locusts were
shrilling, as if in a stubborn prediction of something which was
inevitable, and he meditated upon a great number of things. There were a
host of fleecy little clouds in the sky. He looked up at them,
interrogatively.
And then he smiled and shook his head.
"Yet I don't know," said he; "for I am coming to the conclusion that the
world is run on an extremely humorous basis."
And oddly enough, it was at the same moment that Patricia--in
Lichfield--reached the same conclusion.
PART SEVEN - YOKED
"We are as time moulds us, lacking wherewithal
To shape out nobler fortunes or contend
Against all-patient Fates, who may not mend
The allotted pattern of things temporal
Or alter it a jot or e'er let fall
A single stitch thereof, until at last
The web and its drear weavers be overcast
And predetermined darkness swallow all.
"They have ordained for us a time to sing,
A time to love, a time wherein to tire
Of all spent songs and kisses; caroling
Such elegies as buried dreams require,
Love now departs, and leaves us shivering
Beside the embers of a burned-out fire."
PAUL VANDERHOFFEN. _Egeria Answers._
I
The doctor's waiting-room smelt strongly of antiseptics. That was
Patricia's predominating thought as she wandered aimlessly about the
apartment. She fingered its dusty furniture. She remembered afterward
the steel-engraving of Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet, with General Lee
explaining some evidently important matter to those attentive and
unhumanly stiff politicians; and she remembered, too, how in depicting
one statesman, who unavoidably sat with his back to the spectator, the
artist had exceeded anatomical possibilities in order to obtain a
recognizable full-faced portrait. Yet at the time this picture had not
roused her conscious attention.
She went presently to the long table austerely decorated with two rows
of magazines, each partly covered by its neighbor, just as shingles are
placed. The arrangement irritated her unreasonably. She wanted to
disarrange these dog-eared pamphlets, to throw them on the floor, to
destroy them. She wondered how many other miserable people had tried to
read these hateful books while they waited in this abominable room.
She started when the door of the consultation-room opened. The doctor
was patting the silk glove of a harassed-looking woman in black as he
escorted her to the outer door, and was assuring her that everything was
going very well indeed, and that she was not to worry, and so on.
And presently he spoke with Patricia, for a long while, quite levelly,
of matters which it is not suitable to record. Discreet man that he was,
Wendell Pemberton could not entirely conceal his wonder that Patricia
should have remained so long in ignorance of her condition. He spoke
concerning malformation and functional weaknesses and, although
obscurely because of the bugbear of professional courtesy, voiced his
opinion that Patricia had not received the most adroit medical treatment
at the time of little Roger's birth.
She was dividedly conscious of a desire to laugh and of the notion that
she must remain outwardly serious, because though this horrible
Pemberton man was talking abject nonsense, she would presently be having
him as a dinner-guest.
But what if he were not talking nonsense? The possibility, considered,
roused a sensation of falling through infinity.
"Yes, yes," Patricia civilly assented. "These young doctors have taken
this out of me, and that out of me, as you might take the works out of a
watch. And it has done no good; and they were mistaken in their first
diagnoses, because what they took for true osteomalacia was only----
Would you mind telling me again? Oh, yes; I had only a
pseudo-osteomalacic rhachitic pelvis, to begin with. To think of
anybody's being mistaken about a simple little trouble like that! And I
suppose I was just born with it, like my mother and all those other
luckless women with Musgrave blood in them?"
"Fehling and Schliephake at least consider this variety of pelvic
anomaly to be congenital in the majority of cases. But, without going
into the question of heredity at all, I think it only, fair to tell you,
Mrs. Musgrave----" And Pemberton went on talking.
Neither of the two showed any emotion.
The doctor went on talking. Patricia did not listen. The man was
talking, she comprehended, but to her his words seemed blurred and
indistinguishable. "Like a talking-machine when it isn't wound up
enough," she decided.
Subconsciously Patricia was thinking, "You have two big beads of
perspiration on your nose, and if I were to allude to the fact you would
very probably die of embarrassment."
Aloud Patricia said: "You mean, then, that, to cap it all, a functional
disorder of my heart has become organic, so that I would inevitably die
under another operation? or even at a sudden shock? And that particular
operation is now the solitary chance of saving my life! The dilemma is
neat, isn't it? How God must laugh at the jokes He contrives," said
Patricia. "I wish that I could laugh. And I will. I don't care whether
you think me a reprobate or not, Dr. Pemberton, I want a good stiff
drink of whiskey--the Musgrave size."
He gave it to her.
II
Patricia had as yet an hour to spend in Lichfield before her train left.
She passed it in the garden of her own home, where she had first seen
Rudolph Musgrave and he had fought with Pevensey. All that seemed very
long ago.
The dahlia leaves, she noticed, were edged with yellow. She must look to
it that the place was more frequently watered; and that the bulbs were
dug up in September. Next year she meant to set the dahlias thinly, like
a hedge....
"Oh, yes, I meant to. Only I won't be alive next year," she recollected.
She went about the garden to see if Ned had weeded out the wild-pea
vines--a pest which had invaded the trim place lately. Only a few of the
intruders remained, burnt-out and withered as they are annually by the
mid-summer sun. There would be no more fight until next April.
"Oh, and I have prayed to You, I have always tried to do what You
wanted, and I never asked You to let me be born locked up in a
good-for-nothing Musgrave body! And You won't even let me see a
wild-pea vine again! That isn't much to ask, I think. But You won't let
me do it. You really do have rather funny notions about Your jokes."
She began to laugh.
"Oh, very well!" Patricia said aloud. "It is none of my affair that You
elect to run Your world on an extremely humorous basis."
She was at Matocton in good time for luncheon.
III
Colonel Musgrave had a brief interview with his wife after luncheon. He
began with quiet remonstrance, and ended with an unheard extenuation of
his presumption. Patricia's speech on this occasion was of an unfettered
and heady nature.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she said, when she had finally
paused for breath, and had wiped away her tears, and had powdered her
nose, viciously, "to bully a weak and defenseless woman in this way. I
dare say everybody in the house has heard us--brawling and squabbling
just like a hod-carrier and his wife. What's that? You haven't said a
word for fifteen minutes? Oh, la, la, la! well, I don't care. Anyhow, I
have, and I am perfectly sure they heard me, and I am sure I don't care
in the least, and it's all your fault, anyway. Oh, but you have an
abominable nature, Rudolph--a mean and cruel and suspicious nature. Your
bald-headed little Charteris is nothing whatever to me; and I would have
been quite willing to give him up if you had spoken to me in a decent
manner about it. You only _said_----? I don't care what you said; and
besides, if you did speak to me in a decent manner, it simply shows that
your thoughts were so horrid and vulgar that even you weren't so
abandoned as to dare to put them into words. Very well, then, I won't be
seen so much with him in future. I realize you are quite capable of
beating me if I don't give way to your absurd prejudices. Yes, you are,
Rudolph; you're just the sort of man to take pleasure in beating a
woman. After the exhibition of temper you've given this afternoon, I
believe you are capable of anything. Hand me that parasol! Don't keep on
talking to me; for I don't wish to hear anything you have to say. You're
simply driving me to my grave with your continual nagging and abuse and
fault-finding. I'm sure I wish I were dead as much as you do. Is my hat
on straight? How do you expect me to see into that mirror if you stand
directly in front of it? There! not content with robbing me of every
pleasure in life, I verily believe you were going to let me go
downstairs with my hat cocked over one ear. And don't you snort and look
at me like that. I'm not going to meet Mr. Charteris. I'm going driving
with Felix Kennaston; he asked me at luncheon. I suppose you'll object
to him next; you object to all my friends. Very well! Now you've made me
utterly miserable for the entire afternoon, and I'm sure I hope you are
satisfied."
There was a rustle of skirts, and the door slammed.
IV
Colonel Musgrave went to his own room, where he spent an interval in
meditation. He opened his desk and took out a small packet of papers,
some of which he read listlessly. How curiously life re-echoed itself!
he reflected, for here, again, were castby love-letters potent to breed
mischief; and his talk with Polly Ashmeade had been peculiarly
reminiscent of his more ancient talk with Clarice Pendomer. Everything
that happened seemed to have happened before.
But presently he shook his head, sighing. Chance had put into his hands
a weapon, and a formidable weapon, it seemed to him, but the colonel did
not care to use it. He preferred to strike with some less grimy cudgel.
Then he rang for one of the servants, questioned him, and was informed
that Mr. Charteris had gone down to the beach just after luncheon. A
moment later, Colonel Musgrave was walking through the gardens in this
direction.
As he came to the thicket which screens the beach, he called
Charteris's name loudly, in order to ascertain his whereabouts. And the
novelist's voice answered--yet not at once, but after a brief silence.
It chanced that, at this moment, Musgrave had come to a thin place in
the thicket, and could plainly see Mr. Charteris; he was concealing some
white object in the hollow of a log that lay by the river. A little
later, Musgrave came out upon the beach, and found Charteris seated upon
the same log, an open book upon his knees, and looking back over his
shoulder wonderingly.
"Oh," said John Charteris, "so it was you, Rudolph? I could not imagine
who it was that called."
"Yes--I wanted a word with you, Jack."
Now, there are five little red-and-white bath-houses upon the beach at
Matocton; the nearest of them was some thirty feet from Mr. Charteris.
It might have been either imagination or the prevalent breeze, but
Musgrave certainly thought he heard a door closing. Moreover, as he
walked around the end of the log, he glanced downward as in a casual
manner, and perceived a protrusion which bore an undeniable resemblance
to the handle of a parasol. Musgrave whistled, though, at the bottom of
his heart, he was not surprised; and then, he sat down upon the log, and
for a moment was silent.
"A beautiful evening," said Mr. Charteris.
Musgrave lighted a cigarette.
"Jack, I have something rather difficult to say to you--yes, it is
deuced difficult, and the sooner it is over the better. I--why,
confound it all, man! I want you to stop making love to my wife."
Mr. Charteris's eyebrows rose. "Really, Colonel Musgrave----." he began,
coolly.
"Now, you are about to make a scene, you know," said Musgrave, raising
his hand in protest, "and we are not here for that. We are not going to
tear any passions to tatters; we are not going to rant; we are simply
going to have a quiet and sensible talk. We don't happen to be
characters in a romance; for you aren't Lancelot, you know, and I am not
up to the part of Arthur by a great deal. I am not angry, I am not
jealous, nor do I put the matter on any high moral grounds. I simply say
it won't do--no, hang it, it won't do!"
"I dare not question you are an authority in such matters," said John
Charteris, sweetly--"since among many others, Clarice Pendomer is near
enough to be an obtainable witness."
Colonel Musgrave grimaced. "But what a gesture!" he thought,
half-enviously. Jack Charteris, quite certainly, meant to make the most
of the immunity Musgrave had purchased for him. None the less, Musgrave
had now his cue. Patricia must be listening.
And so what Colonel Musgrave said was: "Put it that a burnt child dreads
the fire--is that a reason he should not warn his friends against it?"
"At least," said Charteris at length, "you are commendably frank. I
appreciate that, Rudolph. I honestly appreciate the fact you have come
to me, not as the husband of that fiction in which kitchen-maids
delight, breathing fire and speaking balderdash, but as one sensible man
to another. Let us be frank, then; let us play with the cards upon the
table. You have charged me with loving your wife; and I answer you
frankly--I do. She does me the honor to return this affection. What,
then, Rudolph?"
Musgrave blew out a puff of smoke. "I don't especially mind," he said,
slowly. "According to tradition, of course, I ought to spring at your
throat with a smothered curse. But, as a matter of fact, I don't see why
I should be irritated. No, in common reason," he added, upon
consideration, "I am only rather sorry for you both."
Mr. Charteris sprang to his feet, and walked up and down the beach. "Ah,
you hide your feelings well," he cried, and his laughter was a trifle
unconvincing and a bit angry. "But it is unavailing with me. I know! I
know the sick and impotent hatred of me that is seething in your heart;
and I feel for you the pity you pretend to entertain toward me. Yes, I
pity you. But what would you have? Frankly, while in many ways an
estimable man, you are no fit mate for Patricia. She has the sensitive,
artistic temperament, poor girl; and only we who are cursed with it can
tell you what its possession implies. And you--since frankness is the
order of the day, you know--well, you impress me as being a trifle
inadequate. It is not your fault, perhaps, but the fact remains that you
have never amounted to anything personally. You have simply traded upon
the accident of being born a Musgrave of Matocton. In consequence you
were enabled to marry Patricia's money, just as the Musgraves of
Matocton always marry some woman who is able to support them. Ah, but it
was her money you married, and not Patricia! Any community of interest
between you was impossible, and is radically impossible. Your marriage
was a hideous mistake, just as mine was. For you are starving her soul,
Rudolph, just as Anne has starved mine. And now, at last, when Patricia
and I have seen our single chance of happiness, we cannot--no! we cannot
and we will not--defer to any outworn tradition or to fear of Mrs.
Grundy's narrow-minded prattle!"
Charteris swept aside the dogmas of the world with an indignant gesture
of somewhat conscious nobility; and he turned to his companion in an
attitude of defiance.
Musgrave was smiling. He smoked and seemed to enjoy his cigarette.
The day was approaching sunset. The sun, a glowing ball of copper, hung
low in the west over a rampart of purple clouds, whose heights were
smeared with red. A slight, almost imperceptible, mist rose from the
river, and, where the horizon should have been, a dubious cloudland
prevailed. Far to the west were orange- quiverings upon the
stream's surface, but, nearer, the river dimpled with silver-tipped
waves; and, at their feet, the water grew transparent, and splashed over
the sleek, brown sand, and sucked back, leaving a curved line of
bubbles which, one by one, winked, gaped and burst. There was a drowsy
peacefulness in the air; behind them, among the beeches, were many
stealthy wood-sounds; and, at long intervals, a sleepy, peevish
twittering went about the nested trees.
In Colonel Musgrave's face, the primal peace was mirrored.
"May I ask," said he at length, "what you propose doing?"
Mr. Charteris answered promptly. "I, of course, propose," said he, "to
ask Patricia to share the remainder of my life."
"A euphemism, as I take it, for an elopement. I hardly thought you
intended going so far."
"Rudolph!" cried Charteris, drawing himself to his full height--and he
was not to blame for the fact that it was but five-feet-six--"I am, I
hope, an honorable man! I cannot eat your salt and steal your honor. So
I loot openly, or not at all."
The colonel shrugged his shoulders.
"I presuppose you have counted the cost--and estimated the necessary
breakage?"
"True love," the novelist declared, in a hushed, sweet voice, "is above
such considerations."
"I think," said Musgrave slowly, "that any love worthy of the name will
always appraise the cost--to the woman. It is of Patricia I am
thinking."
"She loves me," Charteris murmured. He glanced up and laughed. "Upon my
soul, you know, I cannot help thinking the situation a bit
farcical--you and I talking over matters in this fashion. But I honestly
believe the one chance of happiness for any of us hinges on Patricia and
me chucking the whole affair, and bolting."
"No! it won't do--no, hang it, Jack, it will not do!" Musgrave glanced
toward the bath-house, and he lifted his voice. "I am not considering
you in the least--and under the circumstances, you could hardly expect
me to. It is of Patricia I am thinking. I haven't made her altogether
happy. Our marriage was a mating of incongruities--and possibly you are
justified in calling it a mistake. Yet, day in and day out, I think we
get along as well together as do most couples; and it is wasting time to
cry over spilt milk. Instead, it rests with us, the two men who love
her, to decide what is best for Patricia. It is she and only she we must
consider."
"Ah, you are right!" said Charteris, and his eyes grew tender. "She must
have what she most desires; and all must be sacrificed to that." He
turned and spoke as simply as a child. "Of course, you know, I shall be
giving up a great deal for love of her, but--I am willing."
Musgrave looked at him for a moment. "H'm doubtless," he assented. "Why,
then, we won't consider the others. We will not consider your wife,
who--who worships you. We won't consider the boy. I, for my part, think
it is a mother's duty to leave an unsullied name to her child, but,
probably, my ideas are bourgeois. We won't consider Patricia's
relatives, who, perhaps, will find it rather unpleasant. In short, we
must consider no one save Patricia."
"Of course, one cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs."
"No; the question is whether it is absolutely necessary to make the
omelet. I say no."
"And I," quoth Charteris smiling gently, "say yes."
"For Patricia," Musgrave went on, as in meditation, but speaking very
clearly, "it means giving up--everything. It means giving up her friends
and the life to which she is accustomed; it means being ashamed to face
those who were formerly her friends. We, the world, our world of
Lichfield, I mean--are lax enough as to the divorce question, heaven
knows, but we can't pardon immorality when coupled with poverty. And you
would be poor, you know. Your books are tremendously clever, Jack,
but--as I happen to know--the proceeds from them would not support two
people in luxury; and Patricia has nothing. That is a sordid detail, of
course, but it is worth considering. Patricia would never be happy in a
three-pair back."
Mr. Charteris was frankly surprised. "Patricia has--nothing?"
"Bless your soul, of course not! Her father left the greater part of his
money to our boy, you know. Most of it is still held in trust for our
boy, who is named after him. Not a penny of it belongs to Patricia, and
even I cannot touch anything but a certain amount of interest."
Mr. Charteris looked at the colonel with eyes that were sad and hurt
and wistful. "I am perfectly aware of your reason for telling me this,"
he said, candidly. "I know I have always been thought a mercenary man
since my marriage. At that time I fancied myself too much in love with
Anne to permit any sordid considerations of fortune to stand in the way
of our union. Poor Anne! she little knows what sacrifices I have made
for her! She, too, would be dreadfully unhappy if I permitted her to
realize that our marriage was a mistake."
"God help her--yes!" groaned Musgrave.
"And as concerns Patricia, you are entirely right. It would be hideously
unfair to condemn her to a life of comparative poverty. My books sell
better than you think, Rudolph, but still an author cannot hope to
attain affluence so long as he is handicapped by any reverence for the
English language. Yes, I was about to do Patricia a great wrong. I
rejoice that you have pointed out my selfishness. For I have been
abominably selfish. I confess it."
"I think so," assented Musgrave, calmly. "But, then, my opinion is,
naturally, rather prejudiced."
"Yes, I can understand what Patricia must mean to you"--Mr. Charteris
sighed, and passed his hand over his forehead in a graceful
fashion,--"and I, also, love her far too dearly to imperil her
happiness. I think that heaven never made a woman more worthy to be
loved. And I had hoped--ah, well, after all, we cannot utterly defy
society! Its prejudices, however unfounded, must be respected. What
would you have? This dunderheaded giantess of a Mrs. Grundy condemns me
to be miserable, and I am powerless. The utmost I can do is to refrain
from whining over the unavoidable. And, Rudolph, you have my word of
honor that henceforth I shall bear in mind more constantly my duty
toward one of my best and oldest friends. I have not dealt with you
quite honestly. I confess it, and I ask your pardon." Mr. Charteris held
out his hand to seal the compact.
"Word of honor?" queried Colonel Musgrave, with an odd quizzing sort of
fondness for the little novelist, as the colonel took the proffered
hand. "Why, then, that is settled, and I am glad of it. I told you, you
know, it wouldn't do. See you at supper, I suppose?"
And Rudolph Musgrave glanced at the bath-house, turned on his heel, and
presently plunged into the beech plantation, whistling cheerfully. The
effect of the melody was somewhat impaired by the apparent necessity of
breaking off, at intervals, in order to smile.
The comedy had been admirably enacted, he considered, on both sides; and
he did not object to Jack Charteris's retiring with all the honors of
war.
V
The colonel had not gone far, however, before he paused, thrust both
hands into his trousers' pockets, and stared down at the ground for a
matter of five minutes.
Musgrave shook his head. "After all," said he, "I can't trust them.
Patricia is too erratic and too used to having her own way. Jack will
try to break off with her now, of course; but Jack, where women are
concerned, is as weak as water. It is not a nice thing to do, but--well!
one must fight fire with fire."
Thereupon, he retraced his steps. When he had come to the thin spot in
the thicket, Rudolph Musgrave left the path, and entered the shrubbery.
There he composedly sat down in the shadow of a small cedar. The sight
of his wife upon the beach in converse with Mr. Charteris did not appear
to surprise Colonel Musgrave.
Patricia was speaking quickly. She held a bedraggled parasol in one
hand. Her husband noted, with a faint thrill of wonder, that, at times,
and in a rather unwholesome, elfish way, Patricia was actually
beautiful. Her big eyes glowed; they flashed with changing lights as
deep waters glitter in the sun; her copper- hair seemed luminous,
and her cheeks flushed, arbutus-like. The soft, white stuff that gowned
her had the look of foam; against the gray sky she seemed a freakish
spirit in the act of vanishing. For sky and water were all one lambent
gray by this. In the west was a thin smear of orange; but, for the rest,
the world was of a uniform and gleaming gray. She and Charteris stood in
the heart of a great pearl.
"Ah, believe me," she was saying, "Rudolph isn't an ophthalmic bat. But
God keep us all respectable! is Rudolph's notion of a sensible
morning-prayer. So he just preferred to see nothing and bleat out
edifying axioms. That is one of his favorite tricks. No, it was a comedy
for my benefit, I tell you. He will allow a deal for the artistic
temperament, no doubt, but he doesn't suppose you fetch along a
white-lace parasol when you go to watch a sunset--especially a parasol
he gave me last month."
"Indeed," protested Mr. Charteris, "he saw nothing. I was too quick for
him."
She shrugged her shoulders. "I saw him looking at it. Accordingly, I
paid no attention to what he said. But you--ah, Jack, you were splendid!
I suppose we shall have to elope at once now, though?"
Charteris gave her no immediate answer. "I am not quite sure, Patricia,
that your husband is not--to a certain extent--in the right. Believe me,
he did not know you were about. He approached me in a perfectly
sensible manner, and exhibited commendable self-restraint; he has played
a difficult part to admiration. I could not have done it better myself.
And it is not for us who have been endowed with gifts denied to Rudolph,
to reproach him for lacking the finer perceptions and sensibilities of
life. Yet, I must admit that, for the time, I was a little hurt by his
evident belief that we would allow our feeling for each other--which is
rather beyond his comprehension, isn't it, dear?--to be coerced by
mercenary considerations."
"Oh, Rudolph is just a jackass-fool, anyway." She was not particularly
interested in the subject.
"He can't help that, you know," Charteris reminded her, gently; then, he
asked, after a little: "I suppose it is all true?"
"That what is true?"
"About your having no money of your own?" He laughed, but she could see
how deeply he had been pained by Musgrave's suspicions. "I ask, because,
as your husband has discovered, I am utterly sordid, my lady, and care
only for your wealth."
"Ah, how can you expect a man like that to understand--you? Why, Jack,
how ridiculous in you to be hurt by what the brute thinks! You're as
solemn as an owl, my dear. Yes, it's true enough. My father was not very
well pleased with us--and that horrid will--Ah, Jack, Jack, how
grotesque, how characteristic it was, his thinking such things would
influence you--you, of all men, who scarcely know what money is!"
"It was even more grotesque I should have been pained by his thinking
it," Charteris said, sadly. "But what would you have? I am so abominably
in love with you that it seemed a sort of desecration when the man
lugged your name into a discussion of money-matters. It really did. And
then, besides--ah, my lady, you know that I would glory in the thought
that I had given up all for you. You know, I think, that I would
willingly work my fingers to the bone just that I might possess you
always. So I had dreamed of love in a cottage--an idyl of blissful
poverty, where Cupid contents himself with crusts and kisses, and mocks
at the proverbial wolf on the doorstep. And I give you my word that
until to-day I had not suspected how blindly selfish I have been! For
poor old prosaic Rudolph is in the right, after all. Your delicate,
tender beauty must not be dragged down to face the unlovely realities
and petty deprivations and squalid makeshifts of such an existence as
ours would be. True, I would glory in them--ah, luxury and riches mean
little to me, my dear, and I can conceive of no greater happiness than
to starve with you. But true love knows how to sacrifice itself. Your
husband was right; it would not be fair to you, Patricia."
"You--you are going to leave me?"
"Yes; and I pray that I may be strong enough to relinquish you forever,
because your welfare is more dear to me than my own happiness. No, I do
not pretend that this is easy to do. But when my misery is earned by
serving you I prize my misery." Charteris tried to smile. "What would
you have? I love you," he said, simply.
"Ah, my dear!" she cried.
Musgrave's heart was sick within him as he heard the same notes in her
voice that echoed in Anne's voice when she spoke of her husband. This
was a new Patricia; her speech was low and gentle now, and her eyes held
a light Rudolph Musgrave had not seen there for a long while.
"Ah, my dear, you are the noblest man I have ever known; I wish we women
could be like men. But, oh, Jack, Jack, don't be quixotic! I can't give
you up, my dear--that would never be for my good. Think how unhappy I
have been all these years; think how Rudolph is starving my soul! I want
to be free, Jack; I want to live my own life,--for at least a month or
so--"
Patricia shivered here. "But none of us is sure of living for a month.
You've shown me a glimpse of what life might be; don't let me sink back
into the old, humdrum existence from a foolish sense of honor! I tell
you, I should go mad! I mean to have my fling while I can get it. And I
mean to have it with you, Jack--just you! I don't fear poverty. You
could write some more wonderful books. I could work, too, Jack dear.
I--I could teach music--or take in washing--or something, anyway. Lots
of women support themselves, you know. Oh, Jack, we would be so happy!
Don't be honorable and brave and disagreeable, Jack dear!"
For a moment Charteris was silent. The nostrils of his beak-like nose
widened a little, and a curious look came into his face. He discovered
something in the sand that interested him.
"After all," he demanded, slowly, "is it necessary--to go away--to be
happy?"
"I don't understand." Her hand lifted from his arm; then quick remorse
smote her, and it fluttered back, confidingly.
Charteris rose to his feet. "It is, doubtless, a very spectacular and
very stirring performance to cast your cap over the wind-mill in the
face of the world; but, after all, is it not a bit foolish, Patricia?
Lots of people manage these things--more quietly."
"Oh, Jack!" Patricia's face turned red, then white, and stiffened in a
sort of sick terror. She was a frightened Columbine in stone. "I thought
you cared for me--really, not--that way."
Patricia rose and spoke with composure. "I think I'll go back to the
house, Mr. Charteris. It's a bit chilly here. You needn't bother to
come."
Then Mr. Charteris laughed--a choking, sobbing laugh. He raised his
hands impotently toward heaven. "And to think," he cried, "to think that
a man may love a woman with his whole heart--with all that is best and
noblest in him--and she understand him so little!"
"I do not think I have misunderstood you," Patricia said, in a crisp
voice. "Your proposition was very explicit. I--am sorry. I thought I had
found one thing in the world which I would regret to leave--"
"And you really believed that I could sully the great love I bear you by
stooping to--that! You really believed that I would sacrifice to you my
home life, my honor, my prospects--all that a man can give--without
testing the quality of your love! You did not know that I spoke to try
you--you actually did not know! Eh, but yours is a light nature,
Patricia! I do not reproach you, for you are only as your narrow
Philistine life has made you. Yet I had hoped better things of you,
Patricia. But you, who pretend to care for me, have leaped at your first
opportunity to pain me--and, if it be any comfort to you, I confess you
have pained me beyond words." And he sank down on the log, and buried
his face in his hands.
She came to him--it was pitiable to see how she came to him, laughing
and sobbing all in one breath--and knelt humbly by his side, and raised
a grieved, shamed, penitent face to his.
"Forgive me!" she wailed; "oh, forgive me!"
"You have pained me beyond words, Patricia," he repeated. He was not
angry--only sorrowful and very much hurt.
"Ah, Jack! dear Jack, forgive me!"
Mr. Charteris sighed. "But, of course, I forgive you, Patricia," he
said. "I cannot help it, though, that I am foolishly sensitive where you
are concerned. And I had hoped you knew as much."
She was happy now. "Dear boy," she murmured, "don't you see it's just
these constant proofs of the greatness and the wonderfulness of your
love--Really, though, Jack, wasn't it too horrid of me to misunderstand
you so? Are you quite sure you're forgiven me entirely--without any
nasty little reservations?"
Mr. Charteris was quite sure. His face was still sad, but it was
benevolent.
"Don't you see," she went on, "that it's just these things that make me
care for you so much, and feel sure as eggs is eggs we will be happy?
Ah, Jack, we will be so utterly happy that I am almost afraid to think
of it!" Patricia wiped away the last tear, and laughed, and added, in a
matter-of-fact fashion: "There's a train at six-five in the morning; we
can leave by that, before anyone is up."
Charteris started. "Your husband loves you," he said, in gentle reproof.
"And quite candidly, you know, Rudolph is worth ten of me."
"Bah, I tell you, that was a comedy for my benefit," she protested, and
began to laugh. Patricia was unutterably happy now, because she, and not
John Charteris, had been in the wrong. "Poor Rudolph!--he has such a
smug horror of the divorce-court that he would even go so far as to
pretend to be in love with his own wife in order to keep out of it.
Really, Jack, both our better-halves are horribly commonplace and they
will be much better off without us."
"You forget that Rudolph has my word of honor," said Mr. Charteris, in
indignation.
And that instant, with one of his baffling changes of mood, he began to
laugh. "Really, though, Patricia, you are very pretty. You are April
embodied in sweet flesh; your soul is just a wisp of April cloud, and
your life an April day, half sun that only seems to warm, and half
tempest that only plays at ferocity; but you are very pretty. That is
why I am thinking, light-headedly, it would be a fine and past doubt an
agreeable exploit to give up everything for such a woman, and am
complacently comparing myself to Antony at Actium. I am thinking it
would be an interesting episode in one's _Life and Letters_. You see, my
dear, I honestly believe the world revolves around John
Charteris--although of course I would never admit that to you if I
thought for a moment you would take me seriously."
Then presently, sighing, he was grave again. "But, no! Rudolph has my
word of honor," Mr. Charteris repeated, and with unconcealed regret.
"Ah, does that matter?" she cried. "Does anything matter, except that we
love each other? I tell you I have given the best part of my life to
that man, but I mean to make the most of what is left. He has had my
youth, my love--there was a time, you know, when I actually fancied I
cared for him--and he has only made me unhappy. I hate him, I loathe
him, I detest him, I despise him! I never intend to speak to him
again--oh, yes, I shall have to at supper, I suppose, but that doesn't
count. And I tell you I mean to be happy in the only way that's
possible. Everyone has a right to do that. A woman has an especial
right to take her share of happiness in any way she can, because her
hour of it is so short. Sometimes--sometimes the woman knows how short
it is and it almost frightens her.... But at best, a woman can be really
happy through love alone, Jack dear, and it's only when we are young and
good to look at that men care for us; after that, there is nothing left
but to take to either religion or hand-embroidery, so what does it
matter, after all? Yes, they all grow tired after a while. Jack, I am
only a vain and frivolous person of superlative charm, but I love you
very much, my dear, and I solemnly swear to commit suicide the moment my
first wrinkle arrives. You shall never grow tired of me, my dear."
She laughed to think how true this was.
She hurried on: "Jack, kneel down at once, and swear that you are
perfectly sore with loving me, as that ridiculous person says in
Dickens, and whose name I never could remember. Oh, I forgot--Dickens
caricatures nature, doesn't he, and isn't read by really cultured
people? You will have to educate me up to your level, Jack, and I warn
you in advance you will not have time to do it. Yes, I am quite aware
that I am talking nonsense, and am on the verge of hysterics, thank you,
but I rather like it. It is because I am going to have you all to myself
for whatever future there is, and the thought makes me quite drunk. Will
you kindly ring for the patrol-wagon, Jack? Jack, are you quite sure you
love me? Are you perfectly certain you never loved any one else half so
much? No, don't answer me, for I intend to do all the talking for both
of us for the future! I shall tyrannize over you frightfully, and you
will like it. All I ask in return is that you will be a good boy--by
which I mean a naughty boy--and do solemnly swear, promise and affirm
that you will meet me at the side-door at half-past five in the morning,
with a portmanteau and the intention of never going back to your wife.
You swear it? Thank you so much! Now, I think I would like to cry for a
few minutes, and, after that, we will go back to the house, before
supper is over and my eyes are perfectly crimson."
In fact, Mr. Charteris had consented. Patricia was irresistible as she
pleaded and mocked and scolded and coaxed and laughed and cried, all in
one bewildering breath. Her plan was simple; it was to slip out of
Matocton at dawn, and walk to the near-by station. There they would take
the train, and snap their fingers at convention. The scheme sounded
preposterous in outline, but she demonstrated its practicability in
performance. And Mr. Charteris consented.
Rudolph Musgrave sat in the shadow of the cedar with fierce and confused
emotions whirling in his soul. He certainly had never thought of this
contingency.
PART EIGHT - HARVEST
"Time was I coveted the woes they rued
Whose love commemorates them,--I that meant
To get like grace of love then!--and intent
To win as they had done love's plenitude,
Rapture and havoc, vauntingly I sued
That love like theirs might make a toy of me,
At will caressed, at will (if publicly)
Demolished, as Love found or found not good.
"To-day I am no longer overbrave.
I have a fever,--I that always knew
This hour was certain!--and am too weak to rave,
Too tired to seek (as later I must do)
Tried remedies--time, manhood and the grave--
To drug, abate and banish love of you."
ALLEN ROSSITER. _A Fragment_.
I
When Patricia and Charteris had left the beach, Colonel Musgrave parted
the underbrush and stepped down upon the sand He must have air--air and
an open place wherein to fight this out.
Night had risen about him in bland emptiness. There were no stars
overhead, but a patient, wearied, ancient moon pushed through the
clouds. The trees and the river conferred with one another doubtfully.
He paced up and down the beach....
Musgrave laughed in the darkness. His heart was racing, racing in him,
and his thoughts were blown foam. He raised his hat and bowed
fantastically in the darkness, because the colonel loved his gesture.
"Signor Lucifer, I present my compliments. You have discoursed with me
very plausibly. I honor your cunning, signor, but if you are indeed a
gentleman, as I have always heard, you will now withdraw and permit me
to regard the matter from a standpoint other than my own. For the others
are weak, signor; as you have doubtless discovered, good women and bad
men are the weakest of their sex. I am the strongest among them, for all
that I am no Hercules; and the outcome of this matter must rest with
me."
So he sat presently upon the log, where Charteris had sat when Musgrave
came to this beach at sunset. Very long ago that seemed now. For now the
colonel was tired--physically outworn, it seemed to him, as if after
prolonged exertion--and now the moon looked down upon him, passionless,
cold, inexorable, and seemed to await the colonel's decision.
And it was woefully hard to come to any decision. For, as you know by
this, it was the colonel's besetting infirmity to shrink from making
changes; instinctively he balked--under shelter of whatever
grandiloquent excuse--against commission of any action which would alter
his relations with accustomed circumstances or persons. To guide events
was never his forte, as he forlornly knew; and here he was condemned
perforce to play that uncongenial role, with slender chances of reward.
Yet always Anne's face floated in the darkness. Always Anne's voice
whispered through the lisping of the beeches, through the murmur of the
water....
He sat thus for a long while.
II
Musgrave was, not unnaturally, late for supper. It is not to be supposed
that at this meal the colonel faltered in his duties as a host, for, to
the contrary, he narrated several anecdotes in his neatest style. It was
with him a point of honor always to be in company the social triumph of
his generation. He observed with idle interest that Charteris and
Patricia avoided each other in a rather marked manner. Both seemed a
trifle more serious than they were wont to be.
After supper, Tom Gelwix brought forth a mandolin, and most of the
house-party sang songs, sentimental and otherwise, upon the front porch
of Matocton. Anne had disappeared somewhere. Musgrave subsequently
discovered her in one of the drawing-rooms, puzzling over a number of
papers which her maid had evidently just brought to her.
Mrs. Charteris looked up with a puckered brow. "Rudolph," said she,
"haven't you an account at the Occidental Bank?"
"Hardly an account, dear lady,--merely a deposit large enough to
entitle me to receive monthly notices that I have overdrawn it."
"Why, then, of course, you have a cheque-book. Horrible things, aren't
they?--such a nuisance remembering to fill out those little stubs. Of
course, I forgot to bring mine with me--I always do; and equally, of
course, a vexatious debt turns up and finds me without an Occidental
Bank cheque to my name."
Musgrave was amused. "That," said he, "is easily remedied. I will get
you one; though even if--Ah, well, what is the good of trying to teach
you adorable women anything about business! You shall have your
indispensable blank form in three minutes."
He returned in rather less than that time, with the cheque. Anne was
alone now. She was gowned in some dull, soft, yellow stuff, and sat by a
small, marble-topped table, twiddling a fountain-pen.
"You mustn't sneer at my business methods, Rudolph," she said, pouting a
little as she filled out the cheque. "It isn't polite, sir, in the first
place, and, in the second, I am really very methodical. Of course, I am
always losing my cheque-book, and drawing cheques and forgetting to
enter them, and I usually put down the same deposit two or three
times--all women do that; but, otherwise, I am really very careful. I
manage all the accounts; I can't expect Jack to do that, you know." Mrs.
Charteris signed her name with a flourish, and nodded at the colonel
wisely. "Dear infant, but he is quite too horribly unpractical. Do you
know this bill has been due--oh, for months--and he forgot it entirely
until this evening. Fortunately, he can settle it to-morrow; those
disagreeable publishers of his have telegraphed for him to come to New
York at once, you know. Otherwise--dear, dear! but marrying a genius is
absolutely ruinous to one's credit, isn't it, Rudolph? The tradespeople
will refuse to trust us soon."
Involuntarily, Musgrave had seen the cheque. It was for a considerable
amount, and it was made out to John Charteris.
"Beyond doubt," said Musgrave, in his soul, "Jack is colossal! He is
actually drawing on his wife for the necessary expenses for running away
with another woman!"
The colonel sat down abruptly before the great, open fireplace, and
stared hard at the pine-boughs which were heaped up in it.
"A penny," said she, at length.
He glanced up with a smile. "My dear madam, it would be robbery! For a
penny, you may read of the subject of my thoughts in any of the yellow
journals, only far more vividly set forth, and obtain a variety of more
or less savory additions, to boot. I was thinking of the Lethbury case,
and wondering how we could have been so long deceived by the man."
"Ah, poor Mrs. Lethbury!" Anne sighed, "I am very sorry for her,
Rudolph; she was a good woman, and was always interested in charitable
work."
"Do you know," said Colonel Musgrave, with deliberation, "it is she I
cannot understand. To discover that he had been systematically
hoodwinking her for some ten years; that, after making away with as much
of her fortune as he was able to lay hands on, he has betrayed business
trust after business trust in order to--to maintain another
establishment; that he has never cared for her, and has made her his
dupe time after time, in order to obtain money for his gambling debts
and other even less reputable obligations--she must realize all these
things now, you know, and one would have thought no woman's love could
possibly survive such a test. Yet, she is standing by him through thick
and thin. Yes, I confess, Amelia Lethbury puzzles me. I don't understand
her mental attitude."
Musgrave was looking at Anne very intently as he ended.
"Why, but of course," said Anne, "she realizes that it was all the fault
of that--that other woman; and, besides, the--the entanglement has been
going on only a little over eight years--not ten, Rudolph."
She was entirely in earnest; Colonel Musgrave could see it plainly.
"I admit I hadn't looked on it in that light," said he, at length, and
was silent for a moment Then, "Upon my soul, Anne," he cried, "I believe
you think the woman is only doing the natural thing, only doing the
thing one has a right to expect of her, in sticking to that blackguard
after she has found him out!"
Mrs. Charteris raised her eyebrows; she was really surprised.
"Naturally, she must stand by her husband when he is in trouble; why,
if his own wife didn't, who would, Rudolph? It is just now that he needs
her most. It would be abominable to desert him now."
Anne paused and thought. "Depend upon it, she knows a better side of his
nature than we can see; she knows him, possibly, to have been misled, or
to have acted thoughtlessly; because otherwise, she would not stand by
him so firmly." Having reached this satisfactory conclusion, Anne began
to laugh--at Musgrave's lack of penetration, probably. "So, you see,
Rudolph, in either case, her conduct is perfectly natural."
"And this," he cried, "this is how women reason!"
"Am I very stupid? Jack says I am a bit illogical at times. But,
Rudolph, you mustn't expect a woman to judge the man she loves; if you
call on her to do that, she doesn't reason about it; she just goes on
loving him, and thinking how horrid you are. Women love men as they do
children; they punish them sometimes, but only in deference to public
opinion. A woman will always find an excuse for the man she loves. If he
deserts her, she is miserable until she succeeds in demonstrating to
herself it was entirely her own fault; after that, she is properly
repentant, but far less unhappy; and, anyhow, she goes on loving him
just the same."
The colonel pondered over this. "Women are different," he said.
"I don't know. I think that, if all women could be thrown with good
men, they would all be good. Women want to be good; but there comes a
time to each one of them when she wants to make a certain man happy, and
wants that more than anything else in the world; and then, of course, if
he wants--very much--for her to be bad, she will be bad. A bad woman is
always to be explained by a bad man."
Anne nodded, very wisely; then, she began to laugh, but this time at
herself. "I am talking quite like a book," she said. "Really, I had no
idea I was so clever. But I have thought of this before, Rudolph, and
been sorry for those poor women who--who haven't found the right sort of
man to care for."
"Yes." Musgrave's face was alert. "You have been luckier than most,
Anne," he said.
"Lucky!" she cried, and that queer little thrill of happiness woke again
in her rich voice. "Ah, you don't know how lucky I have been, Rudolph! I
have never cared for any one except--well, yes, you, a great while
ago--and Jack. And you are both good men. Ah, Rudolph, it was very dear
and sweet and foolish, the way we loved each other, but you don't
mind--very, very much--do you, if I think Jack is the best man in the
world, and by far the best man in the world for me? He is so good to me;
he is so good and kind and considerate to me, and, even after all these
years of matrimony, he is always the lover. A woman appreciates that,
Rudolph; she wants her husband to be always her lover, just as Jack is,
and never to give in when she coaxes--because she only coaxes when she
knows she is in the wrong--and never, never, to let her see him shaving
himself. If a husband observes these simple rules, Rudolph, his wife
will be a happy woman; and Jack does. In consequence, every day I live I
grow fonder of him, and appreciate him more and more; he grows upon me
just as a taste for strong drink might. Without him--without him--"
Anne's voice died away; then she faced Musgrave, indignantly. "Oh,
Rudolph!" she cried, "how horrid of you, how mean of you, to come here
and suggest the possibility of Jack's dying or running away from me, or
doing anything dreadful like that!"
Colonel Musgrave was smiling, "I?" said he, equably. "My dear madam! if
you will reconsider,--"
"No," she conceded, after deliberation, "it wasn't exactly your fault. I
got started on the subject of Jack, and imagined all sorts of horrible
and impossible things. But there is a sort of a something in the air
to-night; probably a storm is coming down the river. So I feel very
morbid and very foolish, Rudolph; but, then, I am in love, you see.
Isn't it funny, after all these years?" Anne asked with a smile;--"and
so you are not to be angry, Rudolph."
"My dear," he said, "I assure you, the emotion you raise in me is very
far from resembling that of anger." Musgrave rose and laughed. "I fear,
you know, we will create a scandal if we sit here any longer. Let's see
what the others are doing."
III
That night, after his guests had retired, Colonel Musgrave smoked a
cigarette on the front porch of Matocton. The moon, now in the zenith,
was bright and chill. After a while, Musgrave raised his face toward it,
and laughed.
"Isn't it--isn't it funny?" he demanded, echoing Anne's query ruefully.
"Eh, well! perhaps I still retained some lingering hope; in a season of
discomfort, most of us look vaguely for a miracle. And, at times, it
comes, but, more often, not; life isn't always a pantomime, with a fairy
god-mother waiting to break through the darkness in a burst of glory and
reunite the severed lovers, and transform their enemies into pantaloons.
In this case, it is certain that the fairy will not come. I am condemned
to be my own god in the machine."
Having demonstrated this to himself, Musgrave went into the house and
drugged his mind correcting proofsheets--for the _Lichfield Historical
Association's Quarterly Magazine_--and brought down to the year 1805 his
"List of Wills Recorded in Brummell County."
IV
The night was well advanced when Charteris stepped noiselessly into the
room. The colonel was then sedately writing amid a host of motionless
mute watchers, for at Matocton most of the portraits hang in the East
Drawing-room.
Thus, above the great marble mantel,--carved with thyrsi, and supported
by proud deep-bosomed caryatides,--you will find burly Sebastian
Musgrave, "the Speaker," an all-overbearing man even on canvas. "Paint
me among dukes and earls with my hat on, to show I am in all things a
Republican, and the finest diamond in the Colony shall be yours," he had
directed the painter, and this was done. Then there is frail Wilhelmina
Musgrave--that famed beauty whose two-hundred-year-old story all
Lichfield knows, and no genealogist has ever cared to detail--eternally
weaving flowers about her shepherd hat. There, too, is Evelyn Ramsay,
before whose roguish loveliness, as you may remember, the colonel had
snapped his fingers in those roseate days when he so joyously considered
his profound unworthiness to be Patricia's husband. There is also the
colonial governor of Albemarle--a Van Dyck this--two Knellers, and
Lely's portrait of Thomas Musgrave, "the poet," with serious blue eyes
and flaxen hair. The painting of Captain George Musgrave, who
distinguished himself at the siege of Cartagena, is admittedly an
inferior piece of work, but it has vigor, none the less; and below it
hangs the sword which was presented to him by the Lord High Admiral.
So quietly did Charteris come that the colonel was not aware of his
entrance until the novelist had coughed gently. He was in a
dressing-gown, and looked unusually wizened.
"I saw your light," he said. "I don't seem to be able to sleep, somehow.
It is so infernally hot and still. I suppose there is going to be a
thunderstorm. I hate thunderstorms. They frighten me." The little man
was speaking like a peevish child.
"Oh, well--! it will at least clear the air," said Rudolph Musgrave.
"Sit down and have a smoke, won't you?"
"No, thanks." Charteris had gone to the bookshelves and was gently
pushing and pulling at the books so as to arrange their backs in a
mathematically straight line. "I thought I would borrow something to
read--Why, this is the Tennyson you had at college, isn't it? Yes, I
remember it perfectly."
These two had roomed together through their college days.
"Yes; it is the old Tennyson. And yonder is the identical Swinburne you
used to spout from, too. Lord, Jack, it seems a century since I used to
listen by the hour to _The Triumph of Time and Dolores!_"
"Ah, but you didn't really care for them--not even then." Charteris
reached up, his back still turned, and moved a candlestick the fraction
of an inch. "There is something so disgustingly wholesome about you,
Rudolph. And it appears to be ineradicable. I can't imagine how I ever
came to be fond of you."
The colonel was twirling his pen, his eyes intent upon it. "And yet--we
_were_ fond of each other, weren't we, Jack?"
"Why, I positively adored you. You were such a strong and healthy
animal. Upon my word, I don't believe I ever missed a single football
game you played in. In fact, I almost learned to understand the game on
your account. You see--it was so good to watch you raging about with
touzled hair, like the only original bull of Bashan, and the others
tumbling like ninepins. It used to make me quite inordinately proud."
The colonel smoked. "But, Lord! how proud _I_ was when you got medals!"
"Yes--I remember."
"Even if I did bully you sometimes. Remember how I used to twist your
arm to make you write my Latin exercises, Jack?"
"I liked to have you do that," Charteris said, simply. "It hurt a great
deal, but I liked it."
He had come up behind the colonel, who was still seated. "Yes, that was
a long while ago," said Charteris. "It is rather terrible--isn't it?--to
reflect precisely how long ago it was. Why, I shall be bald in a year or
two from now. But you have kept almost all your beautiful hair,
Rudolph."
Charteris touched the colonel's head, stroking his hair ever so lightly
once or twice. It was in effect a caress.
The colonel was aware of the odor of myrrh which always accompanied
Charteris and felt that the little man was trembling.
"Isn't there--anything you want to tell me, Jack?" the colonel said. He
sat quite still.
There was the tiniest pause. The caressing finger-tips lifted from
Musgrave's head, but presently gave it one more brief and half-timid
touch.
"Why, only _au revoir_, I believe. I am leaving at a rather ungodly hour
to-morrow and won't see you, but I hope to return within the week."
"I hope so, Jack."
"And, after all, it is too late to be reading. I shall go back to bed
and take more trional. And then, I dare say, I shall sleep. So good-by,
Rudolph."
"Good-night, Jack."
"Oh, yes--! I meant good-night, of course."
The colonel sighed; then he spoke abruptly:
"No, just a moment, Jack. I didn't ask you to come here to-night; but
since you have come, by chance, I am going to follow the promptings of
that chance, and strike a blow for righteousness with soiled weapons.
Jack, do you remember suggesting that my father's correspondence during
the War might be of value, and that his desk ought to be overhauled?"
"Why, yes, of course. Mrs. Musgrave was telling me she began the task,"
said Charteris, and smiled a little.
"Unluckily; yes--but--well! in any event, it suggested to me that old
letters are dangerous. I really had no idea what that desk contained. My
father had preserved great stacks of letters. I have been going through
them. They were most of them from women--letters which should never have
been written in the first place, and which he certainly had no right to
keep."
"What! and is 'Wild Will's' love-correspondence still extant? I fancy it
made interesting reading, Rudolph."
"There were some letters which in a measure concern you, Jack." The
colonel handed him a small packet of letters. "If you will read the top
one it will explain. I will just go on with my writing."
He wrote steadily for a moment or two.... Then Charteris laughed
musically.
"I have always known there was a love-affair between my mother and 'Wild
Will.' But I never suspected until to-night that I had the honor to be
your half-brother, Rudolph--one of 'Wild Will's' innumerable bastards."
Charteris was pallid, and though he seemed perfectly composed, his eyes
glittered as with gusty brilliancies. "I understand now why my reputed
father always made such a difference between my sister and myself. I
never liked old Alvin Charteris, you know. It is a distinct relief to be
informed I have no share in his blood, although of course the knowledge
comes a trifle suddenly."
"Perhaps I should have kept that knowledge to myself. I know it would
have been kinder. I had meant to be kind. I loathe myself for dabbling
in this mess. But, in view of all things, it seemed necessary to let you
know I am your own brother in the flesh, and that Patricia is your
brother's wife."
"I see," said Charteris. "According to your standards that would make a
great difference. I don't know, speaking frankly, that it makes much
difference with me." He turned again to the bookshelves, so that
Musgrave could no longer see his face. Charteris ran his fingers
caressingly over the backs of a row of volumes. "I loved my mother,
Rudolph. I never loved anyone else. That makes a difference." Then he
said, "We Musgraves--how patly I catalogue myself already!--we Musgraves
have a deal to answer for, Rudolph."
"And doesn't that make it all the more our duty to live clean and honest
lives? to make the debt no greater than it is?" Both men were oddly
quiet.
"Eh, I am not so sure." John Charteris waved airily toward Sebastian
Musgrave's counterfeit, then toward the other portraits. "It was they
who compounded our inheritances, Rudolph--all that we were to have in
this world of wit and strength and desire and endurance. We know their
histories. They were proud, brave and thriftless, a greedy and lecherous
race, who squeezed life dry as one does an orange, and left us the
dregs. I think that it is droll, but I am not sure it places us under
any obligation. In fact, I rather think God owes us an apology,
Rudolph."
He spoke with quaint wistfulness. The colonel sat regarding him in
silence, with shocked, disapproving eyes. Then Charteris cocked his head
to one side and grinned like a hobgoblin.
"What wouldn't you give," he demanded, "to know what I am really
thinking of at this very moment while I talk so calmly? Well, you will
never know. And for the rest, you are at liberty to use your
all-important documents as you may elect. I am John Charteris; whatever
man begot my body, he is rotten bones to-day, and it is as such I value
him. I was never anybody's son--or friend or brother or lover,--but just
a pen that someone far bigger and far nobler than John Charteris writes
with occasionally. Whereas you--but, oh, you are funny, Rudolph!" And
then, "Good-night, dear brother," Charteris added, sweetly, as he left
the room.
* * * * *
And Rudolph Musgrave could not quite believe in the actuality of what
had just happened. In common with most of us, he got his general notions
concerning the laws of life from reading fiction; and here was the
material for a Renaissance tragedy wasted so far as any denouement went.
Destiny, once more, was hardly rising to the possibilities of the
situation. The weapon chance had forged had failed Rudolph Musgrave
utterly; and, indeed, he wondered now how he could ever have esteemed it
formidable. Jack was his half-brother. In noveldom or in a melodrama
this discovery would have transformed their mutual dealings; but as a
workaday world's fact, Musgrave would not honestly say that it had in
any way affected his feelings toward Jack, and it appeared to have left
Charteris equally unaltered.
"I am not sure, though. We can only guess where Jack is concerned. He
goes his own way always, tricky and furtive and lonelier than any other
human being I have ever known. It is loneliness that looks out of his
eyes, really, even when he is mocking and sneering," the colonel
meditated.
Then he sighed and went back to the tabulation of his lists of wills.
V
The day was growing strong in the maple-grove behind Matocton. As yet,
the climbing sun fired only the topmost branches, and flooded them with
a tempered radiance through which birds plunged and shrilled vague
rumors to one another. Beneath, a green twilight lingered--twilight
which held a gem-like glow, chill and lucent and steady as that of an
emerald. Vagrant little puffs of wind bustled among the leaves, with a
thin pretense of purpose, and then lapsed, and merged in the large,
ambiguous whispering which went stealthily about the grove.
Rudolph Musgrave sat on a stone beside the road that winds through the
woods toward the railway station, and smoked, nervously. He was
disheartened of the business of living, and, absurdly enough, as it
seemed to him, he was hungry.
"It has to be done quietly and without the remotest chance of Anne's
ever hearing of it, and without the remotest chance of its ever having
to be done again. I have about fifteen minutes in which to convince
Patricia both of her own folly and of the fact that Jack is an
unmitigated cad, and to get him off the place quietly, so that Anne will
suspect nothing. And I never knew any reasonable argument to appeal to
Patricia, and Jack will be a cornered rat! Yes, it is a large contract,
and I would give a great deal--a very great deal--to know how I am going
to fulfil it."
At this moment his wife and Mr. Charteris, carrying two portmanteaux,
came around a bend in the road not twenty feet from Musgrave. They were
both rather cross. In the clean and more prosaic light of morning an
elopement seemed almost silly; moreover, Patricia had had no breakfast,
and Charteris had been much annoyed by his wife, who had breakfasted
with him, and had insisted on driving to the station with him. It was a
trivial-seeming fact, but, perhaps, not unworthy of notice, that
Patricia was carrying her own portmanteau, as well as an umbrella.
The three faced one another in the cool twilight. The woods stirred
lazily about them. The birds were singing on a wager now.
"Ah," said Colonel Musgrave, "so you have come at last. I have been
expecting you for some time."
Patricia dropped her portmanteau, sullenly. Mr. Charteris placed his
with care to the side of the road, and said, "Oh!" It was perhaps the
only observation that occurred to him.
"Patricia," Musgrave began, very kindly and very gravely, "you are
about to do a foolish thing. At the bottom of your heart, even now, you
know you are about to do a foolish thing--a thing you will regret
bitterly and unavailingly for the rest of time. You are turning your
back on the world--our world--on the one possible world you could ever
be happy in. You can't be happy in the half-world, Patricia; you aren't
that sort. But you can never come back to us then, Patricia; it doesn't
matter what the motive was, what the temptation was, or how great the
repentance is--you cannot ever return. That is the law, Patricia;
perhaps, it isn't always a just law. We didn't make it, you and I, but
it is the law, and we must obey it. Our world merely says that, leaving
it once, you cannot ever return: such is the only punishment it awards
you, for it knows, this wise old world of ours, that such is the
bitterest punishment which could ever be devised for you. Our world has
made you what you are; in every thought and ideal and emotion you
possess, you are a product of our world. You couldn't live in the
half-world, Patricia; you are a product of our world that can never take
root in that alien soil. Come back to us before it is too late,
Patricia!"
Musgrave shook himself all over, rather like a Newfoundland dog coming
out of the water, and the grave note died from his voice. He smiled, and
rubbed his hands together.
"And now," said he, "I will stop talking like a problem play, and we
will say no more about it. Give me your portmanteau, my dear, and upon
my word of honor, you will never hear a word further from me in the
matter. Jack, here, can take the train, just as he intended. And--and
you and I will go back to the house, and have a good, hot breakfast
together. Eh, Patricia?"
She was thinking, unreasonably enough, how big and strong and clean her
husband looked in the growing light. It was a pity Jack was so small.
However, she faced Musgrave coldly, and thought how ludicrously wide of
the mark were all these threats of ostracism. She shudderingly wished he
would not talk of soil and taking root and hideous things like that, but
otherwise the colonel left her unmoved. He was certainly good-looking,
though.
Charteris was lighting a cigarette, with a queer, contented look. He
knew the value of Patricia's stubbornness now; still, he appeared to be
using an unnecessary number of matches.
"I should have thought you would have perceived the lack of dignity, as
well as the utter uselessness, in making such a scene," Patricia said.
"We aren't suited for each other, Rudolph; and it is better--far better
for both of us--to have done with the farce of pretending to be. I am
sorry that you still care for me. I didn't know that. But, for the
future, I intend to live my own life."
Patricia's voice faltered, and she stretched out her hands a little
toward her husband in an odd gust of friendliness. He looked so kind;
and he was not smiling in that way she never liked. "Surely that isn't
so unpardonable a crime, Rudolph?" she asked, almost humbly.
"No, my dear," he answered, "it is not unpardonable--it is impossible.
You can't lead your own life, Patricia; none of us can. Each life is
bound up with many others, and every rash act of yours, every hasty word
of yours, must affect to some extent the lives of those who are nearest
and most dear to you. But, oh, it is not argument that I would be at!
Patricia, there was a woman once--She was young, and wealthy, and--ah,
well, I won't deceive you by exaggerating her personal attractions! I
will serve up to you no praises of her sauced with lies. But fate and
nature had combined to give her everything a woman can desire, and all
this that woman freely gave to me--to me who hadn't youth or wealth or
fame or anything! And I can't stand by, for that dear dead girl's sake,
and watch your life go wrong, Patricia!"
"You are just like the rest of them, Olaf"--and when had she used that
half-forgotten nickname last, he wondered. "You imagine you are in love
with a girl because you happen to like the color of her eyes, or because
there is a curve about her lips that appeals to you. That isn't love,
Olaf, as we women understand it."
And wildly hideous and sad, it seemed to Colonel Musgrave--this dreary
parody of their old love-talk. Only, he dimly knew that she had
forgotten John Charteris existed, and that to her this moment seemed no
less sardonic.
Charteris inhaled, lazily; yet, he did not like the trembling about
Patricia's mouth. Her hands, too, opened and shut tight before she
spoke.
"It is too late now," she said, dully. "I gave you all there was to
give. You gave me just what Grandma Pendomer and all the others had left
you able to give. That remnant isn't love, Olaf, as we women understand
it. And, anyhow, it is too late now."
Yet Patricia was remembering a time when Rudolph's voice held always
that grave, tender note in speaking to her; it seemed a great while ago.
And he was big and manly, just like his voice, Rudolph was; and he
looked very kind. Desperately, Patricia began to count over the times
her husband had offended her. Hadn't he talked to her in the most
unwarrantable manner only yesterday afternoon?
"Too late!--oh, not a bit of it!" Musgrave cried. His voice sank
persuasively. "Why, Patricia, you are only thinking the matter over for
the first time. You have only begun to think of it. Why, there is the
boy--our boy, Patricia! Surely, you hadn't thought of Roger?"
He had found the right chord at last. It quivered and thrilled under his
touch; and the sense of mastery leaped in his blood. Of a sudden, he
knew himself dominant. Her face was red, then white, and her eyes
wavered before the blaze of his, that held her, compellingly.
"Now, honestly, just between you and me," the colonel said,
confidentially, "was there ever a better and braver and quainter and
handsomer boy in the world? Why, Patricia, surely, you wouldn't
willingly--of your own accord--go away from him, and never see him
again? Oh, you haven't thought, I tell you! Think, Patricia! Don't you
remember that first day, when I came into your room at the hospital and
he--ah, how wrinkled and red and old-looking he was then, wasn't he,
little wife? Don't you remember how he was lying on your breast, and how
I took you both in my arms, and held you close for a moment, and how for
a long, long while there wasn't anything left of the whole wide world
except just us three and God smiling down upon us? Don't you remember,
Patricia? Don't you remember his first tooth--why, we were as proud of
him, you and I, as if there had never been a tooth before in all the
history of the world! Don't you remember the first day he walked? Why,
he staggered a great distance--oh, nearly two yards!--and caught hold of
my hand, and laughed and turned back--to you. You didn't run away from
him then, Patricia. Are you going to do it now?"
She struggled under his look. She had an absurd desire to cry, just that
he might console her. She knew he would. Why was it so hard to remember
that she hated Rudolph! Of course, she hated him; she loved that other
man yonder. His name was Jack. She turned toward Charteris, and the
reassuring smile with which he greeted her, impressed Patricia as being
singularly nasty. She hated both of them; she wanted--in that brief time
which remained for having anything--only her boy, her soft, warm little
Roger who had eyes like Rudolph's.
"I--I--it's too late, Rudolph," she stammered, parrot-like. "If you had
only taken better care of me, Rudolph! If--No, it's too late, I tell
you! You will be kind to Roger. I am only weak and frivolous and
heartlesss. I am not fit to be his mother. I'm not fit, Rudolph!
Rudolph, I tell you I'm not fit! Ah, let me go, my dear!--in mercy, let
me go! For I haven't loved the boy as I ought to, and I am afraid to
look you in the face, and you won't let me take my eyes away--you won't
let me! Ah, Rudolph, let me go!"
"Not fit?" His voice thrilled with strength, and pulsed with tender
cadences. "Ah, Patricia, I am not fit to be his father! But, between
us--between us, mightn't we do much for him? Come back to us,
Patricia--to me and the boy! We need you, my dear. Ah, I am only a
stolid, unattractive fogy, I know; but you loved me once, and--I am the
father of your child. My standards are out-of-date, perhaps, and in any
event they are not your standards, and that difference has broken many
ties between us; but I am the father of your child. You must--you _must_
come back to me and the boy!" Musgrave caught her face between his
hands, and lifted it toward his. "Patricia, don't make any mistake!
There is nothing you care for so much as that boy. You can't give him
up! If you had to walk over red-hot ploughshares to come to him, you
would do it; if you could win him a moment's happiness by a lifetime of
poverty and misery and degradation, you would do it. And so would I,
little wife. That is the tie which still unites us; that is the tie
which is too strong ever to break. Come back to us, Patricia--to me and
the boy."
"I--Jack, Jack, take me away!" she wailed helplessly.
Charteris came forward with a smile. He was quite sure of Patricia now.
"Colonel Musgrave," he said, with a faint drawl, "if you have entirely
finished your edifying and, I assure you, highly entertaining monologue,
I will ask you to excuse us. I--oh, man, man!" Charteris cried, not
unkindly, "don't you see it is the only possible outcome?"
Musgrave faced him. The glow of hard-earned victory was pulsing in the
colonel's blood, but his eyes were chill stars. "Now, Jack," he said,
equably, "I am going to talk to you. In fact, I am going to discharge an
agreeable duty toward you."
Musgrave drew close to him. Charteris shrugged his shoulders; his smile,
however, was not entirely satisfactory. It did not suggest enjoyment.
"I don't blame you for being what you are," Musgrave went on, curtly.
"You were born so, doubtless. I don't blame a snake for being what it
is. But, when I see a snake, I claim the right to set my foot on its
head; when I see a man like you--well, this is the right I claim."
Thereupon Rudolph Musgrave struck his half-brother in the face with his
open hand. The colonel was a strong man, physically, and, on this
occasion, he made no effort to curb his strength.
"Now," Musgrave concluded, "you are going away from this place very
quickly, and you are going alone. You will do this because I tell you to
do so, and because you are afraid of me. Understand, also--if you will
be so good--that the only reason I don't give you a thorough thrashing
is that I don't think you are worth the trouble. I only want Patricia to
perceive exactly what sort of man you are."
The blow staggered Charteris. He seemed to grow smaller. His clothes
seemed to hang more loosely about him. His face was paper-white, and the
red mark showed plainly upon it.
"There would be no earthly sense in my hitting you back," he said
equably. "It would only necessitate my getting the thrashing which, I
can assure you, we are equally anxious to avoid. Of course you are able
to knock me down and so on, because you are nearly twice as big as I am.
I fail to see that proves anything in particular. Come, Patricia!" And
he turned to her, and reached out his hand.
She shrank from him. She drew away from him, without any vehemence, as
if he had been some slimy, harmless reptile. A woman does not like to
see fear in a man's eyes; and there was fear in Mr. Charteris's eyes,
for all that he smiled. Patricia's heart sickened. She loathed him, and
she was a little sorry for him.
"Oh, you cur, you cur!" she gasped, in a wondering whisper. Patricia
went to her husband, and held out her hands. She was afraid of him. She
was proud of him, the strong animal. "Take me away, Rudolph," she said,
simply; "take me away from that--that coward. Take me away, my dear. You
may beat me, too, if you like, Rudolph. I dare say I have deserved it.
But I want you to deal brutally with me, to carry me away by force, just
as you threatened to do the day we were married--at the Library, you
remember, when the man was crying 'Fresh oranges!' and you smelt so
deliciously of soap and leather and cigarette smoke."
Musgrave took both her hands in his. He smiled at Charteris.
The novelist returned the smile, intensifying its sweetness. "I fancy,
Rudolph," he said, "that, after all, I shall have to take that train
alone."
Mr. Charteris continued, with a grimace: "You have no notion, though,
how annoying it is not to possess an iota of what is vulgarly considered
manliness. But what am I to do? I was not born with the knack of
enduring physical pain. Oh, yes, I am a coward, if you like to put it
nakedly; but I was born so, willy-nilly. Personally, if I had been
consulted in the matter, I would have preferred the usual portion of
valor. However! the sanctity of the hearth has been most edifyingly
preserved--and, after all, the woman is not worth squabbling about."
There was exceedingly little of the mountebank in him now; he kicked
Patricia's portmanteau, frankly and viciously, as he stepped over it to
lift his own. Holding this in one hand, John Charteris spoke, honestly:
"Rudolph, I had a trifle underrated your resources. For you are a brave
man--we physical cowards, you know, admire that above all things--and a
strong man and a clever man, in that you have adroitly played upon the
purely brutal traits of women. Any she-animal clings to its young and
looks for protection in its mate. Upon a higher ground I would have
beaten you, but as an animal you are my superior. Still, a thing done
has an end. You have won back your wife in open fight. I fancy, by the
way, that you have rather laid up future trouble for yourself in doing
so, but I honor the skill you have shown. Colonel Musgrave, it is to you
that, as the vulgar phrase it, I take off my hat."
Thereupon, Mr. Charteris uncovered his head with perfect gravity, and
turned on his heel, and went down the road, whistling melodiously.
Musgrave stared after him, for a while. The lust of victory died; the
tumult and passion and fervor were gone from Musgrave's soul. He could
very easily imagine the things Jack Charteris would say to Anne
concerning him; and the colonel knew that she would believe them all. He
had won the game; he had played it, heartily and skilfully and
successfully; and his reward was that the old bickerings with Patricia
should continue, and that Anne should be taught to loathe him. He
foresaw it all very plainly as he stood, hand in hand with his wife.
But Anne would be happy. It was for that he had played.
VI
They came back to Matocton almost silently. The spell of the dawn was
broken; it was honest, garish day now, and they were both hungry.
Patricia's spirits were rising, as a butterfly's might after a
thunderstorm. Since she had only a few months to live, she would at
least not waste them in squabbling. She would be conscientiously
agreeable to everybody.
"Ah, Rudolph, Rudolph!" she cooed, "if I had only known all along that
you loved me!"
"My dear," he protested, fondly, "it seemed such a matter of course." He
was a little tired, perhaps; the portmanteau seemed very heavy.
"A woman likes to be told--a woman likes to be told every day.
Otherwise, she forgets," Patricia murmured. Then her face grew tenderly
reproachful. "Ah, Rudolph, Rudolph, see what your carelessness and
neglect has nearly led to! It nearly led to my running away with a man
like--like that! It would have been all your fault, Rudolph, if I had.
You know it would have been, Rudolph."
And Patricia sighed once more, and then laughed and became magnanimous.
"Yes--yes, after all, you are the boy's father." She smiled up at him
kindly and indulgently. "I forgive you, Rudolph," said Patricia.
He must have shown that pardon from Patricia just now was not unflavored
with irony, for she continued, in another voice: "Who, after all, is the
one human being you love? You know that it's the boy, and just the boy
alone. I gave you that boy. You should remember that, I think--"
"I do remember it, Patricia--"
"I bore the child. I paid the price, not you," Patricia said, very
quiet. "No, I don't mean the price all women have to pay--" She paused
in their leisurely progress, and drew vague outlines in the roadway with
the ferrule of her umbrella before she looked up into Rudolph Musgrave's
face. She appraised it for a long while and quite as if her husband were
a stranger.
"Yes, I could make you very sorry for me, if I wanted to." Her thoughts
ran thus. "But what's the use? You could only become an interminable
nuisance in trying to soothe my dying hours. You have just obstinately
squatted around in Lichfield and devoted all your time to being
beautiful and good and mooning around women for I don't know how many
years. You make me tired, and I have half a mind to tell you so right
now. And there really is no earthly sense in attempting to explain
things to you. You have so got into the habit of being beautiful and
good that you are capable of quoting Scripture after I have finished.
Then I would assuredly box your jaws, because I don't yearn to be a poor
stricken dear and weep on anybody's bosom. And I don't particularly care
about your opinion of me, anyway."
Aloud she said: "Oh, well! let's go and get some breakfast."
VII
And thus the situation stayed. Patricia told him nothing. And Rudolph
Musgrave, knowing that according to his lights he had behaved not
unhandsomely, was the merest trifle patronizing and rather like a person
speaking from a superior plane in his future dealings with Patricia.
Moreover, he was engrossed at this time by his scholarly compilation of
Lichfield Legislative Papers prior to 1800, which was printed the
following February.
She told him nothing. She was a devoted mother for two days' space, and
then candidly decided that Roger was developing into the most
insufferable of little prigs.
"And, besides, if he had never been born I would quite probably have
lived to keep my teeth in a glass of water at night. And I can't help
thinking of that privilege being denied me whenever I look at him."
She told Rudolph Musgrave nothing. She was finding it mildly amusing to
note how people came and went at Matocton, and to appraise these people
disinterestedly, because she would never see them again.
Patricia was drawing her own conclusions as to Lichfield's aristocracy.
These people--for the most part a preposterously handsome race--were the
pleasantest of companions and their manners were perfection; but there
was enough of old Roger Stapylton's blood in Patricia's veins to make
her feel, however obscurely, that nobody is justified in living without
even an attempt at any personal achievement. The younger men evinced a
marked tendency to leave Lichfield, to make their homes elsewhere, she
noted, and they very often attained prominence; there was Joe Parkinson,
for instance, who had lunched at Oyster Bay only last Thursday,
according to the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_. And, meanwhile, the men of
her husband's generation clung to their old mansions, and were
ornamental, certainly, and were, very certainly, profoundly
self-satisfied; for they adhered to the customs of yesterday under the
comfortable delusion that this was the only way to uphold yesterday's
ideals. But what, in heaven's name, had any of these men of Rudolph
Musgrave's circle ever done beyond enough perfunctory desk-work, say, to
furnish him food and clothes?
"A hamlet of Hamlets," was Patricia's verdict as to Lichfield--"whose
actual tragedy isn't that their fathers were badly treated, but that
they themselves are constitutionally unable to do anything except talk
about how badly their fathers were treated."
No, it was not altogether that these men were indolent. Rudolph and
Rudolph's peers had been reared in the belief that when any manual labor
became inevitable, you as a matter of course entrusted its execution to
a <DW64>; and, forced themselves to labor, they not unnaturally complied
with an ever-present sense of unfair treatment, and, in consequence,
performed the work inefficiently. Lichfield had no doubt preserved a
comely manner of living; but it had produced in the last half-century
nothing of real importance except John Charteris.
VIII
For Charteris was important. Patricia was rereading all the books that
Charteris had published, and they engrossed her with an augmenting
admiration.
But it is unnecessary to dilate upon the marvelous and winning pictures
of life in Lichfield before the War between the States which Charteris
has painted in his novels. "Even as the king of birds that with
unwearied wing soars nearest to the sun, yet wears upon his breast the
softest down,"--as we learn from no less eminent authority than that of
the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_--"so Mr. Charteris is equally expert in
depicting the derring-do and tenderness of those glorious days of
chivalry, of fair women and brave men, of gentle breeding, of splendid
culture and wholesome living."
Patricia was not a little puzzled by these books. The traditional
Lichfield, she decided in the outcome, may very possibly have been just
the trick-work of a charlatan's cleverness; but, even in that event,
here were the tales of life in Lichfield--ardent, sumptuous and
fragrant throughout with the fragrance of love and roses, of rhyme and
of youth's lovely fallacies; and for the pot-pourri, if it deserved no
higher name, all who believed that living ought to be a uniformly noble
transaction could not fail to be grateful eternally.
Esthetic values apart--and, indeed, to all such values Patricia accorded
a provisional respect--what most impressed her Stapyltonian mind was the
fact that these books represented, in a perfectly tangible way, success.
Patricia very heartily admired success when it was brevetted as such by
the applause of others. And while to be a noted stylist, and even to be
reasonably sure of annotated reissuement for the plaguing of unborn
schoolchildren, was all well enough, in an unimportant, high-minded way,
Patricia was far more vividly impressed by the blunt figures which told
how many of John Charteris's books had been bought and paid for. She
accepted these figures as his publishers gave them forth, implicitly;
and she marveled over and took odd joy in these figures. They enabled
her to admire Charteris's books without reservation.
By this time Mrs. Ashmeade had managed, in the most natural manner, to
tell Patricia a deal concerning Charteris. No halo graced the portrait
Mrs. Ashmeade painted.... But, indeed, Patricia now viewed John
Charteris, considered as a person, without any particular bias. She did
not especially care--now--what the man had done or had omitted to do.
But the venerable incongruity of the writer and his work confronted her
intriguingly. A Charteris writes _In Old Lichfield;_ a Cockney
drug-clerk writes _The Eve of St. Agnes;_ a genteel printer evolves a
Lovelace; and a cutpurse pens the _Ballad of Dead Ladies_ in a brothel.
It is manifestly impossible; and it happens.
So here, then, was a knave who held, somehow, the keys to a courtlier
and nobler world. These tales made living seem a braver business, for
all that they were written by a poltroon. Was it pure posturing?
Patricia, at least, thought it was not. At worst, such dexterous
maintenance of a pose was hardly despicable, she considered. And,
anyhow, she preferred to believe that Charteris had by some miracle put
the best of himself into these books, had somehow clarified the
abhorrent mixture of ability and evil which was John Charteris; and the
best in him she found, on this hypothesis, to be a deal more admirable
than the best in Rudolph Musgrave.
"It _is_ a part of Jack," she fiercely said. "It is, because I know it
is. All this is part of him--as much a part of him as the cowardice and
the trickery. So I don't really care if he is a liar and a coward. I
ought to, I suppose. But at the bottom of my heart I admire him. He has
made something; he has created these beautiful books, and they will be
here when we are all dead. He doesn't leave the world just as he found
it. That is the only real cowardice, I think--especially as I am going
to do it----"
And later she said, belligerently: "If I had been a man I could have at
least assassinated somebody who was prominent. I do wish Rudolph was
not such a stick-in-the-mud. And I wish I liked Rudolph better. But on
the whole I prefer the physical coward to the moral one. Rudolph simply
bores me stiff with his benevolent airs. He just walks around the place
forgiving me sixty times to the hour, and if he doesn't stop it I am
going to slap him."
Thus Patricia.
IX
The world knows how Charteris was killed in Fairhaven by Jasper
Hardress--the husband of "that flighty Mrs. Hardress" Anne had spoken
of.
"And I hardly know," said Mrs. Ashmeade, "whether more to admire the
justice or the sardonic humor of the performance. Here after hundreds of
entanglements with women, John Charteris manages to be shot by a jealous
maniac on account of a woman with whom--for a wonder--his relations were
proven to be innocent. The man needed killing, but it is asking too much
of human nature to put up with his being made a martyr of."
She cried a little, though. "It--it's because I remember him when he was
turning out his first mustache," she explained, lucidly.
* * * * *
But with the horror and irony of John Charteris's assassination the
biographer of Rudolph Musgrave has really nothing to do save in so far
as this event influenced the life of Rudolph Musgrave.
It was on the day of Charteris's death--a fine, clear afternoon in late
September--that Rudolph Musgrave went bass-fishing with some eight of
his masculine guests. Luncheon was brought to them in a boat about two
o'clock, along with the day's mail.
"I say--! But listen, everybody!" cried Alfred Chayter, whose mail
included a morning paper--the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_, in fact.
He read aloud.
"I wish I could be with Anne," thought Colonel Musgrave. "It may be I
could make things easier."
But Anne was in Lichfield now....
He had just finished dressing for supper when it occurred to him that
since their return from the river he had not seen Patricia. He was
afraid that Patricia, also, would be upset by this deplorable news.
As he crossed the hall Virginia came out of Patricia's rooms. The
colonel raised his voice in speaking to her, for with age Virginia was
growing very deaf.
"Yaas, suh," she said, "I'm doin' middlin' well, suh, thank yeh, suh.
Jus' took the evenin' mail to Miss Patricy, like I always do, suh." She
went away quietly, her pleasant yellow face as imperturbable as an
idol's.
He went into Patricia's bedroom. Patricia had been taking an afternoon
nap, and had not risen from the couch, where she lay with three or four
unopened letters upon her breast. Two she had opened and dropped upon
the floor. She seemed not to hear him when he spoke her name, and yet
she was not asleep, because her eyes were partly unclosed.
There was no purple glint in them, as once there had been always. Her
countenance, indeed, showed everywhere less brightly tinted than
normally it should be. Her heavy copper- hair, alone undimmed,
seemed, like some parasitic growth (he thought), to sustain its beauty
by virtue of having drained Patricia's body of color and vitality.
There was a newspaper in her right hand, with flamboyant headlines,
because to Lichfield the death of John Charteris was an event of
importance.
Patricia seemed very young. You saw that she had suffered. You knew it
was not fair to hurt a child like that.
But, indeed, Rudolph Musgrave hardly realized as yet that Patricia was
dead. For Colonel Musgrave was thinking of that time when this same
Patricia had first come to him, fire-new from the heart of an ancient
sunset, and he had noted, for the first time, that her hair was like the
reflection of a sunset in rippling waters, and that her mouth was an
inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and that her eyes
were purple glimpses of infinity.
"This same Patricia!" he said, aloud.
PART NINE - RELICS
"You have chosen the love 'that lives sans murmurings,
Sans passion,' and incuriously endures
The gradual lapse of time. You have chosen as yours
A level life of little happenings;
And through the long autumnal evenings
Lord Love, no doubt, is of the company,
And hugs your ingleside contentedly,
Smiles at old griefs, and rustles needless wings.
"And yet I think that sometimes memories
Of divers trysts, of blood that urged like wine
On moonlit nights, and of that first long kiss
Whereby your lips were first made one with mine,
Awake and trouble you, and loving is
Once more important and perhaps divine."
ALLEN ROSSITER. _Two in October._
I
To those who knew John Charteris only through the medium of the printed
page it must have appeared that the novelist was stayed in mid-career by
an accident of unrelieved and singular brutality. And truly, thus
extinguished by the unfounded jealousy of a madman, the force of
Charteris's genius seemed, and seems to-day, as emphasized by that
sinister caprice of chance which annihilated it.
But people in Lichfield, after the manner of each prophet's countrymen,
had their own point of view. The artist always stood between these
people and the artist's handiwork, in part obscuring it.
In any event, it was generally agreed in Lichfield that Anne Charteris's
conduct after her husband's death was not all which could be desired. To
begin with, she attended the funeral, in black, it was true, but wearing
only the lightest of net veils pinned under her chin--"more as if she
were going somewhere on the train, you know, than as if she were in
genuine bereavement."
"Jack didn't approve of mourning. He said it was a heathen survival."
That was the only explanation she offered.
It seemed inadequate to Lichfield. It was preferable, as good taste
went, for a widow to be too overcome to attend her husband's funeral at
all. And Mrs. Charteris had not wept once during the church ceremony,
and had not even had hysterics during the interment at Cedarwood; and
she had capped a scandalous morning's work by remaining with the
undertaker and the bricklayers to supervise the closing of John
Charteris's grave.
"Why, but of course. It is the last thing I will ever be allowed to do
for him," she had said, in innocent surprise. "Why shouldn't I?"
Her air was such that you were both to talk to her about appearances.
"Because she isn't a bit like a widow," as Mrs. Ashmeade pointed out.
"Anybody can condole with a widow, and devote two outer sheets to
explaining that you realize nothing you can say will be of any comfort
to her, and begin at the top of the inside page by telling her how much
better off he is to-day--which I have always thought a double-edged
assertion when advanced to a man's widow. But you cannot condole with a
lantern whose light has been blown out. That is what Anne is."
Mrs. Ashmeade meditated and appeared dissatisfied. "And John Charteris
of all people!"
Anne was presently about the Memorial Edition of her husband's
collected writings. It was magnificently printed and when marketed
achieved a flattering success. Robert Etheridge Townsend was
commissioned to write the authorized _Life of John Charteris_ and to
arrange the two volumes of _Letters_.
Anne was considered an authority on literature and art in general,
through virtue of reflected glory. And in the interviews she granted
various journalists it was noticeable that she no longer referred to
"Jack" or to "Mr. Charteris," but to "my husband." To have been his wife
was her one claim on estimation. And, for the rest, it is inadequate to
love the memory of a martyr. Worship is demanded; and so the wife became
the priestess.
II
Into Colonel Musgrave's mental processes during this period it will not
do to pry too closely. The man had his white nights and his battles, in
part with real grief and regret, and in part with sundry emotions which
he took on faith as the emotions he ought to have, and, therefore,
manifestly, suffered under.... "Patricia was my wife, Jack was my
brother," ran his verdict in the outcome; and beyond that he did not
care to go.
For death cowed his thoughts. In the colonel's explicit theology dead
people were straightway conveyed to either one or the other of two
places. He had very certainly never known anybody who in his opinion
merited the torments of his orthodox Gehenna; so that in imagination he
vaguely populated its blazing corridors with Nero and Judas and Caesar
Borgia and Henry VIII, and Spanish Inquisitors and the aboriginal
American Indians--excepting of course his ancestress Pocahontas--and
with Benedict Arnold and all the "carpet-baggers" and suchlike other
eminent practitioners of depravity. For no one whom Rudolph Musgrave
had ever encountered in the flesh had been really and profoundly wicked,
Rudolph Musgrave considered; and so, he always gravely estimated
this-or-that acquaintance, after death, to be "better off, poor
fellow"--as the colonel phrased it, with a tinge of
self-contradiction--even if he actually refrained in fancy from endowing
the deceased with aureate harps and crowns and footgear. In fine, death
cowed the colonel's thoughts; beyond the grave they did not care to
venture, and when confronted with that abyss they decorously balked.
Patricia and Jack were as a matter of course "better off," then--and,
miraculously purged of faults, with all their defects somehow remedied,
the colonel's wife and brother, with Agatha and the colonel's other
interred relatives, were partaking of dignified joys in bright supernal
iridescent realms, which the colonel resignedly looked forward to
entering, on some comfortably remote day or another, and thus rejoining
his transfigured kindred.... Such was the colonel's charitable decision,
in the forming whereof logic was in no way implicated. For religion, as
the colonel would have told you sedately, was not a thing to be reasoned
about. Attempting to do that, you became in Rudolph Musgrave's honest
eyes regrettably flippant.
Meanwhile Cousin Lucy Fentnor was taking care of the colonel and little
Roger. And Lichfield, long before the lettering on Patricia's tombstone
had time to lose its first light dusty gray, had accredited Cousin Lucy
Fentnor with illimitable willingness to become Mrs. Rudolph Musgrave,
upon proper solicitation, although such tittle-tattle is neither here
nor there; for at worst, a widowed, childless and impoverished
second-cousin, discreetly advanced in her forties, was entitled to keep
house for the colonel in his bereavement, as a jointly beneficial
arrangement, without provoking scandal's tongue to more than a jocose
innuendo or two when people met for "auction"--that new-fangled
perplexing variant of bridge, just introduced, wherein you bid on the
suits.... And, besides, Cousin Lucy Fentnor (as befitted any one born an
Allardyce) was to all accounts a notable housekeeper, famed alike for
the perilous glassiness of her hardwood floors, her dexterous management
of servants, her Honiton-braid fancy-work (familiar to every patron of
Lichfield charity bazaars), and her unparalleled calves-foot jelly.
Under Cousin Lucy Fentnor's systematized coddling little Roger grew like
the proverbial ill weed, and the colonel likewise waxed perceptibly in
girth.
Thus it was that accident and a woman's intervention seemed once more to
combine in shielding Rudolph Musgrave from discomfort. And in
consequence it was considered improbable that at this late day the
colonel would do the proper thing by Clarice Pendomer, as, at the first
tidings of Patricia's death, had been authentically rumored among the
imaginative; and, in fact, Lichfield no longer considered that
necessary. The claim of outraged morality against these two had been
thrown out of court, through some unworded social statute of
limitation, as far as Lichfield went. Of course it was interesting to
note that the colonel called at Mrs. Pendomer's rather frequently
nowadays; but, then, Clarice Pendomer had all sorts of callers
now--though not many in skirts--and she played poker with men for money
until unregenerate hours of the night, and was reputed with a wealth of
corroborative detail to have even less discussable sources of income: so
that, indeed, Clarice Pendomer was now rather precariously retained
within the social pale through her initial precaution of having been
born a Bellingham.... But all such tittle-tattle, as has been said, is
quite beside the mark, since with the decadence of Clarice Pendomer this
chronicle has, in the outcome, as scant concern as with the marital
aspirations of Cousin Lucy Fentnor.
And, moreover, the colonel--in colloquial phrase at least--went
everywhere. After the six months of comparative seclusion which decency
exacted of his widowerhood--and thereby afforded him ample leisure to
complete and publish his _Lichfield Legislative Papers prior to
1800_--the colonel, be it repeated, went everywhere; and people found
him no whit the worse company for his black gloves and the somber band
stitched to his coatsleeve. So Lichfield again received him gladly, as
the social triumph of his generation. Handsome and trim and affable, no
imaginable tourist could possibly have divined--for everybody in
Lichfield knew, of course--that Rudolph Musgrave had rounded his
half-century; and he stayed, as ever, invaluable to Lichfield matrons
alike against the entertainment of an "out-of-town" girl, the management
of a cotillon, and the prevention of unpleasant pauses among incongruous
dinner-companies.
But of Anne Charteris he saw very little nowadays. And, indeed, it was
of her own choice that Anne lived apart from Lichfieldian junketings,
contented with her dreams and her pride therein, and her remorseful
tender memories of the things she might have done for Jack and had not
done--lived upon exalted levels nowadays, to which the colonel's more
urbane bereavement did not aspire.
III
"Charteris" was engraved in large, raised letters upon the granite
coping over which Anne stepped to enter the trim burial-plot wherein her
dead lay.
The place to-day is one of the "points of interest" in Cedarwood.
Tourists, passing through Lichfield, visit it as inevitably as they do
the graves of the Presidents, the Southern generals and the many other
famous people which the old cemetery contains; and the <DW64> hackmen of
Lichfield are already profuse in inaccurate information concerning its
occupant. In a phrase, the post card which pictures "E 9436--Grave of
John Charteris" is among the seven similar misinterpretations of
localities most frequently demanded in Lichfieldian drugstores and
news-stands.
Her victoria had paused a trifle farther up the hill, where two big
sycamores overhung the roadway. She came into the place alone, walking
quickly, for she was unwarrantably flustered by her late encounter. And
when she found, of all people, Rudolph Musgrave standing by her
husband's grave, as in a sort of puzzled and yet reverent meditation,
she was, and somehow as half-guiltily, assuring herself there was no
possible reason for the repugnance--nay, the rage,--which a mere
glimpse of trudging, painted and flamboyant Clarice Pendomer had
kindled. Yet it must be recorded that Anne had always detested Clarice.
Now Anne spoke, as the phrase runs, before she thought. "She came with
you!"
And he answered, as from the depths of an uncalled-for comprehension
which was distinctly irritating:
"Yes. And Harry, too, for that matter. Only our talk got somehow to be
not quite the sort it would be salutary for him to take an interest in.
So we told Harry to walk on slowly to the gate, and be sure not to do
any number of things he would never have thought of if we hadn't
suggested them. You know how people are with children----"
"Harry is--her boy?" Anne, being vexed, had almost added--"and yours?"
"Oh----! Say the _fons et origo_ of the Pendomer divorce case, poor
little chap. Yes, Harry is her boy."
Anne said, and again, as she perceived within the moment, a thought too
expeditiously: "I wish you wouldn't bring them here, Colonel Musgrave."
Indeed, it seemed to her flat desecration that Musgrave should have
brought his former mistress into this hallowed plot of ground. She did
not mind--illogically, perhaps--his bringing the child.
"Eh----? Oh, yes," said Colonel Musgrave. He was sensibly nettled. "You
wish 'Colonel Musgrave' wouldn't bring them here. But then, you see, we
had been to Patricia's grave. And we remembered how Jack stood by us
both when--when things bade fair to be even more unpleasant for Clarice
and myself than they actually were. You shouldn't, I think, grudge even
such moral reprobates the privilege of being properly appreciative of
what he did for both of us. Besides, you always come on Saturdays, you
know. We couldn't very well anticipate that you would be here this
afternoon."
So he had been at pains to spy upon her! Anne phrased it thus in her
soul, being irritated, and crisply answered:
"I am leaving Lichfield to-morrow. I had meant this to be my farewell to
them until October."
Colonel Musgrave had glanced toward the little headstone, with its
rather lengthy epitaph, which marked the resting-place of this woman's
only child; and then to the tall shaft whereon was engraved just "John
Charteris." The latter inscription was very characteristic of her
view-point, he reflected; and yet reasonable, too; as one might mention
a Hector or a Goethe, say, without being at pains to disclaim allusion
to the minor sharers of either name.
"Yes," he said. "Well, I shall not intrude."
"No--wait," she dissented.
Her voice was altered now, for there had come into it a marvelous
gentleness.
And Colonel Musgrave remained motionless. The whole world was
motionless, ineffably expectant, as it seemed to him.
Sunset was at hand. On one side was the high wooden fence which showed
the boundary of Cedarwood, and through its palings and above it, was
visible the broad, shallow river, comfortably , for the most
part, like _cafe au lait_, but flecked with many patches of foam and
flat iron- rocks and innumerable islets, some no bigger than a
billiard-table, but with even the tiniest boasting a tree or two. On the
other--westward--was a mounting vista of close-shaven turf, and many
copings, like magnified geometrical problems, and a host of stunted
growing things--with the staid verdancy of evergreens predominant--and a
multitude of candid shafts and slabs and crosses and dwarfed lambs and
meditant angels.
Some of these thronged memorials were tinged with violet, and others
were a-glitter like silver, just as the ordered trees shaded them or no
from the low sun. The disposition of all worldly affairs, the man dimly
knew, was very anciently prearranged by an illimitable and, upon the
whole, a kindly wisdom.
She was considering the change in him. Anne was recollecting that
Colonel Musgrave had somewhat pointedly avoided her since her widowhood.
He seemed almost a stranger nowadays.
And she could not recognize in the man any resemblance to the boy whom
she remembered--so long ago--excepting just his womanish mouth, which
was as in the old time very full and red and sensitive. And,
illogically enough, both this great change in him and this one feature
that had never changed annoyed her equally.
She was also worried by his odd tone of flippancy. It jarred, it
vaguely--for the phrase has no equivalent--"rubbed her the wrong way."
Here at a martyr's tomb it was hideously out-of-place, and yet she did
not see her way clear to rebuke. So she remained silent.
But Rudolph Musgrave was uncanny in some respects. For he said within
the moment, "I am not a bit like John Charteris, am I?"
"No," she answered, quietly. It had been her actual thought.
Anne stayed a tiny while quite motionless. Her eyes saw nothing
physical. It was the attitude, Colonel Musgrave reflected, of one who
listens to a far-off music and, incommunicably, you knew that the music
was of a martial sort. She was all in black, of course, very slim and
pure and beautiful. The great cluster of red roses, loosely held, was
like blood against the somber gown.
The widow of John Charteris, in fine, was a very different person from
that Anne Willoughby whom Rudolph Musgrave had loved so long and long
ago. This woman had tasted of tonic sorrows unknown to Rudolph Musgrave,
and had got consolation too, somehow, in far half-credible uplands
unvisited by him. But, he knew, she lived, and was so exquisite, mainly
by virtue of that delusion which he, of all men, had preserved; Anne
Charteris was of his creation, his masterpiece; and viewing her, he was
aware of great reverence and joy.
Anne was happy. It was for that he had played.
But aloud, "I am envious," Rudolph Musgrave declared. "He is the single
solitary man I ever knew whose widow was contented to be simply his
relict for ever and ever, amen. For you will always be just the woman
John Charteris loved, won't you? Yes, if you lived to be thirty-seven
years older than Methuselah, and every genius and potentate in the world
should come a-wooing in the meantime, it never would occur to you that
you could possibly be anything, even to an insane person, except his
relict. And he has been dead now all of three whole years! So I am
envious, just as we ordinary mortals can't help being of you both;
and--may I say it?--I am glad."
IV
They were standing thus when a boy of ten or eleven came unhurriedly
into the "section." He assumed possession of Colonel Musgrave's hand as
though the action were a matter of course.
"I got lost, Colonel Musgrave," the child composedly announced. "I
walked ever so far, and the gate wasn't where we left it. And the roads
kept turning and twisting so, it seemed I'd never get anywhere. I don't
like being lost when it's getting dark and there's so many dead people
'round, do you?"
The colonel was moved to disapproval. "Young man, I suppose your poor
deserted mother is looking for you everywhere, and has probably torn out
every solitary strand of hair she possesses by this time."
"I reckon she is," the boy assented. The topic did not appear to be in
his eyes of preeminent importance.
Then Anne Charteris said, "Harry," and her voice was such that Rudolph
Musgrave wheeled with amazement in his face.
The boy had gone to her complaisantly, and she stood now with one hand
on either of his shoulders, regarding him. Her lips were parted, but
they did not move at all.
"You are Mrs. Pendomer's boy, aren't you?" said Anne Charteris, in a
while. She had some difficulty in articulation.
"Yes'm," Harry assented, "and we come here 'most every Wednesday, and,
please, ma'am, you're hurtin' me."
"I didn't mean to--dear," the woman added, painfully. "Don't interfere
with me, Rudolph Musgrave! Your mother must be very fond of you, Harry.
I had a little boy once. I was fond of him. He would have been eleven
years old last February."
"Please, ma'am, I wasn't eleven till April, and I ain't tall for my age,
but Tubby Parsons says----"
The woman gave an odd, unhuman sound. "Not until April!"
"Harry," said Colonel Musgrave then, "an enormous whale is coming down
the river in precisely two minutes. Perhaps if you were to look through
the palings of that fence you might see him. I don't suppose you would
care to, though?"
And Harry strolled resignedly toward the fence. Harry Pendomer did not
like this funny lady who had hurt, frightened eyes. He did not believe
in the whale, of course, any more than he did in Santa Claus. But like
most children, he patiently accepted the fact that grown people are
unaccountable overlords appointed by some vast _betise_, whom, if only
through prudential motives, it is preferable to humor.
V
Colonel Musgrave stood now upon the other side of John Charteris's
grave--just in the spot that was reserved for her own occupancy some
day.
"You are ill, Anne. You are not fit to be out. Go home."
"I had a little boy once," she said. "'But that's all past and gone, and
good times and bad times and all times pass over.' There's an odd simple
music in the sentence, isn't there? Yet I remember it chiefly because I
used to read that book to him and he loved it. And it was my child that
died. Why is this other child so like him?"
"Oh, then, that's it, is it?" said Rudolph Musgrave, as in relief.
"Bless me, I suppose all these little shavers are pretty much alike. I
can only tell Roger from the other boys by his red head. Humanity in the
raw, you know. Still, it is no wonder it gave you a turn. You had much
better go home, however, and not take any foolish risks, and put your
feet in hot water, and rub cologne on your temples, and do all the other
suitable things----"
"I remember now," she continued, without any apparent emotion, and as
though he had not spoken. "When I came into the room you were saying
that the child must be considered. You were both very angry, and I was
alarmed--foolishly alarmed, perhaps. And my--and John Charteris said,
'Let him tell, then'--and you told me--"
"The truth, Anne."
"And he sat quietly by. Oh, if he'd had the grace, the common
manliness--!" She shivered here. "But he never interrupted you. I--I was
not looking at him. I was thinking how vile you were. And when you had
ended, he said, 'My dear, I am sorry you should have been involved in
this. But since you are, I think we can assure Rudolph that both of us
will regard his confidence as sacred.' Then I remembered him, and
thought how noble he was! And all those years that were so happy, hour
by hour, he was letting you--meet his bills!" She seemed to wrench out
the inadequate metaphor.
You could hear the far-off river, now, faint as the sound of boiling
water.
After a few pacings Colonel Musgrave turned upon her. He spoke with a
curious simplicity.
"There isn't any use in lying to you. You wouldn't believe. You would
only go to some one else--some woman probably,--who would jump at the
chance of telling you everything and a deal more. Yes, there are a great
many 'they _do_ say's' floating about. This was the only one that came
near being--serious. The man was very clever.--Oh, he wasn't vulgarly
lecherous. He was simply--Jack Charteris. He always irritated Lichfield,
though, by not taking Lichfield very seriously. You would hear every
by-end of retaliative and sniggered-over mythology, and in your present
state of mind you would believe all of them. I happen to know that a
great many of these stories are not true."
"A great many of these stories," Anne repeated, "aren't true! A great
many aren't! That ought to be consoling, oughtn't it?" She spoke without
a trace of bitterness.
"I express myself very badly. What I really mean, what I am aiming at,
is that I wish you would let me answer any questions you might like to
ask, because I will answer them truthfully. Very few people would. You
see, you go about the world so like a gray-stone saint who has just
stepped down from her niche for the fraction of a second," he added, as
with venom, "that it is only human nature to dislike you."
Anne was not angry. It had come to her, quite as though she were
considering some other woman, that what the man said was, in a fashion,
true.
"There is sunlight and fresh air in the street," John Charteris had been
wont to declare, "and there is a culvert at the corner. I think it is a
mistake for us to emphasize the culvert."
So he had trained her to disbelieve in its existence. She saw this now.
It did not matter. It seemed to her that nothing mattered any more.
"I've only one question, I think. Why did you do it?" She spoke with
bright amazement in her eyes.
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he seriocomically deplored. "Why, because it was
such a noble thing to do. It was so like the estimable young man in a
play, you know, who acknowledges the crime he never committed and takes
a curtain-call immediately afterwards. In fine, I simply observed to
myself, with the late Monsieur de Bergerac, 'But what a gesture!'" And
he parodied an actor's motion in this role.
She stayed unsmiling and patiently awaiting veracity. Anne did not
understand that Colonel Musgrave was telling the absolute truth. And so,
"You haven't _any_ sense of humor," he lamented. "You used to have a
deal, too, before you took to being conscientiously cheerful, and
diffusing sweetness and light among your cowering associates. Well, it
was because it helped him a little. Oh, I am being truthful now. I had
some reason to dislike Jack Charteris, but odd as it is, I know to-day I
never did. I ought to have, perhaps. But I didn't."
"My friend, you are being almost truthful. But I want the truth entire."
"It isn't polite to disbelieve people," he reproved her; "or at the very
least, according to the best books on etiquette, you ought not to do it
audibly. Would you mind if I smoked? I could be more veracious then.
There is something in tobacco that makes frankness a matter of course. I
thank you."
He produced an amber holder, fitted a cigarette into it, and presently
inhaled twice. He said, with a curt voice:
"The reason, naturally, was you. You may remember certain things that
happened just before John Charteris came and took you. Oh, that is
precisely what he did! You are rather a narrow-minded woman now, in
consequence--or in my humble opinion, at least--and deplorably superior.
It pleased the man to have in his house--if you will overlook my
venturing into metaphor,--one cool room very sparsely furnished where he
could come when the mood seized him. He took the raw material from me,
wherewith to build that room, because he wanted that room. I acquiesced,
because I had not the skill wherewith to fight him."
Anne understood him now, as with a great drench of surprise. And fear
was what she felt in chief when she saw for just this moment as though
it had lightened, the man's face transfigured, and tender, and strange
to her.
"I tried to buy your happiness, to--yes, just to keep you blind
indefinitely. Had the price been heavier, I would have paid it the more
gladly. Fate has played a sorry trick. _You_ would never have seen
through him. My dear, I have wanted very often to shake you," he said.
And she knew, in a glorious terror, that she desired him to shake her,
and as she had never desired anything else in life.
"Oh, well, I am just a common, ordinary, garden-sort of fool. The
Musgraves always are, in one fashion or another," he sulkily concluded.
And now the demigod was merely Rudolph Musgrave again, and she was not
afraid any longer, but only inexpressibly fordone.
"Isn't that like a woman?" he presently demanded of the June heavens.
"To drag something out of a man with inflexibility, monomania and moral
grappling-irons, and _then_ not like it! Oh, very well! I am disgusted
by your sex's axiomatic variability. I shall take Harry to his fond
mamma at once."
She did not say anything. A certain new discovery obsessed her like a
piece of piercing music.
Then Rudolph Musgrave gave the tiniest of gestures downward. "And I have
told you this, in chief, because we two remember him. He wanted you. He
took you. You are his. You will always be. He gave you just a fragment
of himself. That fragment was worth more than everything I had to
offer."
Anne very carefully arranged her roses on the ivy-covered grave. "I do
not know--meanwhile, I give these to our master. And my real widowhood
begins to-day."
And as she rose he looked at her across the colorful mound, and smiled,
half as with embarrassment. A lie, he thought, might ameliorate the
situation, and he bravely hazarded a prodigious one. "Is it necessary to
tell you that Jack loved you? And that the others never really counted?"
He rejoiced to see that Anne believed him. "No," she assented, "no, not
with him. Oddly enough, I am proud of that, even now. But--don't you
see?--I never loved him. I was just his priestess--the priestess of a
stucco god! Otherwise, I would know it wasn't his fault, but altogether
that of--the others."
He grimaced and gave a bantering flirt of his head. He said, with
quizzing eyes:
"Would it do any good to quote Lombroso, and Maudsley, and Gall, and
Krafft-Ebing, and Flechsig, and so on? and to tell you that the
excessive use of one brain faculty must necessarily cause a lack of
nutriment to all the other brain-cells? It would be rather up-to-date.
There is a deal I could tell you also as to what poisonous blood he
inherited; but to do this I have not the right." And then Rudolph
Musgrave said in all sincerity: "'A wild, impetuous whirlwind of passion
and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly _melody_ dwelling in
the heart of it.'"
She had put aside alike the drolling and the palliative suggestion, like
flimsy veils. "I think it wouldn't do any good whatever. When growing
things are broken by the whirlwind, they don't, as a rule, discuss the
theory of air-currents as a consolation. Men such as he was take what
they desire. It isn't fair--to us others. But it's true, for all that--"
Their eyes met warily; and for no reason which they shared in common
they smiled together.
"Poor little Lady of Shalott," said Rudolph Musgrave, "the mirror is
cracked from side to side, isn't it? I am sorry. For life is not so
easily disposed of. And there is only life to look at now, and life is a
bewilderingly complex business, you will find, because the laws of it
are so childishly simple--and implacable. And one of these laws seems to
be that in our little planet, might makes right--"
He stayed to puff his cigarette.
"Oh, Rudolph dear, don't--don't be just a merry-Andrew!" she cried
impulsively, before he had time to continue, which she perceived he
meant to do, as if it did not matter.
And he took her full meaning, quite as he had been used in the old times
to discourse upon a half-sentence. "I am afraid I am that, rather," he
said, reflectively. "But then Clarice and I could hardly have weathered
scandal except by making ourselves particularly agreeable to everybody.
And somehow I got into the habit of making people laugh. It isn't very
difficult. I am rather an adept at telling stories which just graze
impropriety, for instance. You know, they call me the social triumph of
my generation. And people are glad to see me because I am 'so awfully
funny' and 'simply killing' and so on. And I suppose it tells in the
long run--like the dyer's hand, you know."
"It does tell." Anne was thinking it would always tell. And that, too,
would be John Charteris's handiwork.
Ensued a silence. Rudolph Musgrave was painstakingly intent upon his
cigarette. A nestward-plunging bird called to his mate impatiently.
Then Anne shook her head impatiently.
"Come, while I'm thinking, I will drive you back to Lichfield."
"Oh, no; that wouldn't do at all," he said, with absolute decision. "No,
you see I have to return the boy. And I can't quite imagine your
carriage waiting at the doors of 'that Mrs. Pendomer.'"
"Oh," Anne fleetingly thought, "_he_ would have understood." But aloud
she only said: "And do you think I hate her any longer? Yes, it is true
I hated her until to-day, and now I'm just sincerely sorry for her. For
she and I--and you and even the child yonder--and all that any of us is
to-day--are just so many relics of John Charteris. Yet he has done with
us--at last!"
She said this with an inhalation of the breath; but she did not look at
him.
"Take care!" he said, with an unreasonable harshness. "For I forewarn
you I am imagining vain things."
"I'm not afraid, somehow." But Anne did not look at him.
He saw as with a rending shock how like the widow of John Charteris was
to Anne Willoughby; and unforgotten pulses, very strange and irrational
and dear, perplexed him sorely. He debated, and flung aside the
cigarette as an out-moded detail of his hobbling part.
"You say I did a noble thing for you. I tried to. But quixotism has its
price. To-day I am not quite the man who did that thing. John Charteris
has set his imprint too deep upon us. We served his pleasure. We are not
any longer the boy and girl who loved each other."
She waited in the rising twilight with a yet averted face. The world was
motionless, ineffably expectant, as it seemed to him. And the
disposition of all worldly affairs, the man dimly knew, was very
anciently prearranged by an illimitable and, upon the whole, a kindly
wisdom.
So that, "My dear, my dear!" he swiftly said: "I don't think I can word
just what my feeling is for you. Always my view of the world has been
that you existed, and that some other people existed--as accessories--"
Then he was silent for a heart-beat, appraising her. His hands lifted
toward her and fell within the moment, as if it were in impotence.
Anne spoke at last, and the sweet voice of her was very glad and proud
and confident.
"My friend, remember that I have not thanked you. You have done the most
foolish and--the manliest thing I ever knew a man to do, just for my
sake. And I have accepted it as if it were a matter of course. And I
shall always do so. Because it was your right to do this very brave and
foolish thing for me. I know you joyed in doing it. Rudolph ... you
cannot understand how glad I am you joyed in doing it."
Their eyes met. It is not possible to tell you all they were aware of
through that moment, because it is a knowledge so rarely apprehended,
and even then for such a little while, that no man who has sensed it can
remember afterward aught save the splendor and perfection of it.
* * * * *
And yet Anne looked back once. There was just the tall, stark shaft, and
on it "John Charteris." The thing was ominous and vast, all like
wet gravel, save where the sunlight tipped it with clean silver very
high above their reach.
"Come," she quickly said to Rudolph Musgrave; "come, for I am afraid."
VI
And are we then to leave them with glad faces turned to that new day
wherein, above the ashes of old errors and follies and mischances and
miseries, they were to raise the structure of such a happiness as earth
rarely witnesses? Would it not be, instead, a grateful task more fully
to depicture how Rudolph Musgrave's love of Anne won finally to its
reward, and these two shared the evening of their lives in tranquil
service of unswerving love come to its own at last?
Undoubtedly, since the espousal of one's first love--by oneself--is a
phenomenon rarely encountered outside of popular fiction, it would be a
very gratifying task to record that Anne and Rudolph Musgrave were
married that autumn; that subsequently Lichfield was astounded by the
fervor of their life-long bliss; that Colonel and (the second) Mrs.
Musgrave were universally respected, in a word, and their dinner-parties
were always prominently chronicled by the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_;
and that Anne took excellent care of little Roger, and that she and her
second husband proved eminently suited to each other.
But, as a matter of fact, not one of these things ever happened....
"I have been thinking it over," Anne deplored. "Oh, Rudolph dear, I
perfectly realize you are the best and noblest man I ever knew. And I
have always loved you very much, my dear; that is why I could never
abide poor Mrs. Pendomer. And yet--it is a feeling I simply can't
explain----"
"That you belong to Jack in spite of everything?" the colonel said.
"Why, but of course! I might have known that Jack would never have
allowed any simple incidental happening such as his death to cause his
missing a possible trick."
Anne would have comforted Rudolph Musgrave; but, to her discomfiture,
the colonel was grinning, however ruefully.
"I was thinking," he stated, "of the only time that I ever, to my
knowledge, talked face to face with the devil. It is rather odd how
obstinately life clings to the most hackneyed trick of ballad-makers;
and still naively pretends to enrich her productions by the stale device
of introducing a refrain--so that the idlest remarks of as much as three
years ago keep cropping up as the actual gist of the present!...
However, were it within my power, I would evoke Amaimon straightway now
to come up yonder, through your hearthrug, and to answer me quite
honestly if I did not tell him on the beach at Matocton that this,
precisely this, would be the outcome of your knowing everything!"
"I told you that I couldn't, quite, _explain_----" Anne said.
"Eh, but I can, my dear," he informed her. "The explanation is that
Lichfield bore us, shaped us, and made us what we are. We may not enjoy
a monopoly of the virtues here in Lichfield, but there is one trait at
least which the children of Lichfield share in common. We are loyal. We
give but once; and when we give, we give all that we have; and when we
have once given it, neither common-sense, nor a concourse of
expostulating seraphim, nor anything else in the universe, can induce us
to believe that a retraction, or even a qualification, of the gift would
be quite worthy of us."
"But that--that's foolish. Why, it's unreasonable," Anne pointed out.
"Of course it is. And that is why I am proud of Lichfield. And that is
why you are to-day Jack's wife and always will be just Jack's wife--and
why to-day I am Patricia's husband--and why Lichfield to-day is
Lichfield. There is something braver in life than to be just reasonable,
thank God! And so, we keep the faith, my dear, however obsolete we find
fidelity to be. We keep to the old faith--we of Lichfield, who have
given hostages to the past. We remember even now that we gave freely in
an old time, and did not haggle.... And so, we are proud--yes! we are
consumedly proud, and we know that we have earned the right to be
proud."
A little later Colonel Musgrave said:
"And yet--it takes a monstrous while to dispose of our universe's
subtleties. I have loved you my whole life long, as accurately as we
can phrase these matters. There is no--no _reasonable_ reason why you
should not marry me now; and you would marry me if I pressed it. And I
do not press it. Perhaps it all comes of our both having been reared in
Lichfield. Perhaps that is why I, too, have been 'thinking it over.' You
see," he added, with a smile, "the rivet in grandfather's neck is not
lightly to be ignored, after all. No, you do not know what I am talking
about, my dear. And--well, anyhow, I belong to Patricia. Upon the whole,
I am glad that I belong to Patricia; for Patricia and what Patricia
meant to me was the one vital thing in a certain person's rather
hand-to-mouth existence--oh, yes, in spite of everything! I know it now.
Anne Charteris," the colonel cried, "I wouldn't marry you or any other
woman breathing, even though you were to kneel and implore me upon the
knees of a centipede. For I belong to Patricia; and the rivet stays
unbroken, after all."
"Oh, and am I being very foolish again?" Anne asked. "For I have been
remembering that when--when Jack was not quite truthful about some
things, you know,--the truth he hid was always one which would have hurt
me. And I like to believe that was, at least in part, the reason he hid
it, Rudolph. So he purchased my happiness--well, at ugly prices perhaps.
But he purchased it, none the less; and I had it through all those
years. So why shouldn't I--after all--be very grateful to him? And,
besides"--her voice broke--"besides, he was Jack, you know. He belonged
to me. What does it matter what he did? He belonged to me, and I loved
him."
And to the colonel's discomfort Anne began to cry.
"There, there!" he said, "so the real truth is out at last. And tears
don't help very much. It does seem a bit unfair, my dear, I know. But
that is simply because you and I are living in a universe which has
never actually committed itself, under any penalizing bond, to be
entirely candid as to the laws by which it is conducted."
* * * * *
But it may be that Rudolph Musgrave voiced quite obsolete views. For he
said this at a very remote period--when the Beef Trust was being
"investigated" in Washington; when an excited Iberian constabulary was
still hunting the anarchists who had attempted to assassinate the young
King and Queen of Spain upon their wedding-day; when the rebuilding of
an earthquake-shattered San Francisco was just beginning to be talked of
as a possibility; and when editorials were mostly devoted to discussion
of what Mr. Bryan would have to say about bi-metallism when he returned
from his foreign tour.
And, besides, it was Rudolph Musgrave's besetting infirmity always to
shrink--under shelter of whatever grandiloquent excuse--from making
changes. One may permissibly estimate this foible to have weighed with
him a little, even now, just as in all things it had always weighed in
Lichfield with all his generation. An old custom is not lightly broken.
PART TEN - IMPRIMIS
"So let us laugh, lest vain rememberings
Breed, as of old, some rude bucolic cry
Of awkward anguishes, of dreams that die
Without decorum, of Love lacking wings
Yet striving you-ward in his flounderings
Eternally,--as now, even when I lie
As I lie now, who know that you and I
Exist and heed not lesser happenings.
"I was. I am. I will be. Eh, no doubt
For some sufficient cause, I drift, defer,
Equivocate, dream, hazard, grow more stout,
Age, am no longer Love's idolater,--
And yet I could and would not live without
Your faith that heartens and your doubts which spur."
LIONEL CROCHARD. _Palinodia_.
I
So weeks and months, and presently irrevocable years, passed tranquilly;
and nothing very important seemed to happen nowadays, either for good or
ill; and Rudolph Musgrave was content enough.
True, there befell, and with increasing frequency, periods when one must
lie abed, and be coaxed into taking interminable medicines, and be
ministered unto generally, because one was of a certain age nowadays,
and must be prudent. But even such necessities, these underhanded
indignities of time, had their alleviations. Trained nurses, for
example, were uncommonly well-informed and agreeable young women, when
you came to know them--and quite lady-like, too, for all that in our
topsy-turvy days these girls had to work for their living. Unthinkable
as it seemed, the colonel found that his night-nurse, a Miss Ramsay, was
actually by birth a Ramsay of Blenheim; and for a little the discovery
depressed him. But to be made much of, upon whatever terms, was always
treatment to which the colonel submitted only too docilely. And,
besides, in this queer, comfortable, just half-waking state, the
colonel found one had the drollest dreams, evolving fancies such as were
really a credit to one's imagination....
For instance, one very often imagined that Patricia was more close at
hand nowadays.... No, she was not here in the room, of course, but
outside, in the street, at the corner below, where the letterbox stood.
Yes, she was undoubtedly there, the colonel reflected drowsily. And they
had been so certain her return could only result in unhappiness, and
they were so wise, that whilst she waited for her opportunity Patricia
herself began to be a little uneasy. She had patrolled the block six
times before the chance came.
And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave, drowsily pleased by his own
inventiveness, that Patricia was glad this afternoon was so hot that no
one was abroad except the small boy at the corner house, who sat upon
the bottom porch-step, and, as children so often do, appeared intently
to appraise the world at large with an inexplicable air of
disappointment.
"Now think how Rudolph would feel,"--the colonel whimsically played at
reading Patricia's reflection--"if I were to be arrested as a suspicious
character--that's what the newspapers always call them, I think--on his
very doorstep! And he must have been home a half-hour ago at least,
because I know it's after five. But the side-gate's latched, and I can't
ring the door-bell--if only because it would be too ridiculous to have
to ask the maid to tell Colonel Musgrave his wife wanted to see him.
Besides, I don't know the new house-girl. I wish now we hadn't let old
Mary go, even though she was so undependable about thorough-cleaning."
And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave that Patricia was tired of pacing
before the row of houses, each so like the other, and compared herself
to Gulliver astray upon a Brobdingnagian bookshelf which held a "library
set" of some huge author. She had lost interest, too, in the new house
upon the other side.
"If things were different I would have to call on them. But as it is, I
am spared that bother at least," said Patricia, just as if being dead
did not change people at all.
Then a <DW52> woman, trim and frillily-capped, came out of the watched
house. She bore some eight or nine letters in one hand, and fanned
herself with them in a leisurely flat-footed progress to the mailbox at
the lower corner.
"She looks capable," was Patricia's grudging commentary, in slipping
through the doorway into the twilight of the hall. "But it isn't safe to
leave the front-door open like this. One never knows--No, I can tell by
the look of her she's the sort that can't be induced to sleep on the
lot, and takes mysterious bundles home at night."
II
And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave, now in the full flow of this droll
dream, that Patricia resentfully noted her front-hall had been "meddled
with." This much alone might Patricia observe in a swift transit to the
parlor.
She waited there until the maid returned; and registered to the woman's
credit the discreet soft closing of the front-door and afterward the
well-nigh inaudible swish of the rear door of the dining-room as the
maid went back into the kitchen.
"In any event," Patricia largely conceded, "she probably doesn't clash
the knives and forks in the pantry after supper, like she was hostile
armaments with any number of cutlasses apiece. I remember Rudolph simply
couldn't stand it when we had Ethel."
So much was satisfactory. Only--her parlor was so altered!
There was--to give you just her instantaneous first impression--so
little in it. Broad spaces of plain color showed everywhere; and
Patricia's ideal of what a parlor should be, as befitted the chatelaine
of a fine home in Lichfield, had always been the tangled elegancies of
the front show-window of a Woman's Exchange for Fancy Work. The room had
even been repapered--odiously, as she considered; and the shiny floor of
it boasted just three inefficient rugs, like dingy rafts upon a sea of
very strong coffee.
Patricia looked in vain for her grandiose plush-covered chairs, her
immaculate "tidies," and the proud yellow lambrequin, embroidered in
high relief with white gardenias, which had formerly adorned the
mantelpiece. The heart of her hungered for her unforgotten and
unforgettable "watered-silk" papering wherein white roses bloomed
exuberantly against a yellow background--which deplorably faded if you
did not keep the window-shades down, she remembered--and she wanted back
her white thick comfortable carpet which hid the floor completely, so
that everywhere you trod upon the buxomest of stalwart yellow roses,
each bunch of which was lavishly tied with wind-blown ribbons.
Then, too, her cherished spinning-wheel, at least two hundred and fifty
years old, which had looked so pretty after she had gilded it and added
a knot of pink sarsenet, was departed; and gone as well was the
mirror-topped table, with its array of china swan and frogs and
water-lilies artistically grouped about its speckless surface. Even her
prized engraving of "Michael Angelo Buonarotti"--contentedly regarding
his just finished Moses, while a pope tiptoed into the room through a
side-door--had been removed, with all its splendors of red-plush and
intricate gilt-framing.
Just here and there, in fine, like a familiar face in a crowd, she could
discover some one of her more sedately- "parlor ornaments"; and
the whole history of it--its donor or else its price, the gestures of
the shopman, even what sort of weather it was when she and Rudolph found
"exactly what I've been looking for" in the shop-window, and the
Stapyltonian, haggling over the price with which Patricia had
bargained--such unimportant details as these now vividly awakened in
recollection.... In fine, this room was not her parlor at all, and in it
Patricia was lonely.... Yes, yes, she would be nowadays, the colonel
reflected, for he himself had never been in thorough sympathy with all
the changes made by Roger's self-assured young wife.
Thus it was with the first floor of the house, through which Patricia
strayed with uniform discomfort. This place was home no longer.
Thus it was with the first floor of the house. Everywhere the equipments
were strange, or at best arranged not quite as Patricia would have
placed them. Yet they had not any look of being recently purchased. Even
that hideous stair-carpet was a little worn, she noted, as noiselessly
she mounted to the second story.
The house was perfectly quiet, save for a tiny shrill continuance of
melody that somehow seemed only to pierce the silence, not to dispel it.
Rudolph--of all things!--had in her absence acquired a canary. And
everybody knew what an interminable nuisance a canary was.
She entered the front room. It had been her bedroom ever since her
marriage. She remembered this as with a gush of defiant joy.
III
So it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave that Patricia came actually into the
room that had been hers....
A canary was singing there, very sweet and shrill and as in defiant joy.
Its trilling seemed to fill the room. In the brief pauses of his song
the old clock, from which Rudolph had removed the pendulum on the night
of Agatha's death would interpose an obstinate slow ticking; and
immediately the clock-noise would be drowned in melody. Otherwise the
room was silent.
In the alcove stood the bed which had been Patricia's. Intent upon its
occupant were three persons, with their backs turned to her. One
Patricia could easily divine to be a doctor; he was twiddling a
hypodermic syringe between his fingers, and the set of his shoulders was
that of acquiescence. Profiles of the others she saw: one a passive
nurse in uniform, who was patiently chafing the right hand of the bed's
occupant; the other a lean-featured red-haired stranger, who sat
crouched in his chair and held the dying man's left hand.
For in the bed, supported by many pillows, and facing Patricia, was a
dying man. He was very old, having thick tumbled hair which, like his
two-weeks' beard, was uniformly white. His eyelids drooped a trifle, so
that he seemed to meditate concerning something ineffably remote and
serious, yet not, upon the whole, unsatisfactory. You saw and heard the
intake of each breath, so painfully drawn, and expelled with manifest
relief, as if the man were very tired of breathing. Yet the bedclothes
heaved with his vain efforts just to keep on breathing. And sometimes
his parted lips would twitch curiously.... Rudolph Musgrave, too, could
see all this quite plainly, in the mirror over the mantel.
The doctor spoke. "Yes--it's the end, Professor Musgrave," he said. For
this lean-featured red-haired stranger to whom the doctor spoke, a
pedagogue to his finger-tips, had once been Patricia's dearly-purchased,
chubby baby Roger.
And Rudolph Musgrave stayed motionless. He knew Patricia was there; but
that fact no longer seemed either very strange or even unnatural; and
besides, it was against some law for him to look at her until Patricia
had called him.... Meanwhile, just opposite, above the mirror, and
facing him, was the Stuart portrait of young Gerald Musgrave. This
picture had now hung there for a great many years. The boy still smiled
at you in undiminished raillery, even though he smiled ambiguously, and
with a sort of humorous sadness in his eyes. Once, very long ago--when
the picture hung downstairs--some one had said that Gerald Musgrave's
life was barren. The dying man could not now recollect, quite, who that
person was.
Rudolph Musgrave stayed motionless. He comprehended that he was dying.
The greatest of all changes was at hand; and he, who had always shrunk
from making changes, was now content enough.... Indeed, with Rudolph
Musgrave living had always been a vaguely dissatisfactory business, a
hand-to-mouth proceeding which he had scrambled through, as he saw now,
without any worthy aim or even any intelligible purpose. He had nothing
very heinous with which to reproach himself; but upon the other side, he
had most certainly nothing of which to be particularly proud.
So this was all that living came to! You heard of other people being
rapt by splendid sins and splendid virtues, and you anticipated that
to-morrow some such majestic energy would transfigure your own living,
and change everything: but the great adventure never arrived, somehow;
and the days were frittered away piecemeal, what with eating your
dinner, and taking a wholesome walk, and checking up your bank account,
and dovetailing scraps of parish registers and land-patents and county
records into an irrefutable pedigree, and seeing that your clothes were
pressed, and looking over the newspapers--and what with other
infinitesimal avocations, each one innocent, none of any particular
importance, and each consuming an irrevocable moment of the allotted
time--until at last you found that living had not, necessarily, any
climax at all.... And Patricia would call him presently.
Once, very long ago, some one had said that the most pathetic tragedy in
life was to get nothing in particular out of it. The dying man could not
now recollect, quite, who that person was.
He wondered, vaguely, what might have been the outcome if Rudolph
Musgrave had whole-heartedly sought, not waited for, the great
adventure; if Rudolph Musgrave had put--however irrationally--more
energy and less second-thought into living; if Rudolph Musgrave had not
been contented to be just a Musgrave of Matocton.... Well, it was too
late now. He viewed his whole life now, in epitome, and much as you may
see at night the hackneyed vista from your window leap to incisiveness
under the lash of lightning. No, the life of Rudolph Musgrave had never
risen to the plane of dignity, not even to that of seeming to Rudolph
Musgrave a connected and really important transaction on Rudolph
Musgrave's part. Yet Lichfield, none the better for Rudolph Musgrave's
having lived, was none the worse, thank heaven! And there were younger
men in Lichfield--men who did not mean to fail as Rudolph Musgrave and
his fellows all had failed.... Eh, yes, what was the toast that Rudolph
Musgrave drank, so long ago, to the new Lichfield which these younger
men were making?
"To this new South, that has not any longer need of me or of my kind.
"To this new South! She does not gaze unwillingly, nor too complacently,
upon old years, and dares concede that but with loss of manliness may
any man encroach upon the heritage of a dog or of a trotting-horse, and
consider the exploits of an ancestor to guarantee an innate and personal
excellence.
"For to her all former glory is less a jewel than a touchstone, and with
her portion of it daily she appraises her own doing, and without vain
speech. And her high past she values now, in chief, as fit foundation of
that edifice whereon she labors day by day, and with augmenting
strokes."
Yes, that was it. And it was true. Yet Rudolph Musgrave's life on earth
was ending now--the only life that he would ever have on earth--and it
had never risen to the plane of seeming even to Rudolph Musgrave a
really important transaction on Rudolph Musgrave's part....
Then Patricia spoke. Low and very low she called to Olaf, and the dim,
wistful eyes of Rudolph Musgrave lifted, and gazed full upon her
standing there, and were no longer wistful. And the man made as though
to rise, and could not, and his face was very glad.
For in the dying man had awakened the pulses of an old, strange,
half-forgotten magic, and all his old delight in the girl who had shared
in and had provoked this ancient wonder-working, together with a quite
new consciousness of the inseparability of Patricia's foibles from his
existence; so that he was incuriously aware of his imbecility in not
having known always that Patricia must come back some day, not as a
glorious, unfamiliar angel, but unaltered.
"I am glad you haven't changed.... Why, but of course! Nothing would
have counted if you had changed--not even for the better, Patricia. For
you and what you meant to me were real. That only was real--that we, not
being demigods, but being just what we were, once climbed together very
high, where we could glimpse the stars--and nothing else can ever be of
any importance. What we inherited was too much for us, was it not, my
dear? And now it is not formidable any longer. Oh, but I loved you very
greatly, Patricia! And now at last, my dear, I seem to understand--as in
that old, old time when you and I were glad together----"
But he did not say this aloud, for it seemed to him that he stood in a
cool, pleasant garden, and that Patricia came toward him through the
long shadows of sunset. The lacy folds and furbelows and
semi-transparencies that clothed her were now tinged with gold and now,
as a hedge or a flower bed screened her from the level rays, were
softened into multitudinous graduations of grays and mauves and violets.
They did not speak. But in her eyes he found compassion and such
tenderness as awed him; and then, as a light is puffed out, they were
the eyes of a friendly stranger. He understood, for an instant, that of
necessity it was decreed time must turn back and everything, even
Rudolph Musgrave, be just as it had been when he first saw Patricia. For
they had made nothing of their lives; and so, they must begin all over
again.
"_Failure is not permitted_" he was saying....
"_You're Cousin Rudolph, aren't you?_" she asked....
And Rudolph Musgrave knew he had forgotten something of vast import, but
what this knowledge had pertained to he no longer knew. Then Rudolph
Musgrave noted, with a delicious tingling somewhere about his heart,
that her hair was like the reflection of a sunset in rippling
waters--only many times more beautiful, of course--and that her mouth
was an inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and that her
eyes were purple glimpses of infinity.
THE END
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck
by James Branch Cabell
***
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook"
}
| 7,881
|
package adept.kbapi.unittests;
import com.hp.hpl.jena.rdf.model.Model;
import com.hp.hpl.jena.rdf.model.ModelFactory;
import com.hp.hpl.jena.rdf.model.NodeIterator;
import com.hp.hpl.jena.rdf.model.RDFNode;
import com.hp.hpl.jena.update.GraphStoreFactory;
import org.junit.After;
import org.junit.Assert;
import org.junit.Before;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Paths;
import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.PreparedStatement;
import java.sql.ResultSet;
import java.sql.SQLException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.InvalidPropertiesFormatException;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Random;
import adept.common.ChannelName;
import adept.common.CharOffset;
import adept.common.Chunk;
import adept.common.ContentType;
import adept.common.Document;
import adept.common.DocumentEvent;
import adept.common.DocumentEventArgument;
import adept.common.DocumentRelation;
import adept.common.DocumentRelationArgument;
import adept.common.Entity;
import adept.common.EntityMention;
import adept.common.EventMention;
import adept.common.EventMentionArgument;
import adept.common.EventText;
import adept.common.HltContentContainer;
import adept.common.Item;
import adept.common.OntType;
import adept.common.Pair;
import adept.common.RelationMention;
import adept.common.Token;
import adept.common.TokenOffset;
import adept.common.TokenStream;
import adept.common.TokenizerType;
import adept.common.TranscriptType;
import adept.common.Type;
import adept.io.Reader;
import adept.kbapi.KB;
import adept.kbapi.KBBelief;
import adept.kbapi.KBDate;
import adept.kbapi.KBEntity;
import adept.kbapi.KBEntityMentionProvenance;
import adept.kbapi.KBEvent;
import adept.kbapi.KBGenericThing;
import adept.kbapi.KBNumber;
import adept.kbapi.KBOntologyMap;
import adept.kbapi.KBOntologyModel;
import adept.kbapi.KBParameters;
import adept.kbapi.KBPredicateArgument;
import adept.kbapi.KBProvenance;
import adept.kbapi.KBQueryException;
import adept.kbapi.KBRelation;
import adept.kbapi.KBRelationArgument;
import adept.kbapi.KBSentiment;
import adept.kbapi.KBTemporalSpan;
import adept.kbapi.KBTextProvenance;
import adept.kbapi.KBUpdateException;
import adept.kbapi.sql.QuickJDBC;
import adept.kbapi.sql.SqlQueryBuilder;
import adept.metadata.SourceAlgorithm;
import adept.utilities.DocumentMaker;
import static org.junit.Assert.assertEquals;
import static org.junit.Assert.assertNotNull;
public abstract class KBUnitTest {
private final Random rand = new Random();
private String schemaName;
private QuickJDBC quickJDBC;
private Connection sqlConnection;
private LocalSPARQLService sparqlService;
protected KBParameters unitTestKBParameters;
protected TokenStream testTokenStream;
protected TokenOffset testTokenOffset;
protected KB kb;
private static final String packagePath = new Object() {
}.getClass().getPackage().getName().replace(".", "/");
private static final String kbUnitTestingParamsFile = packagePath + "/KBUnitTestParameters.xml";
private static final String sqlSchemaFile = "/adept/utilities/DEFT KB create schema.txt";
protected final String defaultEntityType = "org";
protected final String defaultEntityMentionType = "NAME";
protected final float defaultEntityConfidence = 0.8f;
protected final float defaultEntityMentionConfidence = 0.9f;
protected final float defaultEntityCanonicalMentionConfidence = 0.63f;
protected final List<Pair<String, Double>> defaultEntityTypesWithConfidences;
protected final String defaultRelationType = "per:cities_of_residence";
protected final float defaultRelationConfidence = 0.9f;
protected final float defaultRelationMentionConfidence = 0.9f;
private int provenanceNumber = 1;
public KBUnitTest() {
defaultEntityTypesWithConfidences = new ArrayList<Pair<String, Double>>();
defaultEntityTypesWithConfidences.add(new Pair<String, Double>("per", 0.22));
defaultEntityTypesWithConfidences.add(new Pair<String, Double>("loc", 0.33));
}
@Before
public void setUp() {
initializeDataStores();
initializeTest();
}
@After
public void tearDown() {
try {
kb.close();
} catch (KBUpdateException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
deconstructDataStores();
}
protected void initializeDataStores() {
try {
schemaName = "unittest" + rand.nextInt(Integer.MAX_VALUE);
Model model = ModelFactory.createRDFSModel(ModelFactory.createDefaultModel());
model.read(getClass().getResourceAsStream("/adept/ontology/adept-base.ttl"), "", "TTL");
model.read(getClass().getResourceAsStream("/adept/ontology/adept-core.ttl"), "", "TTL");
sparqlService = new LocalSPARQLService(GraphStoreFactory.create(model));
unitTestKBParameters = new KBParameters(kbUnitTestingParamsFile);
quickJDBC = new QuickJDBC(unitTestKBParameters);
sqlConnection = quickJDBC.getConnection();
sqlConnection.setAutoCommit(true);
createUnitTestSqlSchema(schemaName);
sqlConnection.setAutoCommit(false);
// Build schema
String schema = new String(Files.readAllBytes(Paths.get(getClass().getResource(
sqlSchemaFile).toURI())));
PreparedStatement createSchema = sqlConnection.prepareStatement(schema);
createSchema.executeUpdate();
createSchema.close();
sqlConnection.commit();
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
Assert.fail("Unable to initialize data stores for unit tests. " + ex.getMessage());
}
}
protected void deconstructDataStores() {
try {
dropUnitTestSqlSchema(schemaName);
sqlConnection.close();
quickJDBC.close();
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
Assert.fail("Unable to deconstruct data stores for unit tests. " + ex.getMessage());
}
}
protected void initializeTest() {
try {
kb = new KB(unitTestKBParameters, schemaName, sparqlService);
HltContentContainer hltContentContainer = new HltContentContainer();
Document document = DocumentMaker.getInstance().createDocument("sample.txt",
null, "Text", "sample_entity_1.txt", "English",
Reader.getAbsolutePathFromClasspathOrFileSystem("adept/kbapi/sample.txt"),
hltContentContainer);
CharOffset testCharOff = new CharOffset(0, 16);
String testText = "BBN Technologies";
Token testToken = new Token(0, testCharOff, testText);
testTokenStream = new TokenStream(TokenizerType.WHITESPACE, TranscriptType.SOURCE,
"English", ChannelName.NONE, ContentType.TEXT, document);
testTokenOffset = new TokenOffset(0, 0);
testTokenStream.add(testToken);
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
Assert.fail("Unable to initialize test. " + ex.getMessage());
}
}
protected KBEntity insertDefaultTestEntity() throws KBUpdateException,
InvalidPropertiesFormatException, FileNotFoundException, IOException {
if (kb != null) {
Pair<Entity, List<EntityMention>> entityWithMentions = createTestEntityWithMentions(
defaultEntityType, defaultEntityConfidence, defaultEntityMentionType,
defaultEntityMentionConfidence, defaultEntityCanonicalMentionConfidence,
defaultEntityTypesWithConfidences);
KBEntity.InsertionBuilder insertionBuilder = KBEntity.entityInsertionBuilder(
entityWithMentions.getL(), entityWithMentions.getR(),
KBOntologyMap.getTACOntologyMap());
return insertionBuilder.insert(kb);
}
return null;
}
protected Chunk createTestChunk() {
try {
HltContentContainer hltContentContainer = new HltContentContainer();
Document document = DocumentMaker.getInstance().createDocument("sample.txt",
null, "Text", "sample_entity_1.txt", "English",
Reader.getAbsolutePathFromClasspathOrFileSystem("adept/kbapi/sample.txt"),
hltContentContainer);
CharOffset testCharOff = new CharOffset(0, 16);
String testText = "BBN Technologies";
Token testToken = new Token(0, testCharOff, testText);
TokenStream tokenStream = new TokenStream(TokenizerType.WHITESPACE,
TranscriptType.SOURCE, "English", ChannelName.NONE, ContentType.TEXT, document);
TokenOffset tokenOffset = new TokenOffset(0, 0);
tokenStream.add(testToken);
return new Chunk(tokenOffset, tokenStream);
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
Assert.fail("Unable to create test chunk. " + ex.getMessage());
}
return null;
}
protected String getChunkIDByProvenance(KBProvenance provenance) {
try {
PreparedStatement preparedStatement = SqlQueryBuilder.createGetChunkIDByProvenance(provenance, sqlConnection);
ResultSet result = preparedStatement.executeQuery();
if (result.next()) {
return result.getString("chunk");
} else {
throw new Exception("Provenance KBID not found");
}
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
Assert.fail("Unable to get Chunk for Provenance " + provenance.getKBID().getObjectID() + ": " + ex.getMessage());
}
return null;
}
protected List<String> getOrphanChunkIDs() {
List<String> orphanChunks = new ArrayList<String>();
try {
PreparedStatement preparedStatement = SqlQueryBuilder.createGetOrphanTextChunksQuery(sqlConnection);
ResultSet result = preparedStatement.executeQuery();
while (result.next()) {
orphanChunks.add(result.getString("ID"));
}
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
Assert.fail("Unable to get orphan Chunks: " + ex.getMessage());
}
return orphanChunks;
}
protected Pair<Entity, List<EntityMention>> createTestEntityWithMentions(String entityType,
float entityConfidence, String entityMentionType, float entityMentionConfidence,
float entityCanonicalMentionConfidence,
List<Pair<String, Double>> entityTypesWithConfidences) {
try {
// create entity
Entity entity = new Entity(1, new Type(entityType));
// create mention
List<EntityMention> mentions = new ArrayList<EntityMention>();
EntityMention mention = new EntityMention(0, testTokenOffset, testTokenStream);
mention.addEntityConfidencePair(entity.getEntityId(), entityMentionConfidence);
mention.setMentionType(new Type(entityMentionType));
mention.setSourceAlgorithm(new SourceAlgorithm("Example", "BBN"));
mention.setEntityType(new Type(entityType));
mentions.add(mention);
// create a second mention
EntityMention otherMention = new EntityMention(0, testTokenOffset, testTokenStream);
otherMention.addEntityConfidencePair(entity.getEntityId(), 0.3f);
otherMention.setMentionType(new Type(entityMentionType));
otherMention.setSourceAlgorithm(new SourceAlgorithm("Example2", "BBN"));
otherMention.setEntityType(new Type(entityType));
mentions.add(otherMention);
// set canonical mention
entity.setCanonicalMentions(mention);
entity.setEntityConfidence(entityConfidence);
entity.setCanonicalMentionConfidence(entityCanonicalMentionConfidence);
for (Pair<String, Double> entityTypeWithConfidence : entityTypesWithConfidences) {
entity.addType(new Type(entityTypeWithConfidence.getL()),
entityTypeWithConfidence.getR());
}
return new Pair<Entity, List<EntityMention>>(entity, mentions);
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
Assert.fail("Unable to create entity object. " + ex.getMessage());
}
return null;
}
protected KBRelation insertDefaultTestRelation(KBEntity kbEntity1, KBEntity kbEntity2)
throws KBUpdateException, InvalidPropertiesFormatException, FileNotFoundException,
IOException {
if (kb != null) {
Pair<DocumentRelation, HashMap<Item, KBPredicateArgument>> relationWithEntityMap = createTestRelationWithEntityMap(
kbEntity1, kbEntity2, defaultRelationType, defaultRelationConfidence,
defaultRelationMentionConfidence);
KBRelation.InsertionBuilder insertionBuilder = KBRelation.relationInsertionBuilder(
relationWithEntityMap.getL(), relationWithEntityMap.getR(),
KBOntologyMap.getTACOntologyMap());
return insertionBuilder.insert(kb);
}
return null;
}
protected Pair<DocumentEvent, HashMap<Item, KBPredicateArgument>> createTestEventWithEntityMap(
KBEntity kbEntity1, KBEntity kbEntity2, String eventTypeString, float eventConfidence,
float eventMentionConfidence) {
// entity and entity mention creation
Entity locationentity = new Entity(1, new Type("loc"));
Entity personentity = new Entity(2, new Type("per"));
Type eventType = new Type(eventTypeString);
Type personRole = new Type("person");
Type locationRole = new Type("place");
// create mention
EntityMention locationmention = new EntityMention(0, testTokenOffset, testTokenStream);
locationmention.addEntityConfidencePair(locationentity.getEntityId(), 0.9f);
locationmention.setMentionType(new Type("NAME"));
locationmention.setSourceAlgorithm(new SourceAlgorithm("Example", "BBN"));
EntityMention personmention = new EntityMention(1, testTokenOffset, testTokenStream);
personmention.addEntityConfidencePair(personentity.getEntityId(), 0.9f);
personmention.setMentionType(new Type("NAME"));
personmention.setSourceAlgorithm(new SourceAlgorithm("Example", "BBN"));
// TimePhrase timePhrase = new TimePhrase(testTokenOffset,
// testTokenStream, null);
// set canonical mention and confidences on entities
locationentity.setCanonicalMentions(locationmention);
locationentity.setEntityConfidence(0.8f);
locationentity.setCanonicalMentionConfidence(0.63);
personentity.setCanonicalMentions(personmention);
personentity.setEntityConfidence(0.87);
personentity.setCanonicalMentionConfidence(0.1);
// create relation mention
EventMention.Builder eventMentionBuilder = EventMention.builder(eventType);
Chunk mentionTextChunk = new Chunk(testTokenOffset, testTokenStream);
eventMentionBuilder.setScore(eventMentionConfidence);
eventMentionBuilder.setProvenance(EventText.builder(eventType, mentionTextChunk)
.setScore(.23f).build());
EventMentionArgument mentionArg1 = EventMentionArgument
.builder(eventType, personRole, new Chunk(testTokenOffset, testTokenStream))
.setScore(.32f).build();
eventMentionBuilder.addArgument(mentionArg1);
EventMentionArgument mentionArg2 = EventMentionArgument
.builder(eventType, locationRole, new Chunk(testTokenOffset, testTokenStream))
.setScore(.30f).build();
eventMentionBuilder.addArgument(mentionArg2);
EventMention eventMention = eventMentionBuilder.build();
// create document relation
DocumentEvent.Builder documentEventBuilder = DocumentEvent.builder(eventType);
documentEventBuilder.addProvenanceFromEventMention(eventMention);
documentEventBuilder.setScore(eventConfidence);
DocumentEventArgument.Builder arg1Builder = DocumentEventArgument.builder(eventType,
personRole, DocumentEventArgument.Filler.fromEntity(personentity)).setScore(0.51f);
arg1Builder.addProvenance(DocumentEventArgument.Provenance.fromArgumentOfEventMention(
eventMention, mentionArg1));
documentEventBuilder.addArgument(arg1Builder.build());
DocumentEventArgument.Builder arg2Builder = DocumentEventArgument.builder(eventType,
locationRole, DocumentEventArgument.Filler.fromEntity(locationentity)).setScore(
0.52f);
arg2Builder.addProvenance(DocumentEventArgument.Provenance.fromArgumentOfEventMention(
eventMention, mentionArg2));
documentEventBuilder.addArgument(arg2Builder.build());
documentEventBuilder.addAttribute(new Type("GENERIC"), .2f);
// map from document entities to Adept KB entities
HashMap<Item, KBPredicateArgument> entityMap = new HashMap<Item, KBPredicateArgument>();
entityMap.put(personentity, kbEntity1);
entityMap.put(locationentity, kbEntity2);
DocumentEvent documentEvent = documentEventBuilder.build();
return new Pair<DocumentEvent, HashMap<Item, KBPredicateArgument>>(documentEvent, entityMap);
}
protected Pair<DocumentRelation, HashMap<Item, KBPredicateArgument>> createTestRelationWithEntityMap(
KBEntity kbEntity1, KBEntity kbEntity2, String relationType, float relationConfidence,
float relationMentionConfidence) {
// entity and entity mention creation
Entity locationentity = new Entity(1, new Type("Location"));
Entity personentity = new Entity(2, new Type("Person"));
// create mention
EntityMention locationmention = new EntityMention(0, testTokenOffset, testTokenStream);
locationmention.addEntityConfidencePair(locationentity.getEntityId(), 0.9f);
locationmention.setMentionType(new Type("NAME"));
locationmention.setSourceAlgorithm(new SourceAlgorithm("Example", "BBN"));
EntityMention personmention = new EntityMention(1, testTokenOffset, testTokenStream);
personmention.addEntityConfidencePair(personentity.getEntityId(), 0.9f);
personmention.setMentionType(new Type("NAME"));
personmention.setSourceAlgorithm(new SourceAlgorithm("Example", "BBN"));
// set canonical mention and confidences on entities
locationentity.setCanonicalMentions(locationmention);
locationentity.setEntityConfidence(0.8f);
locationentity.setCanonicalMentionConfidence(0.63);
personentity.setCanonicalMentions(personmention);
personentity.setEntityConfidence(0.87);
personentity.setCanonicalMentionConfidence(0.1);
// create relation mention
RelationMention.Builder relationMentionBuilder = RelationMention.builder(new Type(
relationType));
relationMentionBuilder.setConfidence(relationMentionConfidence);
relationMentionBuilder.addJustification(new Chunk(testTokenOffset, testTokenStream));
RelationMention.Filler argFiller1 = RelationMention.Filler.fromEntityMention(personmention,
new Type("arg-1"), 0.51f);
relationMentionBuilder.addArgument(argFiller1);
RelationMention.Filler argFiller2 = RelationMention.Filler.fromEntityMention(
locationmention, new Type("arg-2"), 0.52f);
relationMentionBuilder.addArgument(argFiller2);
List<RelationMention> provenances = new ArrayList<RelationMention>();
provenances.add(relationMentionBuilder.build());
// create document relation
DocumentRelation.Builder documentRelationBuilder = DocumentRelation.builder(new Type(
relationType));
documentRelationBuilder.addProvenances(provenances);
documentRelationBuilder.setConfidence(relationConfidence);
DocumentRelationArgument.Builder arg1Builder = DocumentRelationArgument.builder(new Type(
"arg-1"), DocumentRelationArgument.Filler.fromEntity(personentity), 0.51f);
arg1Builder.addProvenance(argFiller1);
documentRelationBuilder.addArgument(arg1Builder.build());
DocumentRelationArgument.Builder arg2Builder = DocumentRelationArgument.builder(new Type(
"arg-2"), DocumentRelationArgument.Filler.fromEntity(locationentity), 0.52f);
arg2Builder.addProvenance(argFiller2);
documentRelationBuilder.addArgument(arg2Builder.build());
// map from document entities to Adept KB entities
HashMap<Item, KBPredicateArgument> entityMap = new HashMap<Item, KBPredicateArgument>();
entityMap.put(personentity, kbEntity1);
entityMap.put(locationentity, kbEntity2);
DocumentRelation documentRelation = documentRelationBuilder.build();
return new Pair<DocumentRelation, HashMap<Item, KBPredicateArgument>>(documentRelation,
entityMap);
}
private void createUnitTestSqlSchema(String schemaName) {
try {
PreparedStatement createSchemaPreparedStmt = sqlConnection
.prepareStatement("CREATE SCHEMA " + schemaName);
createSchemaPreparedStmt.executeUpdate();
createSchemaPreparedStmt.close();
PreparedStatement setSearchPathPreparedStmt = sqlConnection
.prepareStatement("SET search_path TO " + schemaName);
setSearchPathPreparedStmt.executeUpdate();
setSearchPathPreparedStmt.close();
} catch (SQLException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
Assert.fail("Unable to create unit test sql schema. " + ex.getMessage());
}
}
protected void checkObjectConfidence(KBPredicateArgument object, float confidence) {
Model model = sparqlService.getDefaultGraph();
String objectURI = object.getKBID().getKBNamespace() + object.getKBID().getObjectID();
NodeIterator confidences = model.listObjectsOfProperty(model.createResource(objectURI),
model.createProperty(KBOntologyModel.ONTOLOGY_BASE_PREFIX + "confidence"));
Assert.assertTrue("No confidence present for KBID: " + objectURI, confidences.hasNext());
RDFNode node = confidences.next();
Assert.assertTrue("Confidence in graph is not a literal", node.isLiteral());
Assert.assertEquals("Confidence did not match expected confidence", confidence, node
.asLiteral().getFloat(), 0.0001f);
Assert.assertFalse("More than one confidence was present for KBID: " + objectURI,
confidences.hasNext());
}
/**
* Query the given {@code KBPredicateArgument} from the KB by its KBID.
* Then, verify equality and equal hashCode()s for the given and queried
* objects using {@code Assert.assertEquals()}.
*
* @param kbpa
*/
public void assertEqualsAndHashCodeByQueryByKBID(KBPredicateArgument kbpa)
throws KBQueryException {
assertNotNull("Given KB object is null.", kbpa);
Class<?> kbpaClass = kbpa.getClass();
KBPredicateArgument queriedKbpa;
if (kbpaClass == KBDate.class) {
queriedKbpa = kb.getKBDateByDateId(kbpa.getKBID());
} else if (kbpaClass == KBEntity.class) {
queriedKbpa = kb.getEntityById(kbpa.getKBID());
} else if (kbpaClass == KBGenericThing.class) {
queriedKbpa = kb.getGenericThingByID(kbpa.getKBID());
} else if (kbpaClass == KBNumber.class) {
queriedKbpa = kb.getNumberValueByID(kbpa.getKBID());
} else if (kbpaClass == KBRelation.class) {
queriedKbpa = kb.getRelationById(kbpa.getKBID());
} else if (kbpaClass == KBTemporalSpan.class) {
queriedKbpa = kb.getTemporalSpanByID(kbpa.getKBID());
} else if (kbpaClass == KBBelief.class) {
queriedKbpa = kb.getBeliefById(kbpa.getKBID());
} else if (kbpaClass == KBEvent.class) {
queriedKbpa = kb.getEventById(kbpa.getKBID());
} else if (kbpaClass == KBSentiment.class) {
queriedKbpa = kb.getSentimentById(kbpa.getKBID());
} else {
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Unrecognized KBPredicateArgument subclass "
+ kbpaClass.getSimpleName() + ".");
}
assertEquals(String.format("Queried %s is not equal to inserted %s",
kbpaClass.getSimpleName(), kbpaClass.getSimpleName()), kbpa, queriedKbpa);
assertEquals(String.format(
"Queried %s's hashCode() is not equal to inserted %s's hashCode()",
kbpaClass.getSimpleName(), kbpaClass.getSimpleName()), kbpa.hashCode(),
queriedKbpa.hashCode());
}
private void dropUnitTestSqlSchema(String schemaName) {
try {
sqlConnection.setAutoCommit(true);
PreparedStatement dropSchemaPreparedStmt = sqlConnection
.prepareStatement("DROP SCHEMA " + schemaName + " CASCADE");
dropSchemaPreparedStmt.setQueryTimeout(30);
dropSchemaPreparedStmt.executeUpdate();
dropSchemaPreparedStmt.close();
sqlConnection.setAutoCommit(false);
} catch (SQLException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
Assert.fail("Unable to drop unit test sql schema \"" + schemaName
+ "\", this will have to be manually dropped. " + ex.getMessage());
}
}
/**
* @param relation
* @param ontType
* @return
*/
protected KBRelationArgument getArgumentByRole(KBRelation relation, OntType ontType) {
for (KBRelationArgument argument : relation.getArguments()) {
if (argument.getRole().equals(ontType)) {
return argument;
}
}
return null;
}
protected KBTextProvenance.InsertionBuilder generateProvenance(String value) {
return generateProvenance(value, provenanceNumber++);
}
protected KBEntityMentionProvenance.InsertionBuilder generateProvenance(String value, String
entityMentionType) {
return generateProvenance(value, provenanceNumber++,entityMentionType);
}
protected static KBTextProvenance.InsertionBuilder generateProvenance(String value, int
index) {
KBTextProvenance.InsertionBuilder builder = KBTextProvenance.builder();
builder.setBeginOffset(0);
builder.setEndOffset(1);
builder.setConfidence(.5f);
builder.setContributingSiteName("Contributing Site " + index);
builder.setCorpusID("CorpusID" + index);
builder.setCorpusName("Corpus" + index);
builder.setCorpusType("CorpusType" + index);
builder.setCorpusURI("CorpusURI" + index);
builder.setDocumentID("DocumentID" + index);
builder.setDocumentPublicationDate("2015-11-18");
builder.setDocumentURI("DocumentURI" + index);
builder.setSourceAlgorithmName("SourceAlgorithM" + index);
builder.setSourceLanguage("SourceLanguage" + index);
builder.setValue(value);
return builder;
}
protected static KBEntityMentionProvenance.InsertionBuilder generateProvenance(String value, int
index, String entityMentionType) {
KBTextProvenance.InsertionBuilder builder = generateProvenance(value,index);
KBEntityMentionProvenance.InsertionBuilder entityMentionBuilder =
new KBEntityMentionProvenance.InsertionBuilder(builder);
entityMentionBuilder.setType(entityMentionType);
return entityMentionBuilder;
}
}
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 251
|
Pictures Of French Doors Best Products » Use functional household furniture when decorating a smaller scaled space. An ottoman is an excellent choice. You can use it for chairs or possibly a desk, and you may even shop things inside, if it starts. Items which have multiple functions are successful space savers for the smaller sized area. This particular image (Pictures Of French Doors » Comfy French Doors) above is labelled using pictures of andersen french doors,pictures of bedroom french doors,pictures of window treatments for french doors, Tap into your Pictures Of French Doorsimaginative area when you are redesigning your kitchen. Granite is always a favorite choice, but hardwood, cork along with other supplies operate excellent. Some other choices are more affordable, and may help make your home special Pictures Of French Doors from others.
We hope you can find what you need here. We always effort to show a picture with HD resolution or at least with perfect images. Pictures Of French Doors » Comfy French Doors can be beneficial inspiration for those who seek an image according specific categories; you can find it in this site. Finally all pictures we have been displayed in this site will inspire you all..
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
}
| 8,147
|
Learning everything about anything: Webly-supervised visual concept learning. (2014)
by S K Divvala, A Farhadi, C Guestrin
Venue: In CVPR,
From Captions to Visual Concepts and Back
by Hao Fang, Li Deng, Jianfeng Gao, Xiaodong He, Margaret Mitchell, John C. Platt, C. Lawrence Zitnick , Geoffrey Zweig, et al. , 2014
"... This paper presents a novel approach for automatically generating image descriptions: visual detectors and language models learn directly from a dataset of image captions. We use Multiple Instance Learning to train visual detectors for words that commonly occur in captions, including many different ..."
This paper presents a novel approach for automatically generating image descriptions: visual detectors and language models learn directly from a dataset of image captions. We use Multiple Instance Learning to train visual detectors for words that commonly occur in captions, including many different parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The word detector outputs serve as conditional inputs to a maximum-entropy language model. The language model learns from a set of over 400,000 image descriptions to capture the statistics of word usage. We capture global semantics by re-ranking caption candidates using sentence-level features and a deep multimodal similarity model. When human judges compare the system captions to ones written by other people, the system captions have equal or better quality over 23 % of the time.
Relaxing from vocabulary: Robust weakly-supervised deep learning for vocabulary-free image tagging.
by Jianlong Fu , Yue Wu , Tao Mei , Jinqiao Wang , Hanqing Lu , Yong Rui , 2015
"... Abstract The development of deep learning has empowered machines with comparable capability of recognizing limited image categories to human beings. However, most existing approaches heavily rely on human-curated training data, which hinders the scalability to large and unlabeled vocabularies in im ..."
Abstract The development of deep learning has empowered machines with comparable capability of recognizing limited image categories to human beings. However, most existing approaches heavily rely on human-curated training data, which hinders the scalability to large and unlabeled vocabularies in image tagging. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised deep learning model which can be trained from the readily available Web images to relax the dependence on human labors and scale up to arbitrary tags (categories). Specifically, based on the assumption that features of true samples in a category tend to be similar and noises tend to be variant, we embed the feature map of the last deep layer into a new affinity representation, and further minimize the discrepancy between the affinity representation and its low-rank approximation. The discrepancy is finally transformed into the objective function to give relevance feedback to back propagation. Experiments show that we can achieve a performance gain of 14.0% in terms of a semantic-based relevance metric in image tagging with 63,043 tags from the WordNet, against the typical deep model trained on the ImageNet 1,000 vocabulary set.
...[6] (about 22,000 categories and 14.2 million images). Despite of its wide adoption in research communities, ImageNet is still a small subset of the nouns in WordNet2. There are huge numbers of categories left unlabeled, making the existing deep learning models hard to scale up. Therefore, how to scale deep learning approaches to large and arbitrary categories without enormous human-cost appears to be a challenging yet urgent problem. With the success of commercial image search engines, learning from the Web has demonstrated one of the most effective solutions to collect massive training data [4, 9, 22]. 1https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome 2http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ Despite of the convenience using Web images to train models, the performance degradation is inevitable due to the noises in Web image search results. A conventional deep learning network is sensitive to noisy training images, as it tries to fit all the training data without distinguishing the authenticity of their labels. According to our experiments, when 30% of the training images are mislabeled, the accuracy of a conventional deep network drops at least 20% in CIFAR-10 dataset. Therefore, designing a noise-robust deep net...
Data-Driven 3D Voxel Patterns for Object Category Recognition
by Yu Xiang, Wongun Choi, Yuanqing Lin, Silvio Savarese
"... Despite the great progress achieved in recognizing ob-jects as 2D bounding boxes in images, it is still very chal-lenging to detect occluded objects and estimate the 3D properties of multiple objects from a single image. In this paper, we propose a novel object representation, 3D Voxel Pattern (3DVP ..."
Despite the great progress achieved in recognizing ob-jects as 2D bounding boxes in images, it is still very chal-lenging to detect occluded objects and estimate the 3D properties of multiple objects from a single image. In this paper, we propose a novel object representation, 3D Voxel Pattern (3DVP), that jointly encodes the key properties of objects including appearance, 3D shape, viewpoint, occlu-sion and truncation. We discover 3DVPs in a data-driven way, and train a bank of specialized detectors for a dictio-nary of 3DVPs. The 3DVP detectors are capable of detect-ing objects with specific visibility patterns and transferring the meta-data from the 3DVPs to the detected objects, such as 2D segmentation mask, 3D pose as well as occlusion or truncation boundaries. The transferred meta-data allows us to infer the occlusion relationship among objects, which in turn provides improved object recognition results. Ex-periments are conducted on the KITTI detection benchmark [17] and the outdoor-scene dataset [41]. We improve state-of-the-art results on car detection and pose estimation with notable margins (6 % in difficult data of KITTI). We also verify the ability of our method in accurately segmenting objects from the background and localizing them in 3D. 1.
...es a specific shared "signature" of the three properties listed above (appearance, 3D shape and occlusions). Examples of 3DVPs in the dictionary are shown in Fig. 6. Inspired by a recent body of work =-=[6, 4, 7, 27]-=- that proposes to learn object detectors using clusters of 2D images that share similar appearance properties, in our recognition pipeline we train a bank of detectors using our dictionary of 3DVPs wh...
Don't just listen, use your imagination: Leveraging visual common sense for non-visual tasks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.06108
by Xiao Lin, Devi Parikh , 2015
"... Artificial agents today can answer factual questions. But they fall short on questions that require common sense rea-soning. Perhaps this is because most existing common sense databases rely on text to learn and represent knowledge. But much of common sense knowledge is unwritten – partly because it ..."
Artificial agents today can answer factual questions. But they fall short on questions that require common sense rea-soning. Perhaps this is because most existing common sense databases rely on text to learn and represent knowledge. But much of common sense knowledge is unwritten – partly because it tends not to be interesting enough to talk about, and partly because some common sense is unnatural to ar-ticulate in text. While unwritten, it is not unseen. In this pa-per we leverage semantic common sense knowledge learned from images – i.e. visual common sense – in two textual tasks: fill-in-the-blank and visual paraphrasing. We pro-pose to "imagine " the scene behind the text, and leverage visual cues from the "imagined " scenes in addition to tex-tual cues while answering these questions. We imagine the scenes as a visual abstraction. Our approach outperforms a strong text-only baseline on these tasks. Our proposed tasks can serve as benchmarks to quantitatively evaluate progress in solving tasks that go "beyond recognition". Our code and datasets are publicly available. 1.
...ld. We call such common sense knowledge that can be learnt from visual data visual common sense. By visual common sense we do not mean visual models of commonly occurring interactions between objects =-=[11]-=- or knowledge of visual relationships between objects, parts and attributes [9, 50]. We mean semantic common sense, e.g. the knowledge that if one person is running after another person, and the secon...
Best of both worlds: human-machine collaboration for object annotation
by Olga Russakovsky, Li-jia Li, Li Fei-fei - In CVPR , 2015
"... The long-standing goal of localizing every object in an image remains elusive. Manually annotating objects is quite expensive despite crowd engineering innovations. Current state-of-the-art automatic object detectors can ac-curately detect at most a few objects per image. This pa-per brings together ..."
The long-standing goal of localizing every object in an image remains elusive. Manually annotating objects is quite expensive despite crowd engineering innovations. Current state-of-the-art automatic object detectors can ac-curately detect at most a few objects per image. This pa-per brings together the latest advancements in object detec-tion and in crowd engineering into a principled framework for accurately and efficiently localizing objects in images. The input to the system is an image to annotate and a set of annotation constraints: desired precision, utility and/or human cost of the labeling. The output is a set of object annotations, informed by human feedback and computer vi-sion. Our model seamlessly integrates multiple computer vision models with multiple sources of human input in a Markov Decision Process. We empirically validate the ef-fectiveness of our human-in-the-loop labeling approach on the ILSVRC2014 object detection dataset.
...years [20, 43, 11, 45, 61, 24, 53], with significant progress both in techniques [20, 43, 53, 45] as well as scale: hundreds of thousands of object detectors can now be trained directly from web data =-=[8, 15, 11]-=-. The object detection models are commonly evaluated on benchmark datasets [43, 16], and achievements such as 1.9x improvement in accuracy between year 2013 and 2014 on the ImageNet Large Scale Visual...
Prajna: Towards Recognizing Whatever You Want From Images without Image Labeling
by Xian-Sheng Hua , Jin Li
"... Abstract With the advances in distributed computation, machine learning and deep neural networks, we enter into an era that it is possible to build a real world image recognition system. There are three essential components to build a real-world image recognition system: 1) creating representative ..."
Abstract With the advances in distributed computation, machine learning and deep neural networks, we enter into an era that it is possible to build a real world image recognition system. There are three essential components to build a real-world image recognition system: 1) creating representative features, 2) designing powerful learning approaches, and 3) identifying massive training data. While extensive researches have been done on the first two aspects, much less attention has been paid on the third. In this paper, we present an end-to-end Web knowledge discovery system, Prajna. Starting from an arbitrary set of entities as inputs, Prajna automatically crawls images from multiple sources, identifies images that have reliably labeled, trains models and build a recognition system that is capable of recognizing any new images of the entity set. Due to the high cost of manual data labeling, leveraging the massive yet noisy data on the Internet is a natural idea, but the practical engineering aspect is highly challenging. Prajna focuses on separating reliable training data from extensive noisy data, which is a key to the capability of extending an image recognition system to support arbitrary entities. In this paper, we will analyze the intrinsic characteristics of Internet image data, and find ways to mine accurate and informative information from those data to build a training set, which is then used to train image recognition models. Prajna is capable of automatically building an image recognition system for those entities as long as we can collect sufficient number of images of the entities on the Web.
Inferring the Why in Images
by Hamed Pirsiavash, Carl Vondrick, Antonio Torralba
"... Humans have the remarkable capability to infer the motivations of other people's actions, likely due to cognitive skills known in psychophysics as the theory of mind. In this paper, we strive to build a computational model that predicts the motivation behind the actions of people from images. To our ..."
Humans have the remarkable capability to infer the motivations of other people's actions, likely due to cognitive skills known in psychophysics as the theory of mind. In this paper, we strive to build a computational model that predicts the motivation behind the actions of people from images. To our knowledge, this challenging problem has not yet been extensively explored in computer vision. We present a novel learning based framework that uses high-level visual recognition to infer why people are performing an actions in images. However, the information in an image alone may not be sufficient to automatically solve this task. Since humans can rely on their own experiences to infer motivation, we propose to give computer vision systems access to some of these experiences by using recently developed natural language models to mine knowledge stored in massive amounts of text. While we are still far away from automatically inferring motivation, our results suggest that transferring knowledge from language into vision can help machines understand why a person might be performing an action in an image. 1
...ts action recognition because we seek to infer why a person is performing an action. Common Knowledge: There are promising efforts in progress to acquire common sense for use in computer vision tasks =-=[36, 5, 7]-=-. In this paper, we also seek to put common knowledge into computer vision, but we instead attempt to extract it from written language. Language in Vision: The community has been incorporating natural...
Sense Discovery via Co-Clustering on Images and Text
by Xinlei Chen, Alan Ritter, Abhinav Gupta, Tom Mitchell
"... We present a co-clustering framework that can be used to discover multiple semantic and visual senses of a given Noun Phrase (NP). Unlike traditional clustering ap-proaches which assume a one-to-one mapping between the clusters in the text-based feature space and the visual space, we adopt a one-to- ..."
We present a co-clustering framework that can be used to discover multiple semantic and visual senses of a given Noun Phrase (NP). Unlike traditional clustering ap-proaches which assume a one-to-one mapping between the clusters in the text-based feature space and the visual space, we adopt a one-to-many mapping between the two spaces. This is primarily because each semantic sense (concept) can correspond to different visual senses due to viewpoint and appearance variations. Our structure-EM style opti-mization not only extracts the multiple senses in both se-mantic and visual feature space, but also discovers the mapping between the senses. We introduce a challenging dataset (CMU Polysemy-30) for this problem consisting of 30 NPs (⇠5600 labeled instances out of ⇠22K total in-stances). We have also conducted a large-scale experiment that performs sense disambiguation for ⇠2000 NPs. 1.
...ichness and scalability required for this task. In recent years, the focus has shifted to building knowledge bases automatically by learning knowledge from free text [8, 1] and images on the internet =-=[9, 17]-=-. While these systems have shown much promise, one issue that limits their performance is the problem of semantic and "visual" polysemy. Polysemy is the capacity for a word or Noun Phrase (NP) to have...
Automatic Image Dataset Construction from Click-through Logs Using Deep Neural Network
by Yalong Bai , Kuiyuan Yang , Wei Yu , Chang Xu , Wei-Ying Ma , Tiejun Zhao
"... ABSTRACT Labelled image datasets are the backbone for high-level image understanding tasks with wide application scenarios, and continuously drive and evaluate the progress of feature designing and supervised learning models. Recently, the million scale labelled image dataset further contributes to ..."
ABSTRACT Labelled image datasets are the backbone for high-level image understanding tasks with wide application scenarios, and continuously drive and evaluate the progress of feature designing and supervised learning models. Recently, the million scale labelled image dataset further contributes to the rebirth of deep convolutional neural network and bypass manual designing handcraft features. However, the construction process of image dataset is mainly manual-based and quite labor intensive, which often take years' efforts to construct a million scale dataset with high quality. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based method to construct large scale image dataset in an automatic way. Specifically, word representation and image representation are learned in a deep neural network from large amount of click-through logs, and further used to define word-word similarity and image-word similarity. These two similarities are used to automatize the two labor intensive steps in manual-based image dataset construction: query formation and noisy image removal. With a new proposed cross convolutional filter regularizer, we can construct a million scale image dataset in one week. Finally, two image datasets are constructed to verify the effectiveness of the method. In addition to scale, the automatically constructed dataset has comparable accuracy, diversity and cross-dataset generalization with manually labelled image datasets.
Scaling up object detection
by Olga Russakovsky , 2015
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
}
| 4,902
|
Most Expensive and popular Fragrance in the World
While everyone want a pleasure smell whenever he/sher went outside the home or participated in the parties. In this era there are many ways to feel pleasure smell on your cloths. On the internet whether on internet or local there are thousands of brands of fragrance available on different price ranges. Few of them are really pleasured for everyone and also expensive in the price list. So Below we are going to list down few of most expensive fragrance in the world.
Using expensive and elegant Perfume is an aspect of fashionlic world. We Must have look into the perfumes also as we choose clothes, shoes and watches to look perfect in the society.
AnnickGoutal Eau d'Hadrien
So we are going to start the list with the most popular brand of fragrance Annick Goutal Eau d'Hadrien. The Most beautiful designed perfume is quite popular in the royal families and they mostly used in the royal parties. It's a women perfume and it's made of blend of ylang-ylang, basil, sweet and herbal, along with splashes of citrus. The initial price of one bottle is 441$ on amazon however you can also buy it from local market from their official stores.
JAR Bolt of Lightning
The second perfume comes in our list that impress me as writer is JAR Bolt of Lightning. The Interesting fact about this fragrance is that it was initially launch in 2001 and still it's growing in the market with most popular brand in the world. It's also a women perfume made of tuberose and green which make it more pleasurable. The one bottle price on this particular fragrance in the market is 750$. While it's also using in royal parties and using millionaires.
Caron Poivre
Whenever we talks about most expensive and popular fragrance in the world we can't avoid brand like Caron Poivre. It was launched in 1954 for the very first time and since 1954 it's still on top of most popular brands of perfume. Interesting thing about this perfume smell is that both women and man can wear it for the parties or wedding functions. It's made of hint of floral heart with a base of woody. One Bottle of this perfume is almost 1000$ plus on the amazon while it's also available in the local markets official stories.
Hermès 24 Faubourg
The Limited edition fragrance in the world which has only 1000 bottles as considered the most expensive and most rare perfume in the world. There are many scents include in the perfume which make it more beautiful and pleasurable. It's made of orange blossom, jasmine, tiare flower, patchouli, ylang-ylang, vanilla, ambergris, sandalwood and iris. It's also most expensive perfume in the word have one bottle In 1500$ on amazon.
Clive Christian No. 1
Let's talk about the creators I means the company. Clive Christian is the most popular fragrance brand in the Europe and also in the entire world. They have produced world best perfumes from last two decades. Clive Christian No. 1 has been the most expensive perfume from 2001 to 2006. The Perfume is also been used many times in the royal parties of the United Kingdom and also in royal weddings. It has two flavors of smell Woody Oriental is for man while Floral Oriental for women. You can buy it's one bottle on almost $2,150 on Amazon or local official store near to you.
Wearing perfumes in the parties or wedding functions has a deep impact in your personality. Like Women usually makeup on weddings, use eyeliners etc also using fragrance which make her personality more beautiful. We have list above the most popular brands of perfumes in the world. We hope that you will like it and share it with friends.
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Fashion Pakistan
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|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
}
| 0
|
package riak
import (
"crypto/tls"
"encoding/binary"
"errors"
"fmt"
"io"
"net"
"time"
proto "github.com/golang/protobuf/proto"
)
// Connection errors
var (
ErrCannotRead = errors.New("Cannot read from a non-active or closed connection")
ErrCannotWrite = errors.New("Cannot write to a non-active or closed connection")
)
// AuthOptions object contains the authentication credentials and tls config
type AuthOptions struct {
User string
Password string
TlsConfig *tls.Config
}
type connectionOptions struct {
remoteAddress *net.TCPAddr
connectTimeout time.Duration
requestTimeout time.Duration
healthCheck Command
authOptions *AuthOptions
}
const (
connCreated state = iota
connTlsStarting
connActive
connInactive
)
type connection struct {
addr *net.TCPAddr
conn net.Conn
connectTimeout time.Duration
requestTimeout time.Duration
healthCheck Command
authOptions *AuthOptions
sizeBuf []byte
dataBuf []byte
active bool
inFlight bool
lastUsed time.Time
stateData
}
func newConnection(options *connectionOptions) (*connection, error) {
if options == nil {
return nil, ErrOptionsRequired
}
if options.remoteAddress == nil {
return nil, ErrAddressRequired
}
if options.connectTimeout == 0 {
options.connectTimeout = defaultConnectTimeout
}
if options.requestTimeout == 0 {
options.requestTimeout = defaultRequestTimeout
}
c := &connection{
addr: options.remoteAddress,
connectTimeout: options.connectTimeout,
requestTimeout: options.requestTimeout,
healthCheck: options.healthCheck,
authOptions: options.authOptions,
sizeBuf: make([]byte, 4),
dataBuf: make([]byte, defaultInitBuffer),
inFlight: false,
lastUsed: time.Now(),
}
c.initStateData("connCreated", "connTlsStarting", "connActive", "connInactive")
c.setState(connCreated)
return c, nil
}
func (c *connection) connect() (err error) {
dialer := &net.Dialer{
Timeout: c.connectTimeout,
KeepAlive: time.Second * 30,
}
c.conn, err = dialer.Dial("tcp", c.addr.String()) // NB: SetNoDelay() is true by default for TCP connections
if err != nil {
logError("[Connection]", "error when dialing %s: '%s'", c.addr.String(), err.Error())
c.close()
} else {
logDebug("[Connection]", "connected to: %s", c.addr)
if err = c.startTls(); err != nil {
c.setState(connInactive)
return
}
c.setState(connActive)
if c.healthCheck != nil {
if err = c.execute(c.healthCheck); err != nil || !c.healthCheck.Success() {
c.setState(connInactive)
logError("[Connection]", "initial health check error: '%s'", err.Error())
c.close()
}
}
}
return
}
func (c *connection) startTls() error {
if c.authOptions == nil {
return nil
}
if c.authOptions.TlsConfig == nil {
return ErrAuthMissingConfig
}
c.setState(connTlsStarting)
startTlsCmd := &StartTlsCommand{}
if err := c.execute(startTlsCmd); err != nil {
return err
}
var tlsConn *tls.Conn
if tlsConn = tls.Client(c.conn, c.authOptions.TlsConfig); tlsConn == nil {
return ErrAuthTLSUpgradeFailed
}
if err := tlsConn.Handshake(); err != nil {
return err
}
c.conn = tlsConn
authCmd := &AuthCommand{
User: c.authOptions.User,
Password: c.authOptions.Password,
}
return c.execute(authCmd)
}
func (c *connection) available() bool {
return (c.conn != nil && c.isStateLessThan(connInactive))
}
func (c *connection) close() error {
if c.conn != nil {
err := c.conn.Close()
c.conn = nil
return err
}
return nil
}
func (c *connection) setInFlight(inFlightVal bool) {
c.inFlight = inFlightVal
}
func (c *connection) execute(cmd Command) (err error) {
if c.inFlight == true {
err = fmt.Errorf("[Connection] attempted to run '%s' command on in-use connection", cmd.Name())
return
}
logDebug("[Connection]", "execute command: %v", cmd.Name())
c.setInFlight(true)
defer c.setInFlight(false)
c.lastUsed = time.Now()
var message []byte
message, err = getRiakMessage(cmd)
if err != nil {
return
}
if err = c.write(message); err != nil {
return
}
var response []byte
var decoded proto.Message
for {
response, err = c.read() // NB: response *will* have entire pb message
if err != nil {
cmd.onError(err)
return
}
// Maybe translate RpbErrorResp into golang error
if err = maybeRiakError(response); err != nil {
cmd.onError(err)
return
}
if decoded, err = decodeRiakMessage(cmd, response); err != nil {
cmd.onError(err)
return
}
err = cmd.onSuccess(decoded)
if err != nil {
cmd.onError(err)
return
}
if sc, ok := cmd.(StreamingCommand); ok {
// Streaming Commands indicate done
if sc.Done() {
return
}
} else {
// non-streaming command, done at this point
return
}
}
}
// FUTURE: we should also take currently executing Command (Riak operation)
// timeout into account
func (c *connection) setReadDeadline() {
c.conn.SetReadDeadline(time.Now().Add(c.requestTimeout))
}
// NB: This will read one full pb message from Riak, or error in doing so
func (c *connection) read() ([]byte, error) {
if !c.available() {
return nil, ErrCannotRead
}
var err error
var count int
var messageLength uint32
c.setReadDeadline()
if count, err = io.ReadFull(c.conn, c.sizeBuf); err == nil && count == 4 {
messageLength = binary.BigEndian.Uint32(c.sizeBuf)
if messageLength > uint32(cap(c.dataBuf)) {
logDebug("[Connection]", "allocating larger dataBuf of size %d", messageLength)
c.dataBuf = make([]byte, messageLength)
} else {
c.dataBuf = c.dataBuf[0:messageLength]
}
// FUTURE: large object warning / error
c.setReadDeadline()
count, err = io.ReadFull(c.conn, c.dataBuf)
} else {
if err == nil && count != 4 {
err = newClientError(fmt.Sprintf("[Connection] expected to read 4 bytes, only read: %d", count), nil)
}
}
if err == nil && count != int(messageLength) {
err = newClientError(fmt.Sprintf("[Connection] message length: %d, only read: %d", messageLength, count), nil)
}
if err == nil {
return c.dataBuf, nil
} else {
c.setState(connInactive)
return nil, err
}
}
func (c *connection) write(data []byte) error {
if !c.available() {
return ErrCannotWrite
}
// FUTURE: we should also take currently executing Command (Riak operation) timeout into account
c.conn.SetWriteDeadline(time.Now().Add(c.requestTimeout))
count, err := c.conn.Write(data)
if err != nil {
logDebug("[Connection]", "error in write: '%v'", err)
c.setState(connInactive)
return err
}
if count != len(data) {
// connection will eventually be expired
c.setState(connInactive)
return newClientError(fmt.Sprintf("[Connection] data length: %d, only wrote: %d", len(data), count), nil)
}
return nil
}
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 8,048
|
Нідермулерн () — громада в Швейцарії в кантоні Берн, адміністративний округ Берн-Міттельланд.
Географія
Громада розташована на відстані близько 10 км на південь від Берна.
Нідермулерн має площу 7,3 км², з яких на 6,3% дозволяється будівництво (житлове та будівництво доріг), 76,2% використовуються в сільськогосподарських цілях, 17,5% зайнято лісами, 0% не є продуктивними (річки, льодовики або гори).
Демографія
2019 року в громаді мешкало 501 особа (+8% порівняно з 2010 роком), іноземців було 7,2%. Густота населення становила 69 осіб/км².
За віковим діапазоном населення розподілялося таким чином: 18% — особи молодші 20 років, 61,9% — особи у віці 20—64 років, 20,2% — особи у віці 65 років та старші. Було 214 помешкань (у середньому 2,3 особи в помешканні).
Із загальної кількості 156 працюючих 92 було зайнятих в первинному секторі, 8 — в обробній промисловості, 56 — в галузі послуг.
Примітки
Громади Берну
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
}
| 3,325
|
using System;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;
using Newtonsoft.Json;
using VkNet.Utils;
namespace VkNet.Model.Attachments;
/// <inheritdoc />
[Serializable]
public class PrettyCards : MediaAttachment
{
/// <inheritdoc />
protected override string Alias => "pretty_cards";
/// <summary>
/// Cards
/// </summary>
[JsonProperty("cards")]
public ReadOnlyCollection<PrettyCard> Cards { get; set; }
/// <summary>
/// Разобрать из json.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="response"> Ответ сервера. </param>
/// <returns> </returns>
public static PrettyCards FromJson(VkResponse response) => new()
{
Cards = response["cards"]
.ToReadOnlyCollectionOf<PrettyCard>(x => x)
};
/// <summary>
/// Преобразование класса <see cref="PrettyCards" /> в <see cref="VkParameters" />
/// </summary>
/// <param name="response"> Ответ сервера. </param>
/// <returns>Результат преобразования в <see cref="PrettyCards" /></returns>
public static implicit operator PrettyCards(VkResponse response)
{
if (response == null)
{
return null;
}
return response.HasToken()
? FromJson(response)
: null;
}
}
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 3,032
|
export { default } from './config'
export * from './config.selectors'
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 6,559
|
Dwayne Johnson is bringing Baywatch back to life. The revival film will hit theaters in May 2017, and Johnson gave fans of the franchise their first look at the main cast for the series on his Instagram earlier this week.
The photo shared by Johnson does not include David Hasselhoff. He starred in the original series, and it was recently announced that he would return to the franchise to appear in the movie. He has been featured in photos from the set shared recently.
Coming Soon shared other photos that popped up on social media accounts of other cast members. Check out some of those photos below.
Are you planning to check out Baywatch next year? Do you think the cast looks right for their roles? Tell us what you think.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
}
| 7,263
|
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
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<source>institute-512475</source>
<publication-type its:translate="no" xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its">image</publication-type>
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<publication value="ldsorg">LDS.org</publication>
<publication-date value="2012-04-09">2012-04-09</publication-date>
<title/>
<description/>
<collections>
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<collection its:translate="no" xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its">media</collection>
<collection its:translate="no" xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its">images</collection>
</collections>
<subjects>
<subject>classrooms</subject>
<subject>institutes of religion</subject>
<subject>learning</subject>
<subject>teaching</subject>
<subject>education</subject>
<subject>scriptures</subject>
<subject>studying</subject>
<subject>college</subject>
<subject>young single adults</subject>
<subject>YSA</subject>
<subject>students</subject>
</subjects>
</search-meta>
<no-search>
<path>http://media.ldscdn.org/images/media-library/education/spiritual/institute-512475-gallery.jpg</path>
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<small its:translate="no" xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its">http://media.ldscdn.org/images/media-library/education/spiritual/institute-512475-thumbnail.jpg</small>
</images>
<download-urls>
<download-url>
<label>Mobile</label>
<size>138 KB</size>
<path>http://media.ldscdn.org/images/media-library/education/spiritual/institute-512475-mobile.jpg</path>
</download-url>
<download-url>
<label>Tablet</label>
<size>153 KB</size>
<path>http://media.ldscdn.org/images/media-library/education/spiritual/institute-512475-tablet.jpg</path>
</download-url>
<download-url>
<label>Print</label>
<size>324 KB</size>
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<ldse-meta its:translate="no" xmlns="http://lds.org/code/lds-edit" xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its"><document id="institute-512475" locale="eng" uri="/media-library/images/education/spiritual#institute-512475" status="publish" site="ldsorg" source="chq" words="120" tgp="0.4196"/><created username="lds-edit" userid=""/><last-modified date="2012-05-10T12:26:12.550235-06:00" username="lds-edit" userid=""/></ldse-meta></ldswebml>
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 4,467
|
\section{Introduction}
Observations have demonstrated that stop-and-go patterns frequently arise in congested traffic \citep{mauch2002freeway}. As large speed variations in such oscillatory traffic patterns are challenging for human drivers, accident likelihood \citep{oh2001real} and vehicle emissions \citep{barth2008real} can be significantly increased. Therefore, the properties, mechanism, and control of stop-and-go traffic have been subject to many studies in the transportation engineering field. For example, methods have been proposed to measure the magnitudes, periods, and propagation of traffic oscillations \citep{li2010measurement}. It was shown that unstable car-following behaviors can lead to phantom jams and stop-and-go traffic in a platoon of vehicles \citep[e.g.][]{herman1959traffic,kerner1994cluster,sugiyama2008traffic}. Lane-changing, merging, and diverging activities are also significant contributors of the formation and growth of traffic oscillations \citep{ahn2007freeway,ahn2010merging}. Generally, such instability is caused by individual vehicles' local behaviors.
With many metropolitan areas becoming oversaturated, such network bottlenecks as merges and diverges play a more important role in shaping traffic dynamics \citep{daganzo1999remarks,daganzo1999phase}, and complicated network-wide traffic dynamics can be caused by interactions among different network bottlenecks. In \citep{daganzo1996gridlock}, a beltway network was shown to become totally gridlocked with certain merging priorities and diverging ratios. In \citep{daganzo2011bifurcations}, it was shown that a double-ring network can have multiple stationary states at the same density, and bifurcations are shown to exist in the macroscopic fundamental diagram.
A series of studies have demonstrated that periodical oscillations with a period of about 10 minutes can occur in a diverge-merge network with two intermediate links in \reff{fig:dm2}: in \citep[][Section 7.3]{jin2003dissertation}, damped and persistent oscillatory traffic patterns were first observed with a commodity-based Cell Transmission Model (CTM), even when the network is initially empty and has constant demand patterns and route choice proportions; in \citep{jin2005paramics}, such network-wide oscillations were replicated with a microscopic traffic simulator Paramics, and it suggests that such periodic oscillations are intrinsic properties of the network, not caused by the specific traffic flow models on a link or at the junctions; in \citep{jin2009network}, the mechanism and network conditions for the occurrence of persistent periodic oscillations were identified with detailed analyses of shock and rarefaction waves in the network; in \citep{jin2012statics}, it was shown that the DM network can admit stationary solutions under all network conditions; i.e., if the network starts at certain stationary states, then it will stay there all the time.
These studies on traffic dynamics in a diverge-merge network suggest that the interactions among diverging and merging bottlenecks can lead to unstable traffic patterns.
\bfg\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=3in]{figure20061015osc.3}
\end{center} \caption{A diverge-merge network with one O-D pair and two intermediate links: An abstract network}\label{fig:dm2} \efg
In this study, we examine the stability of these stationary states within the framework of kinematic wave models to better understand why the DM network cannot converge to these stationary states when oscillatory solutions occur.
First we observe that, when one of the two intermediate links is congested and the other not, shock and rarefaction waves travel backward on the congested link and forward on the uncongested, and the two intermediate links form a circular path of information propagation associated with kinematic waves. Based on this observation, we create a section at the downstream boundary of the congested intermediate link and derive a {Poincar\'e } map in the out-flux across the section. Then we demonstrate that the fixed points of the {Poincar\'e } map are related to stationary states in the network. Further we demonstrate that oscillatory traffic dynamics are highly related to unstable fixed points of the {Poincar\'e } map. With the {Poincar\'e } map, we then analyze the stability and bifurcation properties of fixed points of the {Poincar\'e } map with respect to the route choice proportion.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows.
In Section 2, we present the kinematic wave model of traffic dynamics in the DM network and its stationary solutions. In Section 3, we derive a {Poincar\'e } map for the network and discuss its finite-time stable fixed points. In Section 4, we study properties of asymptotically stable and unstable fixed points. In Section 5, with examples we demonstrate the bifurcation in the stability of fixed points. In Section 6, we apply the {Poincar\'e } map approach to analyzing traffic patterns in more general road networks. In Section 7, we conclude with discussions and possible future studies.
\section{The kinematic wave model and its stationary solutions}
For the DM network, we introduce two dummy links at the origin and destination, which are labeled as $r$ and $w$, respectively. Vehicles in this network are categorized into two commodities: vehicles of commodity 1 use link 1, and those of commodity 2 use link 2. On link $a$ ($a\in A=\{r,0,1,2,3,w\}$), a point is denoted by $x_a\in[0,X_a]$, where $X_a$ is the link length. Thus the diverging junction has three coordinates $(0,X_0)\sim (1,0) \sim (2,0)$, and the merging junction has three coordinates $(1,X_1)\sim(2,X_2)\sim (3,0)$. At a point $(a,x_a)$ and time $t$, we define the following quantities of total traffic: density $k_a(x_a,t)$, speed $v_a(x_a,t)$, flow-rate $q_a(x_a,t)$, demand $d_a(x_a,t)$, and supply $s_a(x_a,t)$. In addition, on all links except links 1 and 2, we define $\xi_a(x_a,t)$ as the proportion of commodity 1 vehicles; thus the density of commodity 1 is $\xi_a(x_a,t)k_a(x_a,t)$. Hereafter we omit $(x_a,t)$ from these variables unless necessary.
\subsection{The kinematic wave model} \label{kwmodel}
\btb
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|}\hline
$(a,x_a)$ ($a\in\{r,0,1,2,3,w\}$) & Location $x_a$ on link $a$\\\hline
$t$ & Time\\\hline
$X_a$ &Length of link $a$ \\\hline
$l_a\in [0,1]$ & The congested portion of link $a$ \\\hline
$k_a(x_a,t)$ &Density at location $x_a$ and time $t$ on link $a$ \\\hline
$q_a(x_a,t)$ &Flow-rate \\\hline
$\xi_a(x_a,t)$ &Proportion of commodity 1 vehicles \\\hline
$\phi_a(x_a,t)$ &Flow-rate (flux) of commodity 1 vehicles \\\hline
$d_a(x_a,t)$ &Demand \\\hline
$s_a(x_a,t)$ &Supply \\\hline
$U_a(x_a,t)=(d_a(x_a,t),s_a(x_a,t))$ &Traffic state in the demand-supply space \\\hline
$C_a$ &Capacity of link $a$ \\\hline
$\beta$ & Merging ratio of link 1\\\hline
$\xi$ & Constant choice proportion of route 1\\\hline
$v_a(t)=q_a(X_a^-,t)$ & Out-flux of link $a$ at time $t$ \\\hline
$u_a(t)=q_a(0^+,t)$ & In-flux of link $a$ at time $t$\\\hline
$\Xi_1$& The set of $\xi$ when information propagates counterclockwise \\\hline
$\Xi_2$& The set of $\xi$ when information propagates clockwise \\\hline
$\tilde \Xi_1$& The set of $\xi$ when the DM network is stationary at SOC-SUC \\\hline
$\tilde \Xi_2$& The set of $\xi$ when the DM network is stationary at SUC-SOC \\\hline
$A_1$ &$\equiv\max\{C_3-(1-\xi) C_0 , C_3-C_2, \beta C_3\}$ defined in \refe{def:A}\\\hline
$A_2$ & $\equiv\max\{C_3-\xi C_0, C_3-C_1, (1-\beta) C_3 \}$ defined in \refe{def:Ap} \\\hline
$A_2'$ & $\equiv C_3-A_2$ defined in \refe{def:A2p}\\\hline
$F\cdot$ & The unified {Poincar\'e } map defined in \refe{pmap} \\\hline
$v^*$ &The fixed point of the {Poincar\'e } map\\\hline
$v^-$ & The smaller periodical point of period 2 of the {Poincar\'e } map\\\hline
$v^+$ & The larger periodical point of period 2 of the {Poincar\'e } map\\\hline
\end{tabular}\caption{A list of notations}\label{listnotations}
\end{center}
\etb
We assume that all vehicles have the same characteristics, and all links in the DM network are homogeneous. Furthermore, we assume a fundamental diagram at a point $(a,x_a)$ ($a=0,\cdots,3$) and time $t$: $q_a=Q_a(k_a)$, and $v_a=V_a(k_a)=Q_a(k_a)/k_a$ \citep{greenshields1935capacity}.
Here we assume that $q_a=Q_a(k_a)$ is unimodal and attains its capacity $C_a=Q_a(k_{a,c})$ at the critical density of $k_{a,c}$.
Then traffic demand and supply are also functions of total density, which are given by
\citep{engquist1980difference,daganzo1995ctm,lebacque1996godunov}
\begin{subequations}
\begin{eqnarray}
d_a&=&D_a(k_a)\equiv Q_a(\min\{k_{a,c},k_a\}),\\
s_a&=&S_a(k_a)\equiv Q_a(\max\{k_{a,c},k_a\}).
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
From the definitions of demand and supply, we can see that the demand-supply pair can uniquely determine density and flow-rate:
\begin{subequations}
\begin{eqnarray}
q_a&=&\min\{d_a,s_a\},\\
C_a&=&\max\{d_a,s_a\},\\
k_a&=&R_a(d_a/s_a)\equiv\cas{{ll}D_a^{-1}(C_a d_a/s_a), & d_a\leq s_a\\ S_a^{-1}(C_a s_a/d_a), &s_a\leq d_a}
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
Thus we can denote a traffic state at a point by a demand-supply pair $U_a=(d_a,s_a)$.
In the kinematic wave model of traffic dynamics on the DM network, traffic dynamics on link $a$ ($a=0,\cdots,3$) are described by the following LWR model
\begin{subequations}\label{multi-lwr}
\begin{eqnarray}
\pd{k_a}t+\pd{k_a V_a(k_a)} {x_a}&=&0. \label{lwr}
\end{eqnarray}
To track dynamics of commodity 1 flows on links 0 and 3 we apply a multi-commodity LWR model \citep{lebacque1996godunov}:
\begin{eqnarray}
\pd{\xi_a k_a}t+\pd{\xi_a k_a V_a(k_a)} {x_a}&=&0, \qquad a=0,3. \label{lwr:proportion}
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
Then \refe{multi-lwr} constitutes a link-based kinematic wave model of traffic dynamics in the DM network, which is a system of six hyperbolic conservation laws.
In \citep{jin2012network,jin2012statics}, it was shown that the kinematic wave model is well-defined when complemented by the following invariant junction flux functions. Here $\phi_a(x_a,t)$ is the flux of commodity 1 traffic, and $q_a(x_a,t)-\phi_a(x_a,t)$ the flux of commodity 2 traffic.
\begin{enumerate}
\item If a point $(a,x_a)$ has only one upstream link and one downstream link, then the total and commodity 1 fluxes through this point are given by
\begin{subequations} \label{link-entropy}
\begin{eqnarray}
q_a(x_a,t)&=&\min\{d_a(x_a^-,t),s_a(x_a^+,t)\},\\
\phi_a(x_a,t) &=&\xi_a(x_a^-,t) q_a(x_a,t),
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
where $x_a^-$ and $x_a^+$ are the upstream and downstream points of $(a,x_a)$, respectively. The flux function can be applied to the origin and destination junctions as follows.
\begin{enumerate}
\item At the origin junction $(0,0)\sim (r,0)$, if the demand at origin, $d_r(0^-,t)$, and the proportion of commodity 1, $\xi_r(0^-,t)$, are given, from \refe{link-entropy} the boundary fluxes are given by
\begin{subequations}
\begin{eqnarray}
q_r(0,t)&=&q_0(0,t)=\min\{d_r(0^-,t),s_0(0^+,t)\},\\
\phi_r(0,t)&=&\xi_r(0^-,t) q_r(0,t).
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
\item At the destination junction $(3,X_3) \sim (s,0)$, if the supply at the destination, $s_r(0^+,t)$, is given, from \refe{link-entropy} the boundary fluxes are given by
\begin{subequations}
\begin{eqnarray}
q_w(0,t)&=&q_3(X_3,t)=\min\{d_3(X_3^-,t),s_w(0^+,t)\},\\
\phi_w(0,t)&=&\xi_3(X_3^-,t) q_w(0,t).
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
\end{enumerate}
\item At the diverging junction $(0,X_0)\sim (1,0) \sim (2,0)$, the boundary fluxes are given by
\begin{subequations}\label{divergemodel}
\begin{eqnarray}
q_0(X_0,t)&=&\min\{d_0(X_0^-,t),\frac{s_1(0^+,t)}{\xi_0(X_0^-,t)},\frac{s_2(0^+,t)}{1-\xi_0(X_0^-,t)}\},\\
q_1(0,t)&=&\phi_0(X_0,t)=q_0(X_0,t) \xi_0(X_0^-,t),\\
q_2(0,t)&=&q_0(X_0,t) (1-\xi_0(X_0^-,t)).
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
\item At the merging junction $(1,X_1)\sim (2,X_2)\sim(3,0)$, the boundary fluxes are given by
\begin{subequations} \label{mergemodel}
\begin{eqnarray}
q_3(0,t)&=&\min\{d_1(X_1^-,t)+d_2(X_2^-,t),s_3(0^+,t) \},\\
q_1(X_1,t)&=&\phi_3(0,t)=\min\{d_1(X_1^-,t), \max\{s_3(0^+,t)-d_2(X_2^-,t),\beta s_3(0^+,t)\}\},\\
q_2(X_2,t)&=&\min\{d_2(X_2^-,t), \max\{s_3(0^+,t)-d_1(X_1^-,t),(1-\beta) s_3(0^+,t)\},
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
where $\beta$ is the merging ratio of link 1.
\end{enumerate}
The kinematic wave model, \refe{multi-lwr}, together with the entropy conditions above, defines a semigroup of network hyperbolic conservation laws \citep{bressan1996semigroup}
in the sense that, given initial conditions in $k_a(x_a,0)$ and $\xi_a(x_a,0)$ and boundary conditions in $d_r(0^-,t)$, $\xi_r(0^-,t)$, and $s_w(0^+,t)$, we can uniquely solve $k_a(x_a,t)$ and $\xi_a(x_a,t)$ at any time.
Therefore, the network kinematic wave model can be considered as an infinite-dimensional dynamical system.
\subsection{The traffic statics problem and its stationary solutions}
In \citep{jin2012statics}, the traffic statics problem is defined as finding stationary solutions to \refe{multi-lwr} when the origin demand, destination supply, and route choice proportion are all constant: for example, $d_r(0^-,t)=C_0$, $\xi_r(0^-,t)=\xi$, and $s_w(0^+,t)=C_3$. In this case, \refe{multi-lwr} becomes an autonomous, infinite-dimensional system, and traffic dynamics in the road network are determined by the initial conditions on the two intermediate links: $k_1(x_1,0)$ and $k_2(x_2,0)$.
It was found that in stationary states the flow-rates on the two intermediate links are constant: $q_a(x_a,t)=q_a$ ($a=1,2$); and the commodity proportions are constant on links 0 and 3: $\xi_a(x_a,t)=\xi$ ($a=0,3$). Then the flow-rates on links 0 and 3 are the same: $q=q_1+q_2$.
Since the origin demand equals link 0's capacity, link 0 becomes over-critical (OC) with $k_0(x,t)\geq k_{0,c}$ after a finite period of time; similarly, since the destination supply equals link 3's capacity, link 3 becomes under-critical (UC) with $k_3(x,t)\leq k_{3,c}$ after a finite period of time. Therefore, \refe{multi-lwr} can be simplified into the following two equations:
\begin{subequations} \label{simple-lwr}
\begin{eqnarray}
\pd{k_1}t+\pd{k_1 V_1(k_1)} {x_1}&=&0,\\
\pd{k_2}t+\pd{k_2 V_2(k_2)} {x_2}&=&0,
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
which are complemented by the following flux functions:
\begin{subequations} \label{simple-flux}
\begin{eqnarray}
q_a(x_a,t)&=&\min\{d_a(x_a^-,t),s_a(x_a^+,t)\}, \quad x_a\in(0,X_a), a=1,2\\
q_1(0,t)&=&\min\{\xi C_0 ,s_1(0^+,t),\frac{\xi}{1-\xi} s_2(0^+,t)\} ,\\
q_2(0,t)&=&\min\{(1-\xi) C_0 , \frac{1-\xi}{\xi} s_1(0^+,t), s_2(0^+,t)\},\\
q_1(X_1,t)&=&\min\{d_1(X_1^-,t), \max\{C_3-d_2(X_2^-,t),\beta C_3\}\},\\
q_2(X_2,t)&=&\min\{d_2(X_2^-,t), \max\{C_3-d_1(X_1^-,t),(1-\beta) C_3\}\}.
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
Then the stationary density on link $a$ can be written as
\begin{eqnarray}
k_a(x_a,t)&=&(1-I_a(x_a;l_a))R_a(q_a/C_a)+I_a(x_a;l_a)R_a(C_a/q_a), \label{stationarydensity}
\end{eqnarray}
where $l_a\in[0,1]$, and the indicator function $I_a(x_a;l_a)=\cas{{ll}0, &x_a\in[0,(1-l_a)X_a)\\1,&x_a\in[(1-l_a)X_a,X_a]}$. On each link, there can be four types of stationary states: (i) when $q_a=C_a$ and any $l_a$, the stationary state is C (critical); (ii) when $q_a<C_a$ and $l_a=0$, the stationary state is SUC (strictly under-critical); (iii) when $q_a<C_a$ and $l_a=1$, the stationary state is SOC (strictly over-critical); and (iv) when $q_a<C_a$ and $l_a\in(0,1)$, the stationary state is ZS (zero shock wave).
In \citep{jin2012statics} it was shown that stationary solutions to \refe{simple-lwr} with \refe{simple-flux} exist under all network conditions. That is, if the initial condition is a stationary solution, then the network stays at the state. In stationary states, link 0 is always OC at $(C_0,q)$, link 3 is always UC at $(q,C_3)$, and links 1 and 2 can be C, SUC, SOC, or ZS. In \reft{possibless}, solutions of stationary states on links 1 and 2 are listed under all network conditions: from the types of stationary states on both links and the corresponding flow-rates under given network conditions, we can use \refe{stationarydensity} to find the stationary densities on both links. Refer to \citep{jin2012statics} on the derivation of the table.
\btb
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c||c|c|}\hline
Capacities& $\xi$ & $\beta$ & Link 1-Link 2 & $q$\\\hline\hline
$C_0<\min\{C_1+C_2, C_3\}$ & $\xi\leq 1-\frac {C_2}{C_0}$& &SUC-C & $C_2/(1-\xi)$\\\hline
&$1-\frac{C_2}{C_0}<\xi<\frac{C_1}{C_0}$& &SUC-SUC & $C_0$\\\hline
&$\xi\geq \frac{C_1}{C_0}$& &C-SUC& $C_1/\xi$ \\\hline\hline
$C_1+C_2\leq \min\{C_0,C_3\}$&$\xi<\frac{C_1}{C_1+C_2}$&&SUC-C& $C_2/(1-\xi)$\\\hline
&$\xi=\frac{C_1}{C_1+C_2}$&&C-C&$C_1/\xi$\\\hline
&$\xi>\frac{C_1}{C_1+C_2}$&&C-SUC&$C_1/\xi$\\\hline\hline
$C_3=C_0<C_1+C_2$&$\xi< 1-\frac {C_2}{C_0}$&&SUC-C& $C_2/(1-\xi)$ \\\hline
&$\xi=1-\frac{C_2}{C_0}$& $\xi<\beta$ &SUC-C& $C_3$\\\hline
&&$\xi\geq\beta$&SUC/SOC/ZS-C&$C_3$\\\hline
&$1-\frac{C_2}{C_0}<\xi<\frac{C_1}{C_0}$&$\xi<\beta$ &SUC-SUC/SOC/ZS& $C_3$\\\hline
&&$\xi=\beta$&SUC/SOC/ZS-SUC/SOC/ZS& $C_3$\\\hline
&&$\xi>\beta$&SUC/SOC/ZS-SUC& $C_3$\\\hline
&$\xi= \frac{C_1}{C_0}$&$\xi\leq\beta$&C-SUC/SOC/ZS&$C_3$\\\hline
&&$\xi>\beta$&C-SUC&$C_3$\\\hline
&$\xi> \frac{C_1}{C_0}$&&C-SUC&$C_1/\xi$\\\hline\hline
$C_3<\min\{C_0,C_1+C_2\}$&$\xi< 1-\frac{C_2}{C_3}$&&SUC-C& $C_2/(1-\xi)$\\\hline
&$\xi= 1-\frac{C_2}{C_3}$&$\xi<\beta$&SUC-C& $C_3$\\\hline
&&$\xi\geq\beta$&SUC/SOC/ZS-C&$C_3$\\\hline
&$1-\frac{C_2}{C_3}<\xi<\frac{C_1}{C_3}$&$\xi<\beta$&SUC-SOC&$C_3$\\\hline
&&$\xi=\beta$&SOC-SUC/SOC/ZS, SUC/ZS-SOC&$C_3$\\\hline
&&$\xi>\beta$&SOC-SUC&$C_3$\\\hline
&$\xi=\frac{C_1}{C_3}$&$\xi\leq\beta$&C-SUC/SOC/ZS&$C_3$\\\hline
&&$\xi>\beta$&C-SUC&$C_3$\\\hline
&$\xi>\frac{C_1}{C_3}$&&C-SUC&$C_1/\xi$\\\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{Possible stationary states under different network conditions: In the fourth column, the stationary states on the left of a dash are for link 1, and those on the right for link 2. A slash means ``or''. Here $q_1=\xi q$ and $q_2=(1-\xi)q$. \citep{jin2012statics}}\label{possibless}
\end{center}
\etb
\section{A {Poincar\'e } map of circular information propagation}
When $C_0<\min\{C_1+C_2,C_3\}$ or $C_1+C_2\leq \min\{C_0,C_3\}$; i.e., when the upstream or the middle parts of the DM network are bottlenecks, \reft{possibless} shows that stationary states on links 1 and 2 are both UC. As shown in \citep{jin2009network}, in these cases the stationary states will be reached in a finite time under any initial conditions. Thus, these stationary states are always stable.
In this study, we focus our discussions on the stability of the kinematic wave model, \refe{simple-lwr} with \refe{simple-flux}, when $C_3\leq C_0$ and $C_3<C_1+C_2$; i.e., when the downstream link 3 imposes a bottleneck for the whole network.
We denote two sets of $\xi$ by
\begin{eqnarray*}
\Xi_1&=&\{\xi: \frac{C_1}{C_3}\leq \xi\leq 1, \mbox{ or } 1-\frac{C_2}{C_3}<\xi<\frac{C_1}{C_3} \mbox{ and }\xi\geq \beta; C_3\leq C_0 \mbox{ and } C_3<C_1+C_2\}\\
\Xi_2&=&\{\xi: 0\leq \xi\leq 1-\frac{C_2}{C_3}, \mbox{ or } 1-\frac{C_2}{C_3}<\xi<\frac{C_1}{C_3} \mbox{ and }\xi\leq \beta; C_3\leq C_0 \mbox{ and } C_3<C_1+C_2\}.
\end{eqnarray*}
The two sets are collectively exhaustive and overlap only when $1-\frac{C_2}{C_3}<\xi<\frac{C_1}{C_3} \mbox{ and }\xi = \beta$.
\subsection{The derivation of a {Poincar\'e } map}
\begin{figure}\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=5in]{dm2poincare}\caption{Circular information propagation in the DM network and two {Poincar\'e } sections}\label{dm2poincare}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
From \reft{possibless}, when $\xi\in\Xi_1$, links 1 and 2 are stationary at OC and UC, respectively; when $\xi\in\Xi_2$, links 1 and 2 are stationary at UC and OC, respectively. Since shock and rarefaction waves travel upstream in OC states and downstream in UC states, perturbations to a stationary state will circulate with shock or rarefaction waves on the two intermediate links. That is, the two intermediate links are closed by the diverge and the merge to form a circular path for information propagation. In particular, the information propagation direction is counterclockwise when $\xi\in \Xi_1$ and clockwise when $\xi\in \Xi_2$, as shown in \reff{dm2poincare}.
In the following we study the dynamics associated with circular information propagation in terms of {Poincar\'e } maps, which were originally developed to study periodical movements of celestial bodies \citep[][Chapter 10]{wiggins2003chaos}.
Note that, traditionally, {Poincar\'e } maps were used for ordinary differential equations, but here we derive a {Poincar\'e } map for a system of two partial differential equations in \refe{simple-lwr}.
First for $\xi\in\Xi_1$, we define a {Poincar\'e } section at the downstream boundary of link 1, $(1,X_1^-)$, as shown in \reff{dm2poincare}.
At $t$, we apply a small perturbation to a stationary state at the point and denote the out-flux by $v_1(t)$. Then the perturbation will travel backward on link 1 to the diverge and then forward on link 2 to the merge.
When the perturbation reaches the point again after $T$, we obtain $v_1(t+T)$ as a {Poincar\'e } map of $v_1(t)$, $v_1(t+T)=F_1 v_1(t)$, which is a one-dimensional discrete dynamical system. The {Poincar\'e } map can be derived based on the propagation of kinematic waves on the two intermediate links as follows.
\begin{enumerate}
\item At $t$, a small perturbation is applied on link 1 at $(1,X_1^-)$, so that its out-flux becomes $v_1(t)$. Since link 1 is stationary at OC, we have $d_1(X_1^-,t)=C_1$, and the traffic state at the point becomes $(C_1,v_1(t))$, which propagates upstream.
\item At $t+T_1$, the perturbed state $(C_1, v_1(t))$ on link 1 reaches the diverge. Since link 2 is stationary at UC, $s_2(0^+,t+T_1)=C_2$. Then from \refe{divergemodel}, the in-flux on link 2 becomes \footnote{Note that here the route choice proportion $\xi$ is always constant.}
\begin{eqnarray*}
u_2(t+T_1)&=&\min\{(1-\xi) C_0, \frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v_1(t) , C_2\}.
\end{eqnarray*}
Then the traffic state on link 2 at $(2,0^+)$ becomes $(u_2(t+T_1),C_2)$, which propagates downstream.
\item At $t=t+T$, \footnote{The exact value of $T$ depends on the length and fundamental diagram of link 1 as well as traffic states, as shown in \citep{jin2009network}.} $(u_2(t+T_1),C_2)$ on link 2 reaches the merge. Then from \refe{mergemodel}, the out-flux on link 1 becomes
\begin{eqnarray*}
v_1(t+T)&=&\min\{C_1, \max\{C_3-u_2(t+T_1), \beta C_3\}\}.
\end{eqnarray*}
\end{enumerate}
Therefore, we have
\begin{eqnarray*}
v_1(t+T)&=&\min\{C_1, \max\{C_3-\min\{(1-\xi) C_0, \frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v_1(t) , C_2\}, \beta C_3\}\}\nonumber\\
&=&\min\{C_1, \max\{C_3-(1-\xi) C_0 , C_3-C_2, \beta C_3, C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v_1(t)\}\}\nonumber\\
&=&\min\{C_1,\max\{A_1, C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v_1(t)\}\} \label{discreteds}
\end{eqnarray*}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
A_1\equiv\max\{C_3-(1-\xi) C_0 , C_3-C_2, \beta C_3\}. \label{def:A}
\end{eqnarray}
In the derivation, we use some basic properties of min and max operators given in Appendix A.
Thus, we have the following {Poincar\'e } map
\begin{eqnarray}
v_1(t+T)&=&F_1 v_1=\min\{C_1, \max\{A_1, C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v_1\}\}. \label{def:Fmap}
\end{eqnarray}
Similarly, for $\xi\in\Xi_2$, we can derive the following {Poincar\'e } map:
\begin{eqnarray}
v_2(t+T')&=&F_2 v_2(t) = \min\{C_2, \max\{A_2,C_3- \frac{\xi}{1-\xi} v_2(t) \}\}, \label{def:Fpmap}
\end{eqnarray}
where $v_2(t)$ is the perturbed out-flux on link 2 at $(2, X_2^-)$, and
\begin{eqnarray}
A_2\equiv\max\{C_3-\xi C_0, C_3-C_1, (1-\beta) C_3 \}. \label{def:Ap}
\end{eqnarray}
Comparing \refe{def:Fmap} and \refe{def:Fpmap}, we can see that they are symmetric in the sense that they are equivalent if $v_1$, $\xi$, $C_1$, and $\beta$ are swapped with $v_2$, $1-\xi$, $C_2$, and $1-\beta$ respectively.
Note that a discrete dynamical system similar to \refe{def:Fmap} was first derived in \citep{jin2009network}, but was not thoroughly analyzed as {Poincar\'e } maps. Here the new {Poincar\'e } maps, \refe{def:Fmap} and \refe{def:Fpmap}, are more complete, since they apply to a more general merging model \refe{mergemodel} and more network conditions.
If we define a new variable $v(t)=\cas{{ll}v_1(t),&\xi\in \Xi_1\\C_3-v_2(t),&\xi \in \Xi_2}$, then we can obtain a unified {Poincar\'e } map: $v(t+T)=F v(t)$, where
\begin{eqnarray}
F v&\equiv&\cas{{ll}F_1 v, &\xi\in\Xi_1\\C_3-F_2(C_3-v),&\xi\in\Xi_2}\nonumber\\
&=&\cas{{ll}\min\{C_1, \max\{A_1, C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v\}\},&\xi\in \Xi_1\\
\max\{C_3-C_2,\min\{A_2',\frac{\xi}{1-\xi}(C_3-v)\}\}, &\xi\in\Xi_2 \label{pmap}
}
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
A_2'\equiv C_3-A_2=\min\{\xi C_0,C_1,\beta C_3\}. \label{def:A2p}
\end{eqnarray}
From \reft{possibless}, it can be easily verified that the fixed point of \refe{pmap} has the same flow-rate as in the corresponding stationary states. That is, we have the following theorem.
\begin{theorem} \label{thm:fixedpoint}
When $\xi\in \Xi_1$, the fixed point of \refe{pmap} is $v^*=\xi q$, where $q$ is given in \reft{possibless} under the same network conditions.
Namely, the fixed point is
\begin{eqnarray}
v^*&=&\cas{{ll} C_1, & \frac{C_1}{C_3} \leq \xi \leq 1;\\ \xi C_3, & \xi\in(1-\frac{C_2}{C_3},\frac{C_1}{C_3}) \mbox{ and } \xi \geq \beta.} \label{Fmap:fp}
\end{eqnarray}
When $\xi \in \Xi_2$, the fixed point of \refe{pmap} is $v^*=C_3-(1-\xi) q$, where $q$ is given in \reft{possibless} under the same network conditions.
Namely, the fixed point is
\begin{eqnarray}
v^*&=&\cas{{ll} C_3-C_2, & 0\leq \xi \leq 1-\frac{C_2}{C_3};\\ \xi C_3, & \xi\in(1-\frac{C_2}{C_3},\frac{C_1}{C_3})\mbox{ and } \xi\leq \beta.} \label{Fpmap:fp}
\end{eqnarray}
\end{theorem}
\subsection{Finite-time stable fixed points of the {Poincar\'e } map}
For a discrete dynamical system, \refe{pmap}, a fixed point is finite-time stable, if and only if the dynamical system, starting from any initial conditions, converges to the fixed point in a finite number of time-steps \citep{haimo1986finite,bhat2000finite}.
Then we have the following theorem, whose proof is given in Appendix B.
\begin{theorem} \label{thm:fts} For DM networks with $\xi\in \Xi_1$, \refe{pmap} is finite-time stable at $v^*=C_1$ when $\frac {C_1}{C_3}\leq \xi\leq 1$; or at $v^*=\xi C_3$ when $\xi\in(1-\frac{C_2}{C_3},\frac{C_1}{C_3})$ and $\xi= \beta$; or at $v^*=\xi C_3$ when $C_3=C_0$, $\xi\in(1-\frac{C_2}{C_3},\frac{C_1}{C_3})$, and $\xi>\beta$. Similarly, for $\xi\in \Xi_2$, \refe{pmap} is finite-time stable at $v^*=C_3-C_2$ when $0\leq\xi \leq 1-\frac{C_2}{C_3}$; or at $v^*=\xi C_3$ when $C_3=C_0$, $\xi\in(1-\frac{C_2}{C_3},\frac{C_1}{C_3})$, and $\xi< \beta$.
\end{theorem}
In \citep{jin2009network}, it was shown that the kinematic wave model \refe{simple-lwr} also reaches stationary states in a finite period of time under the corresponding network conditions. This demonstrates the consistency between the {Poincar\'e } map \refe{pmap} and the original kinematic wave model in finite-time stable traffic dynamics.
\section{Stability of SOC-SUC and SUC-SOC stationary states}
From Theorem \ref{thm:fts}, the DM network converge to stationary states in a finite period of time except for $C_3<\min\{C_0, C_1+C_2\}$ and $\xi\in \tilde \Xi_1$ or $\xi\in \tilde \Xi_2$, where
\begin{eqnarray*}
\tilde \Xi_1&=&\{\xi\in(1-\frac{C_2}{C_3}, \frac{C_1}{C_3}) \mbox{ and } \xi>\beta; C_3<\min\{C_0, C_1+C_2\}\}\\
\tilde \Xi_2&=&\{\xi\in(1-\frac{C_2}{C_3},\frac{C_1}{C_3}) \mbox{ and } \xi<\beta; C_3<\min\{C_0, C_1+C_2\}\}
\end{eqnarray*}
From \reft{possibless}, we can see that the network is stationary at SOC-SUC and SUC-SOC for $\xi\in \tilde \Xi_1$ and $\tilde \Xi_2$, respectively. In both cases, the fixed point of \refe{pmap} is $v^*=\xi C_3$.
In this section we focus on the stability of the fixed point.
\subsection{Local stability analysis with Lyapunov's first method}
When $\xi\in \tilde \Xi_1$, we denote a small perturbation of $v$ around the fixed point by $\tilde v=v-\xi C_3$. Since $v\approx \xi C_3$, we have $C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v\approx \xi C_3$, which is greater than $A_1$ and smaller than $C_1$. Thus \refe{pmap} is equivalent to a local linear map:
\begin{eqnarray}
\tilde F \tilde v&=&-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} \tilde v, \label{stabilityds}
\end{eqnarray}
which leads to $\tilde F^n \tilde v=(-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi})^n \tilde v$.
Since $\frac{1-\xi}{\xi}>0$ for $\xi\in \tilde \Xi_1$, the map is always oscillatory. The local stability of \refe{pmap} depends on the magnitude of $\frac{1-\xi}{\xi}$. Following the first Lyapunov method \citep{lasalle1976stability,slotine1991applied,galor2004introduction}, we obtain the following stability properties of the original {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}.
\begin{theorem}\label{lyapunov1}
For a DM network with $\xi\in \tilde \Xi_1$, which admits a SOC-SUC stationary state, the stability of the fixed point of the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}, is as follows:
(i) When $\frac{1-\xi}{\xi}\geq 1$; i.e., when $\xi\leq \frac 12$, \refe{stabilityds} is unstable, and, therefore, \refe{pmap} is locally unstable. In this case, the SOC-SUC stationary state is unstable, and PPO (persistent periodic oscillatory) traffic patterns develop in the network;
(ii) When $0\leq \frac{1-\xi}{\xi}<1$; i.e., when $\xi> \frac 12$, \refe{stabilityds} is asymptotically stable, and, therefore, \refe{pmap} is asymptotically stable. In this case, the SOC-SUC stationary state is asymptotically stable, and DPO (damped periodic oscillatory) traffic patterns develop in the network.
\end{theorem}
Similarly, we can obtain the following corollary for fixed points corresponding to SUC-SOC stationary states when $\xi\in\tilde \Xi_2$.
\begin{corollary}\label{lyapunov1cor}
For a DM network with $\xi\in \tilde \Xi_2$, which admits a SUC-SOC stationary state, the stability of the fixed point of the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}, is as follows:
(i) When $\frac{\xi}{1-\xi}\geq 1$; i.e., when $\xi\geq \frac 12$, \refe{pmap} is locally unstable. In this case, the SUC-SOC stationary state is unstable, and the DM network has PPO solutions;
(ii) When $0\leq \frac{\xi}{1-\xi}<1$; i.e., when $\xi< \frac 12$, \refe{pmap} is asymptotically stable. In this case, the SUC-SOC stationary state is asymptotically stable, and the DM network has DPO solutions.
\end{corollary}
Here we obtain the necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of both PPO and DPO solutions in a DM network, which are consistent with those in \citep{jin2009network}.
\subsection{Periodical points of the {Poincar\'e } map}
Furthermore, as shown in \citep{jin2009network}, the PPO solutions tend to have constant oscillation magnitudes in both densities and flow-rates. In this subsection, we will relate these magnitudes to periodical points of the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap} with $\xi\in \tilde \Xi_1$ or $\tilde \Xi_2$.
For a discrete {Poincar\'e } map \refe{pmap}, if $F^n v=v$ and $F^k v\neq v$ for $k<n$, then $v$ is a periodical point of period $n$ \citep[][Chapter 4]{holmgren1996first}. In this sense, the fixed point of the {Poincar\'e } map, $v^*=\xi C_3$, is a periodical point of period $1$.
When $\xi\in\tilde \Xi_1$, we first attempt to find periodical points of period 2, which satisfy $F^2 v=v$; i.e.,
\begin{eqnarray}
v&=&F^2 v\equiv\min\{C_1, \max\{A_1, C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} \min\{C_1, \max\{A_1, C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v\}\}\}\}. \label{eqn:period2}
\end{eqnarray}
Obviously, the fixed point $v^*=\xi C_3$ is a solution of \refe{eqn:period2}.
When the fixed point of \refe{pmap} is asymptotically stable; i.e., when $\xi>\frac 12$, we have the following lemma, whose proof is given in Appendix C.
\begin{lemma} \label{lemma:p1}
For a DM network with $\xi\in\tilde \Xi_1$ and $\xi>\frac 12$, \refe{eqn:period2} has no solutions different from $v^*=\xi C_3$; i.e., the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}, has no periodical points of period 2 when \refe{pmap} is asymptotically stable or when the network has DPO solutions.
\end{lemma}
When the fixed point of \refe{pmap} is unstable; i.e., when $\xi\leq \frac 12$, we have the following lemma, whose proof is also given in Appendix C.
\begin{lemma}\label{lemma:p2}
For a DM network with $\xi\in\tilde \Xi_1$ and $\xi\leq \frac 12$, the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}, has two periodical points of period 2, $v^-$ and $v^+$:
\begin{subequations}
\begin{eqnarray}
v^-&=&\max\{A_1,C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} C_1\}<v^*,\\
v^+&=&\min\{C_1, C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} A_1\}>v^*.
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
That is, $v^-$ and $v^+$ are two solutions of \refe{eqn:period2}, which are different from the fixed point.
In addition,
\begin{subequations}
\begin{eqnarray}
F v^-&=&v^+,\\
F v^+&=&v^-,
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
Thus $\{v^*, v^-,v^+\}$ is an invariant set of the {Poincar\'e } map \citep{lasalle1976stability}.
When $\xi=\frac 12$, any $v\in[v^-,v^*)\cup (v^*,v^+]$ is a periodical point of period 2.
\end{lemma}
Furthermore, the following lemma, whose proof is also given in Appendix C, shows that there are no periodical points of period 4 for \refe{pmap} when $\xi\leq \frac 12$.
\begin{lemma} \label{lemma:p3} For a DM network with $\xi\in\tilde\Xi_1$ and $\xi\leq\frac 12$, there are no periodical points of period 4 for the {Poincar\'e } map \refe{pmap}.
\end{lemma}
From Lemmas \ref{lemma:p1}, \ref{lemma:p2}, and \ref{lemma:p3}, we then have the following theorem.
\begin{theorem} \label{thm:period}
For a DM network with $\xi\in\tilde\Xi_1$, which has a SOC-SUC stationary state, the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}, has one periodical point of period 1, $v^*=\xi C_3$. When $\xi < \frac 12$, it has two periodical points of period 2, $v^-=\max\{A_1,C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} C_1\}<v^*$ and $v^+=\min\{C_1, C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} A_1\}>v^*$; when $\xi=\frac 12$, it has an infinite number of periodical points of period 2 between $v^-=\max\{A_1,C_3- C_1\}$ and $v^+=\min\{C_1, C_3- A_1\}$. The map has no other periodical points.
\end{theorem}
{\em Proof}. According to Sarkovskii's theorem \citep[][Chapter 5]{holmgren1996first}, if a discrete map has no periodical points of period 2, it only has a fixed point of period 1. Then from Lemma \ref{lemma:p1}, the {Poincar\'e } map \refe{def:Fmap} has only one fixed point of period 1 when $\xi>\frac 12$.
Sarkovskii's theorem also states that, if a discrete map has no periodical points of period 4, then it only has periodical points of periods 1 and 2. Then from Lemma \refe{lemma:p2}, the {Poincar\'e } map \refe{def:Fmap} has only one fixed point of period 1, two periodical points of period 2 when $\xi< \frac 12$, and an infinite number of periodical points of period 2 when $\xi=\frac 12$. \eop
Similar to Theorem \ref{thm:period}, the following corollary states periodical points of the {Poincar\'e } map when $\xi\in\tilde \Xi_2$.
\begin{corollary} \label{Gperiod}
For a DM network with $\xi\in\tilde \Xi_2$, which has a SUC-SOC stationary state, the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}, has one periodical point of period 1, $v^*=\xi C_3$.
When $\xi>\frac 12$, it has two periodical points of period 2, $v^-=\max\{C_3-C_2,\frac{\xi}{1-\xi} A_2'\}<v^*$ and $v^+=\min\{A_2',\frac{\xi}{1-\xi}C_2\}>v^*$; when $\xi=\frac 12$, any point $v\in[v^-,v^*)\cup (v^*, v^+]$ is a periodical point of period 2. The map has no other periodical points.
\end{corollary}
In addition, we have the following theorem regarding chaotic solutions to the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}.
\begin{corollary}
For a DM network with $\xi\in\tilde \Xi_1$ or $\xi\in\tilde \Xi_2$, the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}, has no chaotic solutions.
\end{corollary}
{\em Proof}. According to \citep{li1975period,burns2011sharkovsky}, chaotic solutions exist if and only if when there is a periodical point of period 3. Thus from Theorem \ref{thm:period} and Corollary \ref{Gperiod}, there exist no chaotic solutions for the {Poincar\'e } map. \eop
In the following we consider two examples.
First, we consider the DM network studied in \citep{jin2003dissertation,jin2005paramics,jin2009network}: $C_0=3$, $C_1=1$, $C_2=2$, $C_3=2$, and $\beta=\frac{C_1}{C_1+C_2}=\frac 13$. In this network, $C_3<\min\{C_0,C_1+C_2\}$, $A_1=\max\{3\xi-1,\frac 23\}$, and $A_2'=\min\{3\xi,\frac 23\}$. The {Poincar\'e } map \refe{pmap} can be written as
\begin{eqnarray*}
F v&=&\cas{{ll} \min\{1,\max\{3\xi-1,\frac 23,2-\frac{1-\xi}\xi v\}\}, & \frac 13\leq \xi\leq 1\\\max\{0,\min\{3\xi,\frac23,\frac{\xi}{1-\xi}(2-v)\}\},&0\leq\xi\leq\frac 13}
\end{eqnarray*}
\begin{enumerate}
\item From Theorem \ref{thm:fts}, the {Poincar\'e } map is finite-time stable at $v^*=C_1=1$ when $\frac 12\leq\xi\leq 1$; or at $v^*=\xi C_3=\frac 23$ when $\xi=\frac 13$; or at $v^*=C_3-C_2=0$ when $\xi=0$.
\item From Theorem \ref{lyapunov1} and Corollary \ref{lyapunov1cor}, when $\xi\in(\frac 13, \frac 12)$, the map is locally unstable at $v^*=\xi C_3=2\xi$, which corresponds to a SOC-SUC stationary state, since $\xi\leq \frac 12$; when $\xi\in(0, \frac 13)$, the map is asymptotically stable at $v^*=\xi C_3=2\xi$, which corresponds to a SUC-SOC stationary state.
Comparing with results in \citep{jin2009network}, we can verify that PPO traffic patterns arise in an initially empty DM network when the stationary states are unstable, and DPO traffic patterns arise when the stationary states are asymptotically stable. Therefore, unstable stationary states can never be reached in an initially empty network, and asymptotically stable stationary states can be reached only after a long time. Note that this conclusion does not contradict that in \citep{jin2012statics}, where it was shown that stationary states always exist for the DM network.
\item When $\xi\in(\frac 13,\frac 12)$, $A_1=\max\{2-3(1-\xi),0,\frac 23\}=\max\{3\xi-1,0,\frac 23\}=\frac 23$. Thus from Theorem \ref{thm:period}, there are two periodical points of period 2 for the {Poincar\'e } map:
\begin{eqnarray*}
v^-&=&\max\{A,2-\frac{1-\xi}\xi \}=\max\{\frac 23,3-\frac 1\xi\},\\
v^+&=&\min\{1,2-\frac{1-\xi}\xi A\}=\min\{1,\frac 83-\frac 23 \frac 1\xi\}.
\end{eqnarray*}
For example, when $\xi=0.45$, $v^-=\frac 79$, and $v^+=1$. These two values correspond to the lower and upper magnitudes of flow-rates on link 1 in the PPO solutions as observed in \citep[][Section 7.3]{jin2003dissertation} and \citep{jin2009network}. Therefore, the periodical points of periodic 2 determine the oscillation magnitudes of PPO solutions in the DM network.
\end{enumerate}
In the second example, we consider a DM network with $C_3<\min\{C_0,C_1+C_2\}$, $C_1=C_2$, and the fair merging rule with $\beta=C_1/(C_1+C_2)=\frac 12$.
From Theorem \ref{thm:fts}, we can find all finite-time stable fixed points of the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}.
This network has SUC-SOC stationary states when $\xi\in(1-\frac{C_2}{C_3},\frac{C_1}{C_3})$ and $\xi<\frac 12$, and SOC-SUC stationary states when $\xi\in(1-\frac{C_2}{C_3},\frac{C_1}{C_3})$ and $\xi>\frac 12$.
But from Theorem \ref{lyapunov1} and Corollary \ref{lyapunov1cor}, the corresponding stationary state are always asymptotically stable. That is, the DM network has DPO solutions, but no PPO solutions. This is again consistent with numerical simulations in \citep[][Section 7.2]{jin2003dissertation}.
\section{Bifurcation of stationary states with respect to route choice proportions}
In this section, we consider the impacts of route choice proportions on traffic dynamics in the following DM network: $C_0=3$, $C_1=1.5$, $C_2=2$, $C_3=2.5$, and $\beta=0.3$. In this network, $C_3<\min\{C_0,C_1+C_2\}$, $A_1=\max\{3 \xi -0.5, 0.75\}$, and $A_2'=\min\{3\xi, 0.75\}$. The {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}, can be written as
\begin{eqnarray*}
Fv&=&\cas{{ll}\min\{1.5, \max\{3 \xi -0.5, 0.75, 2.5-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi}v\}\}, & \xi \in[0.3,1]\\\max\{0.5, \min\{3\xi, 0.75, \frac{\xi}{1-\xi} (2.5-v)\}\},& \xi\in[0,0.3]}
\end{eqnarray*}
Then the stability of the {Poincar\'e } map is as follows:
\begin{enumerate}
\item From Theorem \ref{thm:fts}, the {Poincar\'e } map is finite-time stable at $v^*=C_1=1.5$ when $\xi\in[0.6,1]$; or at $v^*=\beta C_3=0.75$ when $\xi=0.3$; or $v^*=C_3-C_2=0.5$ when $\xi\in[0,0.2]$.
\item From Theorem \ref{lyapunov1} and Corollary \ref{lyapunov1cor}, when $\xi\in(0.3, 0.5]$, the map is locally unstable at $v^*=\xi C_3=2.5\xi$, which corresponds to a SOC-SUC stationary state; when $\xi\in(0.5,0.6)$, it is asymptotically stable at $v^*=\xi C_3=2.5\xi$, which also corresponds to a SOC-SUC stationary state; when $\xi\in(0.2, 0.3)$, the map is asymptotically stable at $v^*=\xi C_3=2.5\xi$, which corresponds to a SUC-SOC stationary state.
\item From Theorem \ref{thm:period}, there are two periodical points of period 2 for the map when $\xi\in(0.3,0.5)$:
\begin{eqnarray*}
v^-&=&\max\{3\xi-0.5, 0.75, 2.5-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} 1.5 \}\\
v^+&=&\min\{1.5, 2.5-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} 0.75, 3\xi-0.5+0.5\frac{1-\xi}{\xi}\}.
\end{eqnarray*}
When $\xi=0.5$, any point $v\in[v^-,v*)\cup(v^*,v^+]=[1,1.25)\cup(1.25,1.5]$ is a periodical point of period 2.
\end{enumerate}
In the following we consider two numerical examples:
\begin{enumerate}
\item When $\xi=0.55$ with initial $v=1.1$, solutions of $F^n v$ and the orbit of the {Poincar\'e } map \refe{pmap} are shown in \reff{Fmap1}.
Since $\xi>0.5$, the {Poincar\'e } map is asymptotically stable, and $F^n v$ converges to $v^*=\xi C_3=1.375$.
\item When $\xi=0.4$, $A_1=0.75$, and solutions of $F^n v$ and the orbit of the {Poincar\'e } map \refe{pmap} are shown in \reff{Fmap2}.
Since $\xi<0.5$, the map is locally unstable and oscillates between two periodical points: $v^-=0.75$ and $v^+=1.375$.
\end{enumerate}
We can clearly see that the numerical results are consistent with the theoretical predictions.
\bfg\begin{center} $\begin{array}{c@{\hspace{0.3in}}c}
\includegraphics[width=3.2in]{Fmap1sol} &
\includegraphics[width=3.2in]{Fmap1} \\
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\mbox{\bf (a)}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\mbox{\bf (b)}}
\end{array}$ \end{center} \caption{Solutions of $F^n v$ and the orbit of the {Poincar\'e } map \refe{def:Fmap} for $C_0=3$, $C_1=1.5$, $C_2=2$, $C_3=2.5$, $\beta=0.3$, and $\xi=0.55$ with initial $v=1.1$}\label{Fmap1} \efg
\bfg\begin{center} $\begin{array}{c@{\hspace{0.3in}}c}
\includegraphics[width=3.2in]{Fmap2sol} &
\includegraphics[width=3.2in]{Fmap2} \\
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\mbox{\bf (a)}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\mbox{\bf (b)}}
\end{array}$ \end{center} \caption{Solutions of $F^n v$ and the orbit of the {Poincar\'e } map \refe{def:Fmap} for $C_0=3$, $C_1=1.5$, $C_2=2$, $C_3=2.5$, $\beta=0.3$, and $\xi=0.4$ with initial $v=1.1$}\label{Fmap2} \efg
We can see that the {Poincar\'e } map \refe{pmap} always has one fixed point, but its stability property of can change with the route choice proportion, $\xi$, in a DM network when $C_3<\min\{C_0, C_1+C_2\}$: it is finite-time stable for $\xi\in[0,0.2]\cup \{0.3\}\cup[0.6,1]$, asymptotically stable for $\xi\in(0.2,0.3)\cup(0.5,0.6)$, and unstable for $\xi\in(0.3,0.5]$.
Therefore, the Hopf bifurcation phenomenon occurs with respect to the route choice proportion $\xi$, which is the bifurcation parameter \citep[][Chapter 7]{holmgren1996first}. Here a pair of periodical points of period two form a one-dimensional limit cycle.
The bifurcation diagram of \refe{pmap} is shown in \reff{bifurcation1}. In the figure, all fixed points are shown on the solid and thick piecewise linear curves, finite-time stable fixed points are marked by circles, and the points on the dashed lines are for periodical points of period 2. In addition, the arrows show the direction of iterations. Thus we can see that fixed points for $\xi\in(0.2,0.3)$ and $\xi\in(0.5,0.6)$ are stable, those for $\xi\in(0.3,0.5]$ are unstable, but the periodical points are stable.
Since the route choice proportions are determined by drivers' route choice behaviors in a road network, the bifurcation study suggests that a traffic system's stability can be significantly impacted by drivers' choices of routes.
\bfg\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=6in]{bifurcation1.jpg}\caption{The bifurcation diagram of the {Poincar\'e } map \refe{pmap}: $C_0=3$, $C_1=1.5$, $C_2=2$, $C_3=2.5$, and $\beta=0.3$. Here $\xi$ is the bifurcation parameter.}\label{bifurcation1}
\end{center}\efg
\commentout{
Periodicity follows from Excercise 4.4 of Chapter 1 \citep{lasalle1976stability}.
Three types of stability: zeroth-order stable, asymptotically stable, limit cycle
\del{to add simulation results here?}
\citep{kuznetsov2004elements}: Definition 2.11 ``The apperance of a topologically nonequivalent phase portrait under variation of parameters is called a bifurcation.'' ``bifurcation parameter value'', ``local bifurcations as bifurcations of equilibria or fixed points''
flip bifurcation? section 4.4
\add{This means that the mapping from initial conditions to final solutions is not continuous?}
\add{strong stability?}
}
\section{Application of the {Poincar\'e } map approach to analyzing traffic dynamics in general network structures}
From the analyses in the preceding sections, an insight is that the {Poincar\'e } map approach can be used to analyze traffic dynamics when shock and rarefaction waves propagate in a circular pattern, which is caused by the bottleneck effects of diverging and merging junctions. Another insight is that persistent periodic oscillations can occur when the {Poincar\'e } map is unstable locally. In this section, we further apply the {Poincar\'e } map to analyzing traffic dynamics in more general networks.
\subsection{$(DM)^n$ networks}
First, we expect unstable traffic patterns can be observed in networks that embed a DM network. An example is the $3\times 3$ grid network of one-way roads shown in \reff{3by3dm2}. It is possible that, under certain demand patterns, turning proportions, and traffic signals, traffic dynamics are dominated by those in the DM network. If green and red links carry free and congested flow respectively, there exists a circular information path as shown by the dashed line, whose arrows represent the information propagation direction. Obviously we can apply the same {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}, to demonstrate that traffic can become unstable in the network. In this sense, the DM network structure is a sufficient condition for the existence of unstable traffic dynamics in a road network.
\begin{figure} \begin{center}
\includegraphics[height=2.5in]{3by3grid4}
\caption{A $3\times 3$ grid network that embeds the DM network} \label{3by3dm2} \end{center}
\end{figure}
Second, we apply the {Poincar\'e } map approach to analyzing traffic dynamics in a $2\times 2$ grid network, shown in \reff{2by2dm2squared}(a), in which information propagates in a circular fashion when red links are congested and green links not. We assume that traffic dynamics are dominated by the subnetwork shown in \reff{2by2dm2squared}(a), which has two diverge junctions and two merge junctions. We refer to the network in \reff{2by2dm2squared}(b) as a $(DM)^2$ network. Here we consider a symmetric case shown in in \reff{2by2dm2squared}(b), in which all links have the same length, free-flow speed, and shock wave speed in congested traffic, the origin demands $d=3$, destination supplies $s=2$, the capacities of four links are 1, 2, 1, and 2, respectively, and the turning proportion is $\xi$ to links 1 and 3. We denote the out-fluxes of links 1 and 3 by $v_1(t)$ and $v_3(t)$, respectively. Since links 1 and 3 are congested, and links 2 and 4 not for $\frac 13\xi\frac 12$, we can obtain the following {Poincar\'e } map:
\begin{subequations} \label{dm2squared_pm}
\begin{eqnarray}
v_1(t+T)&=&\min\{1,2-\frac{1-\xi}\xi v_3(t)\},\\
v_3(t+T)&=&\min\{1,2-\frac{1-\xi}\xi v_1(t)\},
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
where $T$ is determined by the link length, free-flow speed, and shock wave speed in congested traffic. If initial conditions are also symmetric, then $v_1(t)=v_3(t)$, and \refe{dm2squared_pm} is equivalent to the {Poincar\'e } map for the DM network:
\begin{eqnarray*}
v_1(t+T)&=&\min\{1,2-\frac{1-\xi}\xi v_3(t)\},
\end{eqnarray*}
which is a special case of \refe{pmap} discussed in Section 4.2. In this case, the network has one stationary state $v_1^*=v_3^*= 2\xi$, which is unstable and oscillates between $v^-=\max\{\frac 23, 3-\frac 1\xi\}$ and $v^+=\max\{1,\frac 83-\frac 23 \frac 1\xi\}$. However, if the initial conditions are asymmetric, \refe{dm2squared_pm} becomes
\begin{eqnarray*}
v_1(t+2T)&=&\min\{1,2-\frac{1-\xi}\xi \min\{1,2-\frac{1-\xi}\xi v_1(t)\}\},
\end{eqnarray*}
for which $v_1^*=2\xi$ is still a fixed point (stationary state). If we apply a perturbation $\tilde v_1(t)$ to $v_1^*$, we have
\begin{eqnarray*}
\tilde v_1(t+2T)&=&(\frac{1-\xi}\xi)^2 \tilde v_1(t),
\end{eqnarray*}
which is unstable, since $\frac{1-\xi}\xi>1$ for $\xi\in (\frac 13,\frac 12)$. Therefore, the fixed point $v_1^*$ is still unstable, but it does not oscillate since $(\frac{1-\xi}\xi)^2 >0$. Actually we can find two fixed points for \refe{dm2squared_pm}:
\bi
\item If $v_1^*$ is decreased; i.e., if $\tilde v_1(t)<0$, then from \refe{dm2squared_pm} we can see that $v_3(t+T)$ increases and $v_1(t+2T)$ decreases. However, since $v_3(t+T)$ cannot be greater than 1, \refe{dm2squared_pm} has a new fixed point: $v_3^*=1$ and $v_1^*=2-\frac{1-\xi} \xi$, which is between 0 and 1.
\item Similarly, if $v_1^*$ is increased; i.e., if $\tilde v_1(t)>0$, \refe{dm2squared_pm} has another fixed point: $v_1^*=1$ and $v_3^*=2-\frac{1-\xi} \xi$.
\ei
These two fixed points are stable. These results can be easily confirmed by CTM simulations.
\begin{figure} \begin{center}
$\begin{array}{c@{\hspace{0.3in}}c}
\includegraphics[height=2.5in]{2by2grid3} &
\includegraphics[height=2.5in]{dm2squared} \\
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\mbox{\bf (a)}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\mbox{\bf (b)}}
\end{array}$
\caption{A $2\times 2$ grid network (a) and the $(DM)^2$ network (b)} \label{2by2dm2squared} \end{center}
\end{figure}
Third, we consider a $4\times 3$ grid network in \reff{4by3dm2cubed}(a), which embeds a $(DM)^3$ network shown in \reff{4by3dm2cubed}(b). Under certain conditions, it is possible that there exists a circular information propagation path formed by congested (red) and uncongested (green) links. For the $(DM)^3$ network, we have the same set-up as in the $(DM)^2$ network in \reff{2by2dm2squared}(b). For $\xi\in(\frac 13,\frac 12)$, we can then obtain the following {Poincar\'e } map:
\begin{subequations} \label{dm2cubed_pm}
\begin{eqnarray}
v_1(t+T)&=&\min\{1,2-\frac{1-\xi}\xi v_5(t)\},\\
v_3(t+T)&=&\min\{1,2-\frac{1-\xi}\xi v_1(t)\},\\
v_5(t+T)&=&\min\{1,2-\frac{1-\xi}\xi v_3(t)\},
\end{eqnarray}
\end{subequations}
which has a fixed point $v_1^*=v_3^*=v_5^*=2\xi$. For a small perturbation $\tilde v_1(t)$ around the fixed point, the corresponding map becomes
\begin{eqnarray*}
\tilde v_1(t+3T)&=&-(\frac{1-\xi}\xi)^3 \tilde v_1(t),
\end{eqnarray*}
which is unstable, since $\frac{1-\xi}\xi>1$ for $\xi\in (\frac 13,\frac 12)$, and oscillates, since $-(\frac{1-\xi}\xi)^3<0$. Therefore PPO traffic patterns can develop in this network.
\begin{figure} \begin{center}
$\begin{array}{c@{\hspace{0.3in}}c}
\includegraphics[height=2.5in]{4by3grid} &
\includegraphics[height=2.5in]{dm2cubed} \\
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\mbox{\bf (a)}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\mbox{\bf (b)}}
\end{array}$
\caption{A $4\times 3$ grid network (a) and the $(DM)^3$ network (b)} \label{4by3dm2cubed} \end{center}
\end{figure}
From the analyses above, we can make the following conclusions regarding a general $(DM)^n$ ($n\geq 1$) network with a symmetric set-up as in \reff{2by2dm2squared}(b) and \reff{4by3dm2cubed}(b) and $\xi\in(\frac 13,\frac12)$: (i) The network can be stationary at $v_1^*=2\xi$, which is unstable, and the perturbation $\tilde v_1(t)$ has the following dynamics:
\begin{eqnarray}
\tilde v_1(t+nT)&=&-(\frac{1-\xi}\xi)^n \tilde v_1(t).
\end{eqnarray}
(ii) When $n$ is odd, asymptotic PPO traffic patterns can appear under any non-stationary initial conditions. (iii) When $n$ is even, asymptotic PPO traffic patterns can appear under symmetric non-stationary initial conditions, but two more stable stationary states can appear under asymmetric non-stationary initial conditions. (iv) These networks can be embedded in a large grid network. (v) All these observations can be confirmed with CTM simulations.
\subsection{Beltway networks}
In the $(DM)^n$ networks, circular information propagation paths consist of both congested and uncongested links. In this subsection, we consider another type of circular information propagation paths consisting of all congested links on a ring road. A congested ring road with on- and off-ramps is called a beltway, whose traffic dynamics were first studied in \citep{daganzo1996gridlock}. It was revealed that the beltway network can become totally gridlocked. In \citep{daganzo2007gridlock}, the gridlock mechanism was also discussed for urban networks. In this subsection we apply the {Poincar\'e } map approach to analyze traffic dynamics in a beltway network, shown in \reff{4by4beltway}(b), which can be embedded in a grid network. Here we consider a symmetric beltway network with $n$ pairs of alternate on- and off-ramps, in which the ring road and on-ramps are congested, and the off-ramps are not. In addition, we apply the priority-based merge model in \refe{mergemodel}, where the on-ramp's merging ratio is $\beta$, and the FIFO diverge model in \refe{divergemodel}, where the turning proportion to the off-ramp is $\xi$.
\begin{figure} \begin{center}
$\begin{array}{c@{\hspace{0.3in}}c}
\includegraphics[height=2.5in]{4by4grid} &
\includegraphics[height=2.5in]{beltway} \\
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\mbox{\bf (a)}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\mbox{\bf (b)}}
\end{array}$
\caption{A $4\times 4$ grid network (a) and a beltway network (b)} \label{4by4beltway} \end{center}
\end{figure}
As shown in \reff{4by4beltway}, we define two {Poincar\'e } sections at the upstream points of two consecutive merges and denote the two out-fluxes of the mainline road by $v(t)$ and $v_1(t)$ respectively. Then after a pair of off- and on-ramps, the out-flux becomes $v_1(t+T)=\frac{1-\beta}{1-\xi}v(t)$, where $T$ is the time for the shock wave to travel . After $n$ pairs of off- and on-ramps, we obtain the following {Poincar\'e } map:
\begin{eqnarray}
v(t+nT)&=&(\frac{1-\beta}{1-\xi})^n v(t). \label{beltway_pm}
\end{eqnarray}
In \citep{daganzo1996gridlock}, two different parameters are used: $\alpha=\frac\beta{1-\beta}$, and $\mu=\frac{\xi}{1-\xi}$. Then the coefficient $\frac{1-\beta}{1-\xi}=\frac{1+\mu}{1+\alpha}$, which is given in equation (2) of \citep{daganzo1996gridlock}. Note that the mapping in \citep{daganzo1996gridlock} was implicitly derived ``once the observer has traveled around the loop once''. This is different from our approach based on circular information propagation.
From the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{beltway_pm}, we have the following observations: (i) When $\frac{1-\beta}{1-\xi}<1$, the network converges to the gridlock state ($v(t)=0$), and the gridlock state is stable. (ii) When $\frac{1-\beta}{1-\xi}>1$, the gridlock state is still a stationary state, but it is unstable. (iii) When $\frac{1-\beta}{1-\xi}=1$, there can exist multiple stationary states. Furthermore, other results, including the flow half-life and flow recovery, in \citep{daganzo1996gridlock} can also be obtained (but omitted here) from the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{beltway_pm}.
Moreover, we can see that both network-induced unstable traffic and gridlock have to be associated with circular information propagation. As shown in \reff{circularprop}, there can only be two types of (nontrivial) circular information propagation in a road network: all links are congested and form a beltway network, or links are alternatively congested and uncongested and form a $(DM)^n$ network. \footnote{Of course when all links on a ring are uncongested, there can also exists a circular path for information propagation, but this case is trivial and not interesting.} Therefore, the $(DM)^n$ network structure is sufficient and necessary conditions for the existence of network-induced unstable traffic patterns, and the beltway network structure is sufficient and necessary conditions for the existence of network-induced gridlock states.
\begin{figure} \begin{center}
$\begin{array}{c@{\hspace{0.3in}}c}
\includegraphics[height=2.5in]{grid6by6_beltway} &
\includegraphics[height=2.5in]{grid6by6_dm} \\
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\mbox{\bf (a)}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\mbox{\bf (b)}}
\end{array}$
\caption{Two types of networks with circular information propagation: beltway network (a) and $(DM)^n$ network (b)} \label{circularprop} \end{center}
\end{figure}
\section{Conclusion}
In this study, we first studied the global traffic dynamics arising in the kinematic wave model for a diverge-merge (DM) network with two intermediate links when the downstream link constitutes a bottleneck. In stationary states, the two intermediate links admit respectively under-critical and over-critical stationary states, in which the kinematic waves propagate in a circular fashion. Then we derived a {Poincar\'e } map for flow-rates at two {Poincar\'e } sections. For the {Poincar\'e } map, which is a one-dimensional discrete dynamical system, we studied the fixed points and their stability properties. We showed that the fixed points can be unstable under the conditions when one intermediate link is strictly under-critical (SUC) and the other is strictly over-critical (SOC). Furthermore, we found that the {Poincar\'e } map can have periodical points of period 2 when it is unstable, but it has no other periodical points or chaos. We also demonstrated that the route choice proportion can cause a Hopf bifurcation in the stability of fixed points. By comparing the results for the {Poincar\'e } map with those for the kinematic wave model in previous studies, we found that the {Poincar\'e } map indeed describes the global traffic dynamics in the DM network: the fixed points of the {Poincar\'e } map correspond to stationary link flow-rates, their stability is related to the stability of stationary states, and the periodical points of period 2 yield the oscillation magnitudes in the flow-rates for persistent periodic oscillatory traffic patterns.
Thus together with \citep{jin2012statics}, this study provides us a more complete picture regarding traffic dynamics arising in the kinematic wave model of traffic dynamics in the DM network: stationary states always exist under constant boundary conditions, but a stationary state can be finite-time stable, asymptotically stable, or unstable; when it is unstable, the oscillation magnitudes are still bounded, and chaos does not arise in the DM network.
We further applied the {Poincar\'e } map approach to analyzing traffic patterns in more general $(DM)^n$ and beltway networks, which can be embedded in grid networks, since a {Poincar\'e } map can still be derived even when a circular path involves many links and junctions.
Through this study, we obtain the following insights into network traffic dynamics as well as the {Poincar\'e } map approach: (i) The $(DM)^n$ and beltway networks are the only networks that admit nontrivial circular information propagation; (ii) The Poincare map approach can be applied on circular information propagation paths with any number of junctions and links; (iii) The $(DM)^n$ networks are sufficient and necessary structures for network-induced unstable traffic patterns; and (iv) The beltway networks are sufficient and necessary structures for network-induced gridlock states.
Some of the insights on network traffic flow have been obtained in the literature with the kinematic wave model in \citep{daganzo1996gridlock,jin2009network}, but the {Poincar\'e } map approach is much simpler and more powerful, as it can be applied for very general networks and lead to much broader and deeper insights on network traffic flow.
In the future, we will be interested in collecting empirical evidences for the existence of such network-induced instability.
From the analysis we can see that the stability property of traffic dynamics in a road network is related to the network structure, link capacities, route choice proportions, and merging ratios. Therefore, incidents, route guidance strategies, and traffic signals can all cause unstable traffic patterns. In the future, we will be interested in various controlling strategies to stabilize traffic in a road network.
Another research topic is to examine the stability of traffic dynamics in a road network subject to both route choice behaviors and interactions among network bottlenecks, since unstable traffic dynamics could have impacts on users' route choice behaviors and user equilibrium in the network.
\section*{Acknowledgments}
We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. The views and results are the author's alone.
\section*{Appendix A. Some basic properties of min and max operators}
The following are some basic properties of min and max operators. Here $a$, $b$, $c$, and ${\lambda}$ are all real numbers.
\begin{eqnarray*}
\min\{a,b\}&=&-\max\{-a,-b\}\\
\max\{a,b\}&=&-\min\{-a,-b\}\\
\min\{a,\max\{b,c\}\}&=&\max\{\min\{a,b\},\min\{a,c\}\}\\
\max\{a,\min\{b,c\}\}&=&\min\{\max\{a,b\},\max\{a,c\}\}\\
\min\{a,\min\{b,c\}\}&=&\min\{a,b,c\}\\
\max\{a,\max\{b,c\}\}&=&\max\{a,b,c\}\\
a+\min\{b,c\}&=&\min\{a+b,a+c\}\\
a+\max\{b,c\}&=&\max\{a+b,a+c\}\\
{\lambda} \min\{a,b\}&=&\min\{{\lambda} a, {\lambda} b\}, {\lambda}>0\\
{\lambda} \max\{a,b\}&=&\max\{{\lambda} a, {\lambda} b\}, {\lambda}>0
\end{eqnarray*}
\section*{Appendix B. Proof of Theorem \ref{thm:fts}}
{\em Proof}. We first prove the results for $\xi\in \Xi_1$.
\begin{enumerate}
\item When $C_3\leq C_0$, $C_3<C_1+C_2$, and $\frac {C_1}{C_3}\leq \xi\leq 1$. For any initial $v\leq C_1 \leq \xi C_3$, we have $C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v \geq \xi C_3 \geq C_1$. Thus from \refe{pmap} we have $F v=C_1$, which is the fixed point. Thus the {Poincar\'e } map converges to the fixed point in one time step.
\item When $C_3\leq C_0$, $C_3<C_1+C_2$, $\xi\in(1-\frac{C_2}{C_3}, \frac{C_1}{C_3})$, and $\xi=\beta$. Since $C_3-C_2<\xi C_3$ and $C_3-(1-\xi) C_0\leq \xi C_3$, we have
\begin{eqnarray*}
F v&=&\min\{C_1,\max\{\xi C_3, C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v\}\}.
\end{eqnarray*}
If initially $v\geq \xi C_3$, then $C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v\leq \xi C_3$, and $Fv=\xi C_3 =v^* <C_1$. If initially $v< \xi C_3$, then $C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v> \xi C_3$, $F v=\min\{C_1, C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v\}>\xi C_3$, and $F^2 v=\xi C_3=v^*$. Thus the {Poincar\'e } map converges to the fixed point after at most two time-steps.
\item When $C_3=C_0<C_1+C_2$, $\xi\in(1-\frac{C_2}{C_3}, \frac{C_1}{C_3})$, and $\xi>\beta$. Since $C_3-C_2<\xi C_3$ and $\beta C_3<\xi C_3$, we have
\begin{eqnarray*}
F v&=&\min\{C_1,\max\{\xi C_3, C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v\}\}.
\end{eqnarray*}
If initially $v\geq \xi C_3$, then $C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v\leq \xi C_3$, and $Fv=\xi C_3 =v^*<C_1$. If initially $v< \xi C_3$, then $C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v> \xi C_3$, $F v=\min\{C_1, C_3-\frac{1-\xi}{\xi} v\}>\xi C_3$, and $F^2 v=\xi C_3=v^*$. Thus the {Poincar\'e } map converges to the fixed point after at most two time-steps.
\end{enumerate}
Therefore, the fixed points of \refe{pmap} are finite-time stable for $\xi\in \Xi_1$. Similarly we can prove the results for $\xi\in\Xi_2$. \eop
\section*{Appendix C. Proofs of Lemmas in Section 4}
In the following proofs, we denote ${\lambda}=\frac{1-\xi}{\xi}$.
\bi
\item {\em Proof of Lemma \ref{lemma:p1}}.
Since $\xi>\frac 12$, ${\lambda}<1$.
Assume that \refe{eqn:period2} has a solution $v<\xi C_3$, then $C_3-{\lambda} v>\xi C_3>A_1$. From \refe{eqn:period2} we have
\begin{eqnarray*}
v&=&\min\{C_1, \max\{A_1, C_3-{\lambda}\min\{C_1, C_3-{\lambda} v\}\}\}\\&=&\min\{C_1,\max\{A_1, C_3-{\lambda} C_1, C_3-{\lambda}(C_3-{\lambda} v)\}\}.
\end{eqnarray*}
Since $A_1<C_1$, $C_3-{\lambda} C_1<C_1$, and $C_3-{\lambda} (C_3-{\lambda} v)<\xi C_3<C_1$, we have
\begin{eqnarray*}
v&=&\max\{A_1, C_3-{\lambda} C_1, C_3-{\lambda}(C_3-{\lambda} v)\}.
\end{eqnarray*}
If $v=C_3-{\lambda}(C_3-{\lambda} v)$, then $v=\xi C_3$. Since $v<\xi C_3$, the only possible solution is $v=\max\{A_1,C_3-{\lambda} C_1\}<\xi C_3$. But for this solution to exist, we require that $C_3-{\lambda}(C_3-{\lambda} v)\leq \max\{A_1,C_3-{\lambda} C_1\}=v$,
which leads to $(1-{\lambda}) (C_3-v(1+{\lambda}))=(1-{\lambda})(C_3-\frac {v} {\xi})\leq 0$.
Since $v<\xi C_3$, we require that $1-{\lambda}\leq 0$, which is equivalent to that ${\lambda}\geq 1$ or $\xi\leq \frac 12$. This contradicts that $\xi>\frac 12$.
Similarly, we can show that \refe{eqn:period2} has no solution of $v>\xi C_3$.
\eop
\item {\em Proof of Lemma \ref{lemma:p2}}.
Since $\xi\leq \frac 12$, ${\lambda}\geq 1$.
When $C_3<\min\{C_0,C_1+C_2\}$, $\xi\in\tilde\Xi_1$, and $\xi< \frac 12$, it is straightforward to verify that $v^-<v^*<v^+$. In addition,
\begin{eqnarray*}
F v^-&=&\min\{C_1, \max\{A_1,C_3-{\lambda} v^-\}\}=\min\{C_1, C_3-{\lambda} v^-\}\\&=&\min\{C_1, C_3-{\lambda} A_1, (1-{\lambda})C_3+{\lambda}^2 C_1\}=v^+,
\end{eqnarray*}
since $C_1\leq (1-{\lambda})C_3+{\lambda}^2 C_1$ for ${\lambda}\geq 1$.
Similarly we can show that $F v^+=v^-$. Thus $v^-$ and $v^+$ are two periodical points of period 2.
Next we show that they are the only periodical points of period 2 when $\xi<\frac 12$.
First, \refe{eqn:period2} can be simplified as follows:
\begin{eqnarray*}
v&=&\min\{C_1,\max\{A_1,C_3-{\lambda} C_1, C_3-{\lambda} \max\{A_1,C_3-{\lambda} v\}\}\}\\
&=&\max\{\min\{C_1,v^-\},\min\{C_1,C_3-{\lambda} A_1, C_3-{\lambda}(C_3-{\lambda} v)\}\}\\
&=&\max\{\min\{C_1,v^-\},\min\{v^+,(1-{\lambda})C_3+{\lambda}^2 v\}\}.
\end{eqnarray*}
Since $A_1<C_1$ and $C_3-{\lambda} C_1<C_1$, \refe{eqn:period2} is equivalent to
\begin{eqnarray}
v&=&\max\{v^-, \min\{v^+, (1-{\lambda})C_3+{\lambda}^2 v\}\}. \label{eqn:period2s}
\end{eqnarray}
When $\xi<\frac 12$; i.e., when ${\lambda}>1$, we have that $v>,=,<(1-{\lambda})C_3+{\lambda}^2 v$ if and only if $v<,=,>v^*$, respectively. If $v<v^*$, then $(1-{\lambda})C_3+{\lambda}^2 v<v<v^*<v^+$, and \refe{eqn:period2s} leads to $v=\max\{v^-, (1-{\lambda})C_3+{\lambda}^2 v\}=v^-$; If $v>v^*$, then
$(1-{\lambda})C_3+{\lambda}^2 v>v>v^*>v^-$, and \refe{eqn:period2s} leads to $v=\min\{v^+, (1-{\lambda})C_3+{\lambda}^2 v\}=v^+$. Thus $v^-$ and $v^+$ are the only two periodical points of period 2 when $\xi<\frac 12$.
When $\xi=\frac 12$; i.e., when ${\lambda}=1$, \refe{eqn:period2s} is equivalent to $v=\max\{v^-,\min\{v^+,v\}\}$. In this case, $v^-=\max\{A_1,C_3- C_1\}$, and $v^+=\min\{C_1, C_3-A_1\}$. Thus, any $v\in[v^-,v^*)\cup (v^*,v^+]$ is a periodical point of period 2.
\eop
\item {\em Proof of Lemma \ref{lemma:p3}}.
Since $\xi\leq \frac 12$, ${\lambda}\geq 1$.
Assume that there exists a $v<\xi C_3$ such that $F^4v =v$. Then we have
\begin{eqnarray*}
F^2v&=&\max\{A_1, C_3-{\lambda} Fv\}=\max\{A_1, C_3-{\lambda} C_1, C_3-{\lambda}(C_3-{\lambda} v)\},\\
F^4v&=&\max\{A_1, C_3-{\lambda} C_1, C_3-{\lambda}(C_3-{\lambda} F^2 v)\}\\
&=&\max\{A_1, C_3-{\lambda} C_1, C_3(1-{\lambda})+{\lambda}^2 A_1, C_3(1-{\lambda})+{\lambda}^2 (C_3-{\lambda} C_1),\\
&&C_3(1-{\lambda})+{\lambda}^2(C_3-{\lambda}(C_3-{\lambda} v))\}.
\end{eqnarray*}
Since $F^4 v=v$, $v=C_3(1-{\lambda})+{\lambda}^2(C_3-{\lambda}(C_3-{\lambda} v))$, which leads to $v=\xi C_3$, or $v=\max\{A_1, C_3-{\lambda} C_1, C_3(1-{\lambda})+{\lambda}^2 A_1, C_3(1-{\lambda})+{\lambda}^2 (C_3-{\lambda} C_1)\}$.
Since $v<\xi C_3$, the only possible solution is
\begin{eqnarray*}
v&=&\max\{A_1, C_3-{\lambda} C_1, C_3(1-{\lambda})+{\lambda}^2 A_1, C_3(1-{\lambda})+{\lambda}^2 (C_3-{\lambda} C_1)\}.
\end{eqnarray*}
Since ${\lambda} \geq 1$, $A_1<\xi C_3$, and $\xi C_3<C_1$, we have $A_1\geq C_3(1-{\lambda})+{\lambda}^2 A_1$ and $C_3-{\lambda} C_1 \geq C_3(1-{\lambda})+{\lambda}^2 (C_3-{\lambda} C_1)$. Therefore we have
\begin{eqnarray*}
v&=&\max\{A_1,C_3-{\lambda} C_1\}=v^-,
\end{eqnarray*}
which is a periodical point of period 2.
Similarly, if $v>\xi C_3$ such that $F^4 v=v$, then $v=v^+$, which is also a periodical point of period 2.
In both cases, the solutions of $F^4 v=v$ are also those of $F^2v=v$. Thus, there are no periodical points of period 4 for the {Poincar\'e } map, \refe{pmap}.
\eop
\ei
\bibliographystyle{elsarticle-harv}
\input{nvt_dm2b.bbl}
\end {document}
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
}
| 7,750
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Q: Symfony 3.4 - non existent service when installing FOSUserBundle I've just started a new blank project using Symfony 3.4 and first of all configured FOSUserBundle following this Documentation page.
I've tried two times deleting all and start from scratch again but I got this error during clearing cache:
In CheckExceptionOnInvalidReferenceBehaviorPass.php line 31:
The service "security.authentication.provider.dao.main" has a dependency on a non-existent service "fos_user.user_checker".
config.yml
[...]
fos_user:
db_driver: orm # other valid values are 'mongodb' and 'couchdb'
firewall_name: main
user_class: AppBundle\Entity\User
from_email:
address: "%mailer_user%"
sender_name: "%mailer_user%"
parameters.yml
parameters:
database_path: '%kernel.project_dir%/var/data/data.sqlite'
mailer_transport: smtp
mailer_host: smtp.mailtrap.io
mailer_user: ***
mailer_password: ***
secret: ***
routing.yml
app:
resource: '@AppBundle/Controller/'
type: annotation
fos_user:
resource: "@FOSUserBundle/Resources/config/routing/all.xml"
security.yml
security:
encoders:
FOS\UserBundle\Model\UserInterface: bcrypt
role_hierarchy:
ROLE_ADMIN: ROLE_USER
ROLE_SUPER_ADMIN: ROLE_ADMIN
providers:
fos_userbundle:
id: fos_user.user_provider.username
firewalls:
main:
pattern: ^/
user_checker: fos_user.user_checker
form_login:
provider: fos_userbundle
csrf_token_generator: security.csrf.token_manager
logout: true
anonymous: true
access_control:
- { path: ^/login$, role: IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY }
- { path: ^/register, role: IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY }
- { path: ^/resetting, role: IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY }
- { path: ^/admin/, role: ROLE_ADMIN }
Obviously I've add new FOS\UserBundle\FOSUserBundle(), in AppKernel.php
$bundles = [
new Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\FrameworkBundle(),
new Symfony\Bundle\SecurityBundle\SecurityBundle(),
new Symfony\Bundle\TwigBundle\TwigBundle(),
new Symfony\Bundle\MonologBundle\MonologBundle(),
new Symfony\Bundle\SwiftmailerBundle\SwiftmailerBundle(),
new Doctrine\Bundle\DoctrineBundle\DoctrineBundle(),
new Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\SensioFrameworkExtraBundle(),
new FOS\UserBundle\FOSUserBundle(),
new AppBundle\AppBundle(),
];
I'm using version 2.0 of FOSUserBundle and Symfony 3.4.
A: For Symfony 3.4 and FOSUserBundle 2.1 this issue appears to continue to exist.
Fix:
Change the following in security.yml
security:
firewalls:
main:
user_checker: fos_user.user_checker
to
security:
firewalls:
main:
user_checker: security.user_checker
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 7,013
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Cowbuzz
#CowboysWire
Broaddus
Eatman
Helman
Tuesday, May 22, 2018 09:23 AM
Gut Feeling: Most Pressing Issue At OTAs? DallasCowboys.com Debates
FRISCO, Texas – Football's back. Almost, anyway.
The Cowboys began organized team activities Tuesday at The Star in Frisco, and Wednesday's voluntary workout is the media's first look at the veterans and rookies together on the field.
With plenty of change on the roster and Jason Garrett's coaching staff, the DallasCowboys.com staff (Bryan Broaddus, David Helman, Lindsay Draper, Nick Eatman, Rob Phillips and Mickey Spagnola) discusses who and what they'll be watching most as OTAs get underway.
Bryan Broaddus:
This will be our first chance to see the veteran and rookie players together for the upcoming 2018 season. Something to think about that I said on Talkin' Cowboys this morning. I thought we had the potential of four rookies lining up as starters this season. Connor Williams at left guard, Leighton Vander Esch at middle linebacker, Dalton Schultz at tight end and Michael Gallup at wide receiver all make sense. Williams is a no-brainer due to his talent level and the need at guard. Vander Esch wasn't drafted to sit on the bench, so they'll find a spot for him. Schultz is a complete tight end and should provide a boost to the position from the jump. If the learning curve isn't too steep for Gallup, he'll be pushing for Terrance Williams' spot. OTAs are only the start, but it also gives you a clue to what the front office and coaching staff are likely thinking.
*David Helman: *
There's only one thing I'm wondering heading into these practices, and that's – to paraphrase Aubrey Graham – whether or not we get hit with the Rico. That was a bad joke, but a good point. For nine months, Rico Gathers has been seen and not heard, as far as tight end is concerned, at least. With Jason Witten heading into retirement, Gathers is the biggest variable on this depth chart. He showcased what his athleticism can bring to the table last preseason, but he's also the least-polished tight end on this team. This could be a big opportunity for him to prove he's worth a look higher up on the depth chart. Obviously, these aren't full contact practices, but it's a chance to do some serious work on the mental side of the game. This will be the first time we've seen Rico on the field since August, and I'm curious to see just what we should expect from him in this new-look offense.
Lindsay Draper:
I'm not necessarily looking at a certain player. On the contrary, I'll be looking at the absence of players. We all know there is roster turnover from year to year. But I've spoken with colleagues who have covered the club for decades, and they've collectively noted this offseason as the greatest turnaround they've witnessed to date. I'll be eyeing every position group, every drill order, and every new coach. I want to see who's voice we hear bouncing off the silver walls of The Star. I want to see which jersey all eyes turn toward before a drill. Who commands the huddle? Who is calling for hustle? We all knew when Jason Witten was talking. We heard Dez Bryant's voice before one-on-one drills. Those are now just memories. I'm so intrigued to see who emerges as new leaders of this club, because there are new vacancies in a new era.
*Nick Eatman: *
For this first minicamp, I'm not sure how I could pick anyone other than Tavon Austin. After all, I've been lobbying for a fast, electric, playmaker-type like Austin, and the Cowboys have gone out and acquired that. I know Austin hasn't been the player the Rams hoped for when they drafted him No. 7 overall a few years back. That's OK. The Cowboys aren't asking for first-round talent right now, but a guy who can be a game-changer and someone the defenses have to be prepared for. All the Cowboys need is the defensive players focusing on something else and that's when Zeke hurts them up the middle for big gains. I'm anxious to see how they line up Austin and what kind of role he will have. But I think the fans should be excited about the Cowboys' willingness to go out and get him, because that means they should be committed to using him.
*Rob Phillips: *
How about every skill player not named Ezekiel Elliott? We know Zeke is a rock for Dak Prescott and the offense. We know the offensive line, when healthy, is its foundation. But Prescott will be throwing passes to a bunch of new running backs, receivers and tight ends: Tavon Austin (whether you call him a RB or WR), Allen Hurns, Deonte Thompson, rookies Michael Gallup and Dalton Schultz. Cole Beasley is now the longest-tenured receiver on the roster. Geoff Swaim is the only tight end who has caught an NFL pass. There's talent here, but roles and snaps are up for grabs. Terrance Williams has been recovering from offseason foot surgery, so it'll be interesting to see if a young guy like Gallup can take advantage of extra offseason work.
*Mickey Spagnola: *
Most everyone seems bent out of shape over the Cowboys' safety position. My guess is Jeff Heath starts at one of the spots. The other? I can't wait to see Xavier Woods. Oh, we got a small glimpse of him back there last year during his rookie season. But mostly Woods was pressed into the slot on the nickel and dime defenses. Now we get a chance to see him back there. And remember, the Cowboys gave Woods, a versatile player at Louisiana Tech, a fourth-round grade. So when he was still sitting there in the sixth – they didn't have a fifth – the Cowboys ran out of patience, giving the New York Jets their 2018 fifth-round pick to move up to the seventh pick in the round to grab Woods. With only four starts in 2017 under his belt, but having played 51.5 percent of the defensive snaps, now is his chance to convince the Cowboys they don't need to trade for a veteran safety.
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{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
}
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Kadiluk, također kaza (tur. kadılık od kadı: sudac, prema arap. qada: suditi), u Turskom Carstvu, sudsko i upravno područje, kotar.
Granice kadiluka oblikovane su prema zemljopisnim, demografskim i povijesnim okolnostima.
Više nahija sačinjavalo je kadiluk, a više kadiluka sandžak. Također je kadiluk mogao se poklapati s granicama cijelog sandžaka, no i samo jedne nahije. Na čelu kadiluka stajali su kajmekam (u upravnom), kadija (u sudskom) i muselim (u izvršnom) pogledu. Kadiji je u jednom gradu služba trajala dvije godine.
Uvjet uspostave kadiluka bio je postojanje gradskog naselja znatnije uloge. Drugi uvjet bio je postojanje znatnije muslimanske zajednice u tom gradu, da bi kadija imao kome uredovati. Muslimanima je uredovao u šerijatsko-pravnim poslovima. Podjela kadiluka ovisila je o važnosti grada u kojem je bilo sjedište, pa su na hrvatskim prostorima bile kaze od 150,300 i 500 akča. Izvan grada, u okolici i manjim mjestima bile su ispostave, nijabeti, u kojima su uredovali službenici koji su zastupali kadiju, naibi.
Izvor
Opća enciklopedija JLZ (Svezak 4, Iz-Kzy), Zagreb, 1978.
Hrvatski leksikon A-K, Naklada Leksikon d.o.o., Zagreb, 1996., , str. 561
Administrativna podjela Osmanskog Carstva
Pravosudna tijela
Šerijatsko pravo
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{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
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\section{Introduction}\label{sec:introduction}
\rev
A detailed analysis of microstructured materials
with the full resolution of heterogeneities by classical finite element
methods has been found computationally
prohibitive~\cite{oden2006revolutionizing}. To overcome this, one option
consists of modelling a coarse-scale problem with the help of homogenisation
techniques based on effective material
properties~\cite{Feyel2000309,pichler2008micron,Geers2010}. However, this may
lead to a considerable loss of information on the fine scale behaviour, thereby
resulting in an inaccurate assessment of microstructural effects on the
global response and/or its evolution.
An alternative, computationally appealing, strategy proceeds from generalised
finite element formulations that enhance the approximation properties of
standard finite element spaces by subscale-informed enrichment functions. Their
design involves two related but contradictory aspects: (i)~realistic
representation of the underlying heterogeneity patterns and (ii)~construction of
complex enrichment functions in a computationally efficient manner. Here, we
briefly review these issues for two finite element frameworks. The first one is
based on the \emph{partition of unity method}, introduced by Melenk and
Babu\v{s}ka~\cite{Melenk1996289} and generalised in numerous aspects later
on~\cite{Belytschko:2009:REG,Fries:2010:EGF}. The second one utilises the
\emph{hybrid Trefftz stress formulations} developed by Teixeira de
Freitas~\cite{Freitas1998}, see also~\cite{herrera2000trefftz} for an overview.
For simplicity, we restrict our attention to the small-strain linear elasticity
in two dimensions. The following nomenclature is used in the sequel. Scalar
quantities are denoted by plain letters, e.g. $a$ or $A$, vectors and matrices
are in bold as, e.g. $\M{a}$ or $\M{A}$. In addition, we adopt the Mandel
vector-matrix representation of symmetric second- and fourth-order tensors, e.g.
$a_{ij}$ or $A_{ijkl}$, so that~\cite[Section~2.3]{Milton:2002:TC}
\begin{align*}
\M{a}
=
\begin{bmatrix}
a_{11} \\ a_{22} \\ \sqrt{2} a_{12}
\end{bmatrix}
, &&
\M{A}
=
\begin{bmatrix}
A_{1111} & A_{1122} & \sqrt{2} A_{1112} \\
A_{2211} & A_{2222} & \sqrt{2} A_{2212} \\
\sqrt{2} A_{1211} & \sqrt{2} A_{1222} & 2A_{1212}
\end{bmatrix}.
\end{align*}
\nomenclature{$\M{a}$, $\M{A}$}{A matrix or vector
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{ccc}
\includegraphics[height=35.5mm]{fig01a} &
\includegraphics[height=35.5mm]{fig01b} &
\includegraphics[height=35.5mm]{fig01c} \\
(a) & (b) & (c)
\end{tabular}
\caption
Examples of heterogeneity representations for a macroscopic body $\mathcal{O}$ and
(a)~separated scales ($\ell \ll h < L$): three unit cells associated with
integration points (in red), (b) periodic geometry with non-separated scales
($\ell < h < L$): a single periodic unit cell, (c) aperiodic geometry with
non-separated scales ($\ell < h < L$): eight distinct Wang tiles;
$\ell$, $h$, and $L$ denote characteristic macroscopic, element
(meso-scopic), and heterogeneity lengths, respectively.}
\label{fig:domains}
\end{figure}
\nomenclature{$\mathcal{O}$}{Domain
\nomenclature{$\ell$}{Microstructure length
\nomenclature{$L$}{Macroscopic length
\nomenclature{$h$}{Element length
\subsection{Partition of unity methods}
Consider a microstructured two-dimensional domain $\mathcal{O} \subset \set{R}^2$
approximated by finite elements, cf.~\Fref{fig:domains}.
\nomenclature{$\set A$}{A set
\nomenclature{$\set R$}{Set of real numbers
The partition of unity methods build on the displacement field approximation in
the form
\begin{equation}\label{eq:partion_of_unity}
\M{u}(\M{x})
\approx
\sum_{n = 1}^{n^\mathrm{n}}
N_n(\M{x})
\left[
\M{a}_n
+
\M{\Psi}^*( \M{x} )
\M{b}_n
\right]
\mbox{ for }
\M{x} \in \mathcal{O},
\end{equation}
\nomenclature{$a^*$}{Fluctuating part of $a$
\nomenclature{$\M{a}$}{Standard degrees of freedom
\nomenclature{$\M{b}$}{Extended degrees of freedom
\nomenclature{$\M{\Psi}$}{Matrix of enrichment functions
\nomenclature{$N$}{Nodal basis functions
where $n^\mathrm{n}$ is the number of nodes in the finite element mesh, $N_n : \mathcal{O}
\rightarrow \set{R}$ denotes the standard finite element basis functions and $\M{a}_n
\in \set{R}^2$ the regular degrees of freedom associated with the $n$-th node,
whereas $\M{\Psi}^*$ and $\M{b}_n$ designate the strategy-specific matrices of
enrichment functions and extended degrees of freedom, respectively.
The ansatz~\eqref{eq:partion_of_unity} is then employed in the standard Galerkin
procedure to arrive at a system of linear(ized) equations involving both
regular and extended degrees of freedom. This approach was explored by Fish and
Yuan~\cite{Fish:2005:MEB,Fish:2007:MEB}, who derived the enrichment functions
from solutions to a periodic unit cell problem, formulated for cells associated
with integration points, see \Fref{fig:domains}(a). In particular,
\begin{equation}\label{eq:displ_enrichments}
\M{\Psi}^*(\M{x})
=
\begin{bmatrix}
\uflc{1}{1} & \uflc{1}{2} & \frac{1}{\sqrt 2}\uflc{1}{3} \\
\uflc{2}{1} & \uflc{2}{2} & \frac{1}{\sqrt 2}\uflc{2}{3}
\end{bmatrix}
(\M{x}),
\end{equation}
\nomenclature{$\uflc{i}{j}$}{the $i$-th component of the fluctuating
displacement field due to the $j$-th impulse
where $\uflc{i}{j} : \mathcal{O} \rightarrow \set{R}$ denotes the $i$-th component of the
fluctuating displacement field, determined for a unit cell subject to the
average strain with the $j$-th component set to one, while the remaining two
vanish (see \ref{app:mech_fields} for further details). Such form of
enrichment functions is motivated by the displacement decomposition
\begin{equation}
\M{u}(\M{x}) = \M{u}^0(\M{x}) + \M{u}^*(\M{x})
\mbox{ for }
\M{x} \in \mathcal{O},
\end{equation}
with $\M{u}^0:\mathcal{O} \rightarrow \set{R}^2$ and $\M{u}^*:\mathcal{O} \rightarrow \set{R}^2$
referring to global and fluctuating displacement fields; parameter $\M{b}_n \in
\set{R}^3$ in \Eref{eq:partion_of_unity} has thus the physical meaning of a
generalised average strain known from classical homogenisation
theories~\cite{Geers2010}. Since such fields are constructed under the
assumption of separated lenghtscales, \Fref{fig:domains}(a) with $\ell/L
\rightarrow 0$, an attention is paid neither to the geometrical compatibility
among neighbouring cells, nor to the compatibility of the corresponding
enrichment fields. Consistent mathematical results for \emph{periodic media}
with a finite ratio $\ell/L$, \Fref{fig:domains}(b), were obtained by
Matache~\etal\cite{Matache:2000:GPFEM}. The enrichment functions are
constructed on the basis of the spectral version of the unit cell
problem~\cite{Morgan:1991:AAC} resolved by the $p$-version of the finite element
method, see~\cite{Babuska:2011:OLA} for additional contributions to this
field.
The partition of unity methods have also been applied to simulations of material
systems with \emph{explicitly represented non-periodic} heterogeneities, such as
thin fibres~\cite{Radtke:2010:PUM,Radtke:2011:PUM}. Here, the enrichment
function is chosen to be piecewise constant in fibre and matrix domains, and the
extended degrees of freedom correspond to a relative slip at the fibre-matrix
interface. Such simple format comes at the expense of the fact that two extra
degrees of freedom are introduced per fibre, which renders realistic simulations
costly.
\subsection{Trefftz method}
The hybrid Trettfz approach has recently been employed
by Nov\'{a}k~\etal\cite{Novak:2012:MEF} to simulate composites reinforced with
non-periodic ellipsoidal heterogeneities with non-separated lengthscales. The
method builds on the additive stress decomposition
\begin{equation}
\M{\sigma}(\M{x})
=
\M{\sigma}^0(\M{x})
+
\M{\sigma}^*(\M{x})
\mbox{ for }
\M{x} \in \mathcal{O},
\end{equation}
\nomenclature{$\sigma$}{Stress
with $\M{\sigma}^0 : \mathcal{O} \rightarrow \set{R}^3$ corresponding to the macroscopic stress
field and $\M{\sigma}^* : \mathcal{O} \rightarrow \set{R}^3$ being stress fluctuations,
approximated at the level of an element $\set{E}{e}$ as
\nomenclature{$\set{E}{e}$}{$e$-th finite element
\begin{equation}\label{eq:trefftz_approximation}
\M{\sigma}(\M{x})
\approx
\M{\Sigma}_e(\M{x})
\M{a}_e
+
\M{\Sigma}^*(\M{x})
\M{b}_e
\mbox{ for }
\M{x} \in \set{E}{e}.
\end{equation}
\nomenclature{$\M{\Sigma}$}{Stress basis functions
Here, in analogy to \Eref{eq:partion_of_unity}, $\M{\Sigma}_e : \set{E}{e} \rightarrow \set{R}^{3
\times m}$ stands for the standard basis functions of the Trefftz method associated
with $m$ regular degrees of freedom $\M{a}_e \in R^m$ and $\M{b}_e \in \set{R}^3$ denotes
the extended degrees of freedom with the physical meaning of average element
strains. The individual enrichment functions
\begin{equation}\label{eq:stress_enrichments}
\M{\Sigma}^*( \M{x} )
=
\begin{bmatrix}
\sigfl{11}{1} & \sigfl{11}{2} & \sqrt{2} \sigfl{11}{3} \\
\sigfl{22}{1} & \sigfl{22}{2} & \sqrt{2} \sigfl{22}{3} \\
\sqrt{2} \sigfl{12}{1} & \sqrt{2} \sigfl{12}{2} & 2 \sigfl{12}{3}
\end{bmatrix}( \M{x} )
\mbox{ for }
\M{x} \in \mathcal{O},
\end{equation}
correspond to the fluctuating stress fields due to unitary strain
impulses, see again \ref{app:mech_fields} for further details. Note that the
regular and enrichment basis functions need to be selected such that the stress
remains self-equilibrated. The stress approximation is complemented with an
independent approximation of displacements at the element boundary
$\Gamma_e$~\cite{Kaczmarczyk20091298}
\nomenclature{$\Gamma$}{Boundary or edge
\begin{equation}
\M{u}(\M{x})
\approx
\M{N}^\Gamma_e( \M{x} )
\M{a}^\Gamma_e
\mbox{ for }
\M{x} \in \Gamma_e,
\end{equation}
\nomenclature{$\M{N}$}{Matrix of basis functions
involving only regular edge shape functions $\M{N}^\Gamma_e$ and regular boundary
degrees of freedom $\M{a}^\Gamma_e$. The remainder of the formulation follows from the
weak form of the equilibrium and compatibility equations, which can be converted
to the element boundaries by virtue of the divergence theorem,
cf.~\cite{Kaczmarczyk20091298,Freitas1998}. The appealing feature of the
particular formulation~\cite{Novak:2012:MEF} is that the size of the resulting
system of equations is the same as for the homogeneous problem, due to the
elimination of the extended degrees of freedom. This is achieved by a careful
construction of the enrichment functions through Eshelby solutions for
individual particles~\cite{eshelby1957determination,Eshelby:1959:EFO}, combined
together to obtain compatible mechanical fields~\cite{Novak:2012:MEF}.
\subsection{Tiling-based approach}
This short overview illustrates the major difficulty in simulating non-periodic
systems with realistic geometries, namely that simple enrichment functions lead
to the loss of information and/or to a significant increase in the number of
degrees of freedom, whereas manageable system sizes necessitate complex
constructions of enrichment functions. The aim of this work is thus to develop
an algorithm that allows for extending the local (possibly periodic)
data from computationally tractable samples to entire macroscopic domains
in a non-periodic way, \Fref{fig:domains}(c). The algorithm keeps the
synthesised enrichment functions, $\M{\Psi}^*$ in \Eref{eq:partion_of_unity} or
$\M{\Sigma}^*$ in \Eref{eq:trefftz_approximation}, continuous across congruent
boundaries and consistent in terms of statistical properties of original and
reconstructed material morphologies. It is based on a small number of the
so-called Wang
tiles~\cite{wang1961tiling,glassner2004andrew,Culik:1996:ASW:245761.245814} and
a stochastic tiling procedure introduced by Cohen et al.~\cite{cohen2003wang}.
In 1961, Hao Wang introduced a tiling concept involving square tiles with
different codes on their edges, referred to as Wang tiles~\cite{wang1961tiling}.
The tiles are connected together so that the adjacent edges have the same code
and permit a computationally efficient graphic reproduction of morphological
patterns~\cite{cohen2003wang,Culik:1996:ASW:245761.245814,demaine2007jigsaw,glassner2004andrew}.
Their desirable aesthetic properties are attributed to the aperiodicity of
tilings, whereas the low computational effort results from the use of a small
number of tiles to compress the entire morphological
information~\cite{lagae2008comparison}.
Here, we exploit and extend these principles to provide a basis for an efficient
generation of microstructure-based enrichment functions applicable in partition
of unity or hybrid Trefftz finite element algorithms. In
order to meet additional criteria arising from such constructions, the Simulated
annealing-based optimisation~\cite{Kirkpatrick:1983:S,Cerny:1985:JOTA} is used
to arrive at optimal tile sets. The performance of the method is illustrated on
the construction of tile-based stress enrichment functions in a mono-disperse
two-phase composite medium with linear elastic phases. Although the proposed
approach is illustrated solely in the two-dimensional setting, it is fully
extensible to three dimensions by exploring the results available for the Wang
cubes~\cite{Culik:1995:ASW,Lu:2007:VIW}. We also note in passing that the
techniques developed in this paper can be used equally well as microstructure
reconstruction or generation algorithms, generalising the previous developments
available e.g.
in~\cite{Povirk:1995:IMI,Yeong:1998:RRM,Kumar:2006:UMR,Zeman:2007:FRM,Lee:2009:3DR,Niezgoda2010:OMB,Schoder:2011:ARM}.
}
The paper structure is as follows. The concept of stochastic Wang tiling is
described in \Sref{s:tiling}. A discussion on the optimisation procedure based
on prescribed statistical descriptors and compatibility of synthesised
mechanical fields on contiguous tile edges is given in
\Sref{s:microstructure_optimization}. \Sref{s:results} comprises numerical
examples demonstrating the performance of the proposed approach. Final remarks
on the current developments and future plans are assembled
in~\Sref{s:conclusions}. Finally, in \Aref{app:mech_fields}, we present a brief
overview of the stress analysis algorithm utilised to determine the local stress
fluctuations.
\section{Aperiodic tilings by sets of Wang tiles}\label{s:tiling}
Consider again the domain $\mathcal{O}$ \rev{from \Fref{fig:domains}(c)} covered by a
regular square grid. Each grid cell contains specific microstructural patterns
that are compatible on contiguous boundaries. If there are no missing cells
inside the synthesised domain, the discretization is called a valid
\emph{tiling}\footnote{
Henceforth, the term ``tiling'' stands for ``valid tiling'' exclusively, thereby
excluding invalid tilings from the consideration.} and a single cell is
referred to as the \emph{Wang tile}~\cite{wang1961tiling},
\Fref{fig:wang_tile}. The tiles have different codes on their edges,
enumerated here by lowercase Greek letters, and are not allowed to rotate during
the tiling procedure. The number of distinct tiles is fixed, though arranged
in such a fashion that no sub-sequence of tiles periodically repeats.
The set of all distinct tiles is referred to as the \emph{tile set}, \Fref{fig:wang_tile}(a).
Sets that enable uncountably many, always aperiodic, tilings are called
\emph{aperiodic} sets~\cite{Culik:1996:ASW:245761.245814}. The assumption of
strictly aperiodic sets can be relaxed, though still being capable to tile the
plane aperiodically, e.g., when utilising the Cohen-Shade-Hiller-Deussen~(CSHD)
tiling algorithm~\cite{cohen2003wang} briefly introduced in the following
section. Note that such tilings provide substantial generalisations to periodic
paving algorithms, which use identical tiles--periodic unit cells, \rev{recall
\Fref{fig:domains}(b)}.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{ccc}
(a)~
\includegraphics[height=55mm]{fig02a}
&&
(b)~
\includegraphics[height=55mm]{fig02b}
\end{tabular}
\caption{(a)~Tile set W8/2-2~\cite{cohen2003wang} consisting of $8$ tiles with
$2$ vertical $\{\alpha, \gamma\}$ and $2$ horizontal $\{ \beta, \delta \}$ edge
codes with equal frequencies of occurrence
$q_\alpha = q_\beta = q_\gamma = q_\delta =
\frac{1}{4}$ , and $n^\textrm{NW} = 2$, (b) an example of aperiodic valid
tiling with highlighted connectivity across south-eastern and north-western edges.}
\label{fig:wang_tile}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Tile set setup}
Favourable properties of a tile set to control repetitive effects
proceed from the tile and edge code diversity. The number of edge
codes $n^\textrm{c}_i$ in the $i$-th spatial direction of the Cartesian coordinates can
be chosen arbitrarily, while the number of tiles $n^\textrm{t}$ must satisfy
\nomenclature{$n^\textrm{c}$}{Number of edge codes
\nomenclature{$n^\textrm{t}$}{Number of tiles
\nomenclature{$n^\textrm{NW}$}{Number of NW tiles
\nomenclature{$n^\textrm{cs}$}{Number of tiles in the complete set
\begin{equation}\label{eq:n^t_us}
n^\textrm{t} = n^\textrm{NW} \sqrt{n^\textrm{cs}},
\end{equation}
where $n^\textrm{cs} = (n^\textrm{c}_1 n^\textrm{c}_2)^2$ is the number of tiles in the complete set and
$n^\textrm{NW} = 2, \ldots, \sqrt{n^\textrm{cs}}$ stands for the number of tiles
associated with each admissible pair of north-western~(NW) edge codes,
\Fref{fig:wang_tile}(a), see~\cite{Novak:2012:CRM} for further details.
When designing a tile set, one chooses a particular number of edge codes $n^\textrm{c}_1$
and $n^\textrm{c}_2$. The complete set of $n^\textrm{cs}$ tiles is created by mutually permuting
the codes. In order to tile the plane, the south-eastern edge codes must match
those assigned to NW edges, \Fref{fig:wang_tile}(b). Thus, the created tiles are
collected according to NW combinations. Finally, a desired number of tiles
is chosen using \Eref{eq:n^t_us}, \rev{in such a way that $n^\textrm{NW}$ unique
tiles is selected from each NW group}. The emerging, user-defined, set of tiles
is referred to as \Wa{$n^\textrm{t}$}{$n^\textrm{c}_1$}{$n^\textrm{c}_2$}. Moreover, we denote the relative
frequency of occurrence of the $c$-th code in the tile set by $q_c$, see
\Fref{fig:wang_tile}(a).
\nomenclature{\Wa{$x$}{$y$}{$z$}}{Wang tile set composed of $x$ tiles and $y$
and $z$ edge codes
\nomenclature{$q$}{Frequency of occurrence
\subsection{CSHD stochastic tiling algorithm}\label{sec:stoch_tiling_algorithm}
Since there are $n^\textrm{NW}$ tiles associated to each NW group, index of the new tile
to be placed is selected randomly from the set $\{ 1, \ldots, n^\textrm{NW} \}$ with the
uniform probability. Beforehand, one must select an appropriate NW group
compatible with the eastern code of a previously placed tile and the southern
code of the tile just above the one to be placed (edges $\alpha$ and $\gamma$ of
shaded areas in~\Fref{fig:wang_tile}(b)). Aperiodicity of the resulting tiling
is guaranteed by assuming that the random generator never returns a periodic
sequence of numbers and that each NW group contains at least two distinct
tiles~\cite{cohen2003wang}.
\section{Designing optimal tile set morphology}\label{s:microstructure_optimization}
To simplify the exposition, we limit our attention to two-phase composite
media formed by a matrix phase and equi-sized disks of radius $\rho$ and
a parametric microstructure representation built on the Wang tile set
\Wa{8}{2}{2}\footnote
\nomenclature{$\rho$}{Disk radius
The set~\Wa{8}{2}{2} has been chosen since it is the simplest one that allows
for aperiodic patterns in the stochastic sense~\cite{cohen2003wang}. Note that
all the steps of the tile set design can be directly generalised to more complex
tile sets, cf.~\cite{Novak:2012:CRM}.}, introduced in
\Sref{sec:microstructure_parameterization}.
The location of the disks within the tiles has to be optimised to achieve
(i)~good approximation of the original microstructure in terms of a given
morphological descriptor, \Sref{sec:stat_prop}, and (ii)~microstructures that
guarantee the compatibility of \rev{enrichment functions} on contiguous tile
edges,
\Sref{sec:objective_stress}. Such criteria originate from different
perspectives. The first goal aims at capturing the dominant spatial features of
original media, while the latter criterion ensures that the tiling-generated
fields comply with the governing differential equations. \rev{The details of the
algorithm used to solve the resulting optimisation problem are provided in
\Sref{sec:optimization_procedure}.}
\subsection{Microstructure parametrisation}\label{sec:microstructure_parameterization}
The adopted \rev{bitmap-based} microstructure representation \rev{involves a}
Wang tile set consisting of $n^\textrm{t}$ tiles of the edge length $\ell \in \set{N}$~(in
pixels), in which we distribute $n^\mathrm{d}$ disks of radius $\rho$. The $d$-th disk
is represented by a triplet $\{ t_d, x_{1,d}, x_{2,d} \}$, where
$t_{d} \in \{1, \ldots, n^\textrm{t} \}$ denotes the tile index and $x_{d,j} \in
\{1, \ldots, \ell \}$ specifies the position of the $d$-th disk within the tile
at the $j$-th direction. The associated parameter vector $\M{p}$ is obtained as a
collection of these data:
\begin{equation}\label{eq:parameter_def}
\M{p}
=
\left[
t_d,
x_{1,d},
x_{2,d}
\right]_{d=1}^{n^\mathrm{d}}.
\end{equation}
Since the position of each disk is specified by three parameters, the
parameter space~$\set{P}$ is $(3 \times n^\mathrm{d})$-dimensional, i.e. $\set{P} \subset
\set{N}^{3\timesn^\mathrm{d}}$.
\nomenclature{$n^\mathrm{d}$}{Number of disks
\nomenclature{$t$}{Index used to number Wang tiles
\nomenclature{$\M{p}$}{Parameter vector in optimisation
\nomenclature{$d$}{Parameter used to index disks
\nomenclature{$\set{P}$}{Parameter set
In an admissible configuration, the disks do not penetrate each other or overlap
corners of tiles being associated with. The first constraint reflects the given feature
of the original microstructure, \Fref{fig:original_microstructure}(a), whereas
the latter one arises as an artifact intrinsic to the edge-based tiling
algorithm, e.g.,~\cite{cohen2003wang}. In addition, to maintain the
morphological compatibility, any disk intersecting the edge of a given code
needs also be associated to tiles containing the same edge. To emphasise
this, we encode a particular microstructural configuration as
\conf{$n^\mathrm{d}$}{$n^\mathrm{d}_c$}$_{c=1}^{n^\textrm{c}}$, where $n^\mathrm{d}_c$ denotes the
number of disks intersecting the edge of code~$c$,
see~\Fref{fig:admissible_configuration} on
page~\pageref{fig:admissible_configuration}.
\nomenclature{$\conf{a}{n^\mathrm{d}}$}{Configuration of $a$ disks, in which $n^\mathrm{d}$
intersect edges}
\subsection{Statistical properties of the microstructure}\label{sec:stat_prop}
The most common class of statistical descriptors embodies a set of $n$-point
probability functions, applicable to generic heterogeneous
media~\cite{Torquato:2002}. In this paper, the focus is on the two-point
probability function, which captures primary phenomena as the phase volume
fraction, characteristic microstructural length(s), and long-range
orientation orders, if any.
We now assume that the domain $\mathcal{O}$ is occupied by a two-phase heterogeneous
material discretized by a regular lattice \rev{of} $n^\dmn_1 \times n^\dmn_2$
pixels, indexed by $\k \in \set{K}^\dmn$ with
\begin{equation}\label{eq:lattice_def}
\set{K}^\dmn
=
\left\{
\M{m} \in \set{Z}^2
:
-\frac{n^\dmn_i}{2} < m_i \leq \frac{n^\dmn_i}{2}
,
i = 1, 2
\right\}.
\end{equation}
\nomenclature{$n^\dmn_i$}{Number of pixels in $\mathcal{O}$ and $i$-th direction
\nomenclature{$\set{K}^\dmn$}{Set of pixel indices
\nomenclature{$\k$}{Pixel index
\nomenclature{$\M{m}$}{Auxiliary pixel index
The distribution of individual phases (disks and matrix) within $\mathcal{O}$ is
quantified by the characteristic function $\chi(\k)$, which equals $1$ when $\k$
is occupied by the disk phase and $0$ otherwise, cf.
\Fref{fig:original_microstructure}(a). Assuming a periodic\footnote
Note that periodicity is considered here for the sake of computational
efficiency. The tiling-generated data is always aperiodic.}
ergodic medium, the two-point probability function $S_2 : \set{K}^\dmn \rightarrow
[0,1]$ is then defined as~\cite{Torquato:2002}
\nomenclature{$\chi$}{Characteristic function}
\nomenclature{$S_2$}{Two-point probability function}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:Sdef}
S_2(\k)
=
\frac{1}{n^\dmn_1 n^\dmn_2}
\sum_{\M{m} \in \set{K}^\dmn}
\chi(\M{m})
\chi\left(
\left\lfloor \k + \M{m} \right\rfloor_{\set{K}^\dmn} \right),
\end{equation}
where $\lfloor \bullet \rfloor_{\set{K}^\dmn}$ denotes the $\set{K}^\dmn$-periodic extension.
Noticing that~\eqref{eq:Sdef} has the structure of circular correlation, the
two-point probability function can be efficiently evaluated using Fast Fourier
Transform techniques, see e.g.~\cite{Gajdosik:2006:QAFC}.
According to its definition, $S_2(\k)$ quantifies the probability that two
arbitrary points separated by $\k$ will both be located at the disk phase when
randomly selected from $\set{K}^\dmn$. Denoting by $\phi$ the disk volume fraction,
$0 \leq \phi \leq 1$, the two-point probability function satisfies
$S_2(\M{0}) = \phi$. Moreover, $S_2(\k) \simeq \phi^2$ for $\| \k \| \gg
\rho$ indicates that the medium does not exhibit repeating long-range order
orientation effects, cf.~\Fref{fig:original_microstructure}(b).
\nomenclature{$\phi$}{Volume fractions}
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{cc}
(a)~\includegraphics[height=45mm]{fig03a}
&
(b)~\includegraphics[height=45mm]{fig03b}
\end{tabular}
\caption{(a) An example of two-phase medium formed by equilibrium distribution
of $1,300$ equi-sized disks of volume fraction $26.8 \%$ and (b) the
two-point probability function $S_2$; the sample is discretized with $1,000
\times 1,000$ pixels and each disk has the radius of $8$ pixels.}
\label{fig:original_microstructure}
\end{figure}
The following procedure is adopted to determine the two-point probability
function for the tile-based microstructure. First, the set \Wa{8}{2}{2} is used
to assemble a $4 \times 4$ tiling $\mathcal{O}_\mathrm{S} \subset \set{R}^2$, \rev{periodic on
external boundaries}, in which each tile appears with the same frequency in
order to suppress artificial fluctuations in volume fractions,
\Fref{fig:optimproc}(a). The domain $\mathcal{O}_\mathrm{S}$ is discretized by an $n^{\dmnS}_1
\times n^{\dmnS}_2$ regular grid with the same pixel size as in the original
microstructure, so that $n^{\dmnS}_i < n^\dmn_i$. Given a parameter vector $\M{p}$
quantifying positions of individual disks, the tile-based morphology is
quantified by the two-point probability function $\rec{S}_2 : \set{P} \times \set{K}^{\dmnS}
\rightarrow [0,1]$, and its proximity to the target microstructure is evaluated
as
\begin{equation}\label{eq:obj_func_tppF}
\f^\mathrm{S}( \M{p} )
=
\frac{1}{n^{\dmnS}_1 n^{\dmnS}_2}
\sum_{\k \in \set{K}^{\dmnS}}
\left(
S_2(\k)
-
\rec{S}_2(\M{p}, \k)
\right)^2,
\end{equation}
where $\set{K}^{\dmnS}$ is defined analogously as for the target medium
$\mathcal{O}$.
\nomenclature{$\f^\mathrm{S}$}{Effect function based on two-point probability}
\nomenclature{$n^{\dmnS}$}{Number of lattice points for tiling}
\nomenclature{$\rec{S}_2$}{Two-point probability function of tiling}
\nomenclature{$\set{K}^{\dmnS}$}{Indexes for two-point probability function}
\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.3}
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{cc}
\resizebox{1.78cm}{1.78cm}{
\begin{tabular}[b]{|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
3 & 4 & 1 & 6 \\
\hline
5 & 7 & 2 & 8 \\
\hline
2 & 1 & 4 & 7 \\
\hline
8 & 6 & 3 & 5 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}}
&\resizebox{4cm}{4cm}{
\begin{tabular}[b]{|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
\edge{\bf 2} & \ledge{\bf 1} & \bf 6 & \bf 3 &
\redge{\bf 4} & \ledge{\bf 8} & 3 & 6 & \redge{4} \\
\hline
\edge{2} & \ledge{8} & 6 & 3 & 3 & \redge{\bf 5} &
\edge{\bf 7} & \ledge{8} & \redge{5} \\
\hline
6 & \redge{5} & \edge{2} & \edge{7} & \edge{7} & \edge{2} & \ledge{1} & \redge{5} & \ledge{8} \\
\hline
\edge{2} & \edge{2} & \edge{2} & \edge{7} & \ledge{1} & 6 & 6 & \redge{4} & \edge{7} \\
\hline
\redge{4} & \ledge{8} & 6 & 3 & \redge{4} & \edge{2} & \edge{2} & \edge{7} & \ledge{1} \\
\hline
3 & 3 & \redge{4} & \edge{7} & \edge{7} & \edge{2} & \ledge{8} & \redge{5} & \ledge{8} \\
\hline
\ledge{1} & \redge{5} & \edge{7} & \ledge{1} & 3 & \redge{4} & \ledge{1} & 6 & \redge{5} \\
\hline
\ledge{8} & 6 & \redge{5} & \ledge{8} & \redge{5} & \ledge{1} & \redge{4} & \ledge{8} & \redge{4} \\
\hline
\ledge{1} & \redge{4} & \edge{2} & \edge{7} & \edge{2} & \edge{2} & \edge{7} & \ledge{1} & \redge{5} \\
\hline
\end{tabular}}\\
(a) Tiling $\mathcal{O}_\mathrm{S}$ &(b) Tiling $\dmn_\T$
\end{tabular}
\caption{Valid tilings used in optimisation with respect to (a)~two-point
probability function and (b) stress field; highlighted vertical
edges in (b)~correspond to edge set $\Ge{\delta}$ containing $50$
equivalent edges of code $\delta$ and \rev{length $\ell$. Tiles denoted by
bold numbers~(first two rows) are used to generate aperiodic enrichment
functions.}}
\label{fig:optimproc}
\end{figure}
\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1}
\rev
\subsection{Stress-based enrichment fields and their
compatibility}\label{sec:objective_stress}
The additional, yet more complex, goal is to find the tile set morphology that
ensures the admissibility of enrichment functions synthesised by the tiling
algorithm. Analogously to the original Wang idea, this is achieved by requiring
that edges of identical codes carry identical, this time non-scalar,
information. In particular, motivated by encouraging results obtained recently
in~\cite{Novak:2012:MEF}, we concentrate on the stress enrichment
functions $\M{\Sigma}^*$, recall \Eref{eq:stress_enrichments}. It is natural
convert them to equivalent traction fluctuations, obtained as
\nomenclature{$\nu_i$}{Normal vector component
\begin{equation}\label{eq:traction_enrich}
\MT\flc
=
\M{\nu}
\M{\Sigma}{}^*
,\;
\end{equation}
\complete{where $\MT\flc$ collects the components associated
with individual load-cases and $\M{\nu}$ stores the components of the normal
vector:}
\begin{align*}
\MT\flc
=
\begin{bmatrix}
\Tfl{1}{1} & \Tfl{1}{2} & \Tfl{1}{3} \\
\Tfl{2}{1} & \Tfl{2}{2} & \Tfl{2}{3}
\end{bmatrix}
, &&
\M{\nu}
=
\begin{bmatrix}
\nu_1 & 0 & \frac{1}{\sqrt 2} \nu_2 \\
0 & \nu_2 & \frac{1}{\sqrt 2} \nu_1
\end{bmatrix}.
\end{align*}
\nomenclature{$\M{\nu}$}{Matrix of normal vector components
\nomenclature{$\Tfl{i}{j}$}{$i$-th components of tractions due to $j$-t
loadcase
Analogously to the morphology design, the definition of the traction-based
objective function is based on an auxiliary $9 \times 9$ tiling $\dmn_\T$,
\Fref{fig:optimproc}(b), discretized into $n^{\dmnT}_1 \times n^{\dmnT}_2$ bitmap with
pixels indexed by $\k \in \set{K}^{\dmnT}$. The tiling is periodic at external
boundaries, and contains all admissible combinations of tile pairs from the set
\Wa{8}{2}{2} sharing all edge codes\footnote{There are $16$ distinct pair
combinations of basic tiles sharing the code $\delta:~\{ 2-1, 2-2, 2-7, 2-8,
4-1, 4-2, 4-7, 4-8, 5-1, 5-2, 5-7, 5-8, 7-1, 7-2, 7-7, 7-8 \}$ see
\Fref{fig:wang_tile}(a). All these combinations are present in the tiling
$\dmn_\T$ in \Fref{fig:optimproc}(b), each of them multiple times.}, since we assume that the
edge traction values are dominated by the response of adjacent tiles. Hence, for
each edge code $c \in \{ 1, 2, \ldots, n^\textrm{c} \}$ with $n^\textrm{c} = n^\textrm{c}_1 + n^\textrm{c}_2$, we
introduce a set $\Ge{c}$ formed by $\numGe{c}$ edges of identical code
$c$ and length $\ell$ with normal vector $\M{\nu}^{\Ge{c}}$,
\Fref{fig:optimproc}(b)\footnote{For
the particular tile set considered here, we set $\M{\nu}^{\Ge{\alpha}} =
\M{\nu}^{\Ge{\gamma}} = [0,1]$ and $\M{\nu}^{\Ge{\beta}} = \M{\nu}^{\Ge{\delta}} =
[1,0]$.}. By $\Ges{c}{j} : \{1, \ldots, \ell\} \rightarrow \set{K}^{\dmnT}$, $j \in \{ 1, 2, \ldots, \numGe{c} \}$, we denote a
function providing coordinates of individual pixels at the $j$-th edge of
code~$c$.
\nomenclature{$\dmn_\T$}{Tiling for traction objective function
\nomenclature{$\set{K}^{\dmnT}$}{Indices for traction-based objective function
\nomenclature{$c$}{Edge code
\nomenclature{$\Ge{c}$}{All edges of code $c$
\nomenclature{$\Ges{c}{j}$}{Coordinates of $j$-edge of code $c$
Now we are in a position to quantify differences of tractions carried by an edge
code $c$, due to differing neighbours, via an objective function $\f^\mathrm{\T}_c$.
For a given parameter vector $\M{p} \in \set{P}$ and material properties of individual
phases, we calculate the stress enrichment function $\M{\Sigma}^*( \M{p}, \k )$ by the
algorithm outlined in \Aref{app:mech_fields}, and evaluate the objective
function as
\begin{equation}
\f^\mathrm{\T}_c(\M{p})
=
\frac{1}{\ell}
\sum_{s=1}^\ell
\left\|
\max\left\{
\MT\flc( \M{p}, \Ges{c}{j}(s))
\right\}_{j=1}^{\numGe{c}}
-
\min\left\{
\MT\flc( \M{p}, \Ges{c}{j}(s))
\right\}_{j=1}^{\numGe{c}}
\right\|_1,
\end{equation}
\nomenclature{$\f^\mathrm{\T}$}{Traction-based objective function
where the traction enrichments are determined from~\Eref{eq:traction_enrich}
with $\M{\nu} = \M{\nu}^{\Ge{c}}$, $\max$ and $\min$ operations are understood
component-wise and $\| \M{A} \|_{1} = \sum_{i,j} | A_{ij} |$. Collecting the
contributions from all codes, we obtain
\begin{equation}\label{eq:obj_func_tractions}
\f^\mathrm{\T}(\M{p})
=
\sum_{c=1}^{n^\textrm{c}}
\f^\mathrm{\T}_c(\M{p}).
\end{equation}
Once the tile set is designed with respect to the objective
function~\eqref{eq:obj_func_tractions}, the tiling-based stress enrichment
functions $\rec{\M{\Sigma}}^* : \set{K}^{\dmnT} \rightarrow \set{R}^{3\times 3}$ can be assembled
by the CSHD algorithm using the stress fluctuations $\M{\Sigma}^*$ carried by an
arbitrary selection of tiles $1$--$8$ from the tiling $\dmn_\T$. In the numerical
experiments reported in \Sref{s:results}, we use the set of eight tiles from the
top rows of $\dmn_\T$ highlighted by bold numbers in \Fref{fig:optimproc}(b), but
equivalent results were obtained for different selections. Due to this
procedure, the reconstructed edge tractions corresponding to the synthesised
enrichments $\rec{\M{\Sigma}}^*$ may experience jumps at tile edges. For the $j$-th
edge of the set $\Ge{c}$, these are defined as
\begin{equation}\label{eq:trct_jmp}
\jmp{\rec{\M{\T}}\flc_{c,j}}(s)
=
\M{\nu}^{\Ge{c}}
\left(
\rec{\M{\Sigma}}^*_{+}(\Ges{c}{j})
-
\rec{\M{\Sigma}}^*_{-}(\Ges{c}{j})
\right)
\mbox{ for }
s \in \{1, 2, \ldots, \ell \},
\end{equation}
where $\rec{\M{\Sigma}}^*_{+}$ and $\rec{\M{\Sigma}}^*_{-}$ denote the values of the
stress enrichment functions taken from the nearest edge neighbours from right
and left, respectively, relative to the orientation of the edge set $\Ge{c}$
by the normal vector $\M{\nu}^{\Ge{c}}$.
\nomenclature{$\rec{\M{\Sigma}}^*$}{Reconstructed stress enrichment functions
}
\subsection{Optimisation procedure}\label{sec:optimization_procedure}
In fact, the goals represented by objective functions~\eqref{eq:obj_func_tppF}
and~\eqref{eq:obj_func_tractions} are conflicting. Minimising only with respect
to the two-point probability function results in \rev{traction enrichments
discontinuous at internal edges}, whereas the latter criterion drives the system
to a periodic distribution of disks. To achieve a compromise solution, we
introduce a composite objective function in the form
\begin{equation}\label{eq:err_tot}
f(\M{p})
=
w
\f^\mathrm{S}(\M{p})
+
\f^\mathrm{\T}(\M{p}),
\end{equation}
where $w$ denotes a weighting factor \rev{balancing geometrical features with
mechanical compatibility}.
\nomenclature{$f$}{General objective function
\nomenclature{$w$}{Weighting factor
The minimisation of the objective function~\eqref{eq:err_tot} is performed by
the well-established Simulated Annealing
method~\cite{Kirkpatrick:1983:S,Cerny:1985:JOTA}, extended by a re-annealing
phase to escape from local extremes, e.g.~\cite{Leps2005PhD}.
\begin{figure}[h]
\centerline
\includegraphics[height=40mm]{fig05}
}
\caption{Tile decomposition into interiors, edges and corner
regions.}
\label{fig:tile_decomposition}
\end{figure}
Given the number of disks $n^\mathrm{d}$ and the target volume fraction $\phi$, we
initiate the algorithm by determining the number of edge disks $n^\mathrm{d}_c$
related to the $c$-th code and the tile edge length $\ell$. Although this
problem is difficult due to multiplicity of the edge-related disks, recall
\Fref{fig:admissible_configuration}, we resolved it by a heuristic
procedure outlined next. To this purpose, an arbitrary tile is
decomposed into three regions assigned to interiors~(light grey area in
\Fref{fig:tile_decomposition}), edges~(dark grey area in
\Fref{fig:tile_decomposition}), and to corners~(white area in
\Fref{fig:tile_decomposition} that cannot be occupied by disks due to the
corner constraint). For a disk configuration
$\conf{n^\mathrm{d}}{n^\mathrm{d}_c}_{c=1}^{n^\textrm{c}}$ related to a tile set
\Wa{$n^\textrm{t}$}{$n^\textrm{c}_1$}{$n^\textrm{c}_2$}, there is $(n^\mathrm{d} -
\sum_{c=1}^{n^\textrm{c}} n^\mathrm{d}_c)$ interior disks and, due to the edge constraints,
a single disk associated with code $c$ appears $2n^\textrm{t} q_c$ times,
cf.~\Fref{fig:admissible_configuration}. Thus,
the disk volume fraction in the tile set or in a tiling is given by
\begin{equation}\label{eq:global_volume_fraction}
\rec{\phi}
\approx
\frac{A^\mathrm{d}}{n^\textrm{t} \ell^2}
\left(
n^\mathrm{d}
+
\sum_{c=1}^{n^\textrm{c}}
\left(
2n^\textrm{t} q_c - 1
\right) n^\mathrm{d}_c
\right),
\end{equation}
\nomenclature{$A^\mathrm{d}$}{Area of a disk
\nomenclature{$\rec{\phi}$}{Reconstructed volume fraction
with $A^\mathrm{d}$ denoting the area of a single disk~(in square pixels), and should be
as close to the target value $\phi$ as possible. In addition, we impose the
condition
\begin{equation}\label{eq:local_volume_fraction}
\frac{n^\mathrm{d}
-
\sum_{c=1}^{n^\textrm{c}} n^\mathrm{d}_c }{(\ell - 2 \rho)^2}
\approx
\frac{n^\textrm{t} \sum_{c = 1}^{n^\textrm{c}} q_c n^\mathrm{d}_c}{2\rho( \ell - \rho )},
\end{equation}
matching the local volume fractions of disks in interior and edge regions.
Thus, given the numbers of disks attached to codes $\{
n^\mathrm{d}_c \}_{c=1}^{n^\textrm{c}}$, Eqs.~\eqref{eq:global_volume_fraction}
and~\eqref{eq:local_volume_fraction} implicitly define tile edge lengths
$\tilde{\ell}$ and $\hat{\ell}$, which should be equal to each other for
the correct tile set setup. In our case, we sequentially check all values $\{
n^\mathrm{d}_c\}_{c=1}^{n^\textrm{c}}$ such that $n^\mathrm{d}_c \geq 0$,
$\sum_{c=1}^{n^\textrm{c}} n^\mathrm{d}_c \leq n^\mathrm{d}$ and select the
configuration with the minimum difference $|\tilde{\ell} - \hat{\ell} |$.\footnote
Note that the values of $\ell$ and $n^\mathrm{d}$ are kept constant during the
optimisation process, whereas the values of $n^\mathrm{d}_c$ are allowed to change,
since disks can move freely between tile interiors and edges.}
\nomenclature{$n^\mathrm{d}_c$}{Number of disks associated with edges of code
$c$
\nomenclature{\conf{$a$}{$b$}}{Configuration of $a$ disks with $b$
disks intersecting edges}
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{fig06}
\caption{An example of an admissible \conf{14}{1-1-2-1}
configuration~(with $n^\mathrm{d}_\alpha = n^\mathrm{d}_\gamma =
n^\mathrm{d}_\delta = 1$ and $n^\mathrm{d}_\beta=2$ code-related disks) and its
modification by disk displacements; disk 9 leaves its parent tile 4 and
randomly enters tiles 1, 3, 6 or 8; disk 13 leaves its parent tile 7 and
randomly enters tiles 1, 3, 5 or 7.}
\label{fig:admissible_configuration}
\end{figure}
On the basis of these data, we randomly generate positions of individual disks
and assign them to randomly selected tile interiors and edges, until
an admissible configuration $\M{p}$ is obtained. A single loop of the optimisation
algorithm involves a sequential selection of a disk $d \in \{1, \ldots, n^\mathrm{d}
\}$, and its movement given by
\begin{align}\label{eq:particle_move}
\new{x}_{j,d}
=
x_{j,d}
+
\ell
\left(
U
-
\half
\right),
&&
j = 1, 2,
\end{align}
repeated until a new admissible configuration $\new{\M{p}}$ is encountered. The
symbol $U$ denotes a random variable with a uniform distribution in the interval
$[0,1]$. If a disk, during its displacement, leaves its parent tile by crossing
the edge of code $c$, it is randomly assigned to a tile sharing the same
code, \Fref{fig:admissible_configuration}.
\nomenclature{$U$}{Random variable with a uniform distribution on [0,1]
interval}
The acceptance of the new solution $\new{\M{p}}$ is driven by the Metropolis
criterion~\cite{Kirkpatrick:1983:S}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:Metropolis_criterion}
\exp \left(
\frac{f(\M{p}) - f(\new{\M{p}})}{\theta}
\right)
\geq U,
\end{equation}
where $\theta$ denotes the algorithmic temperature, initially set to $\tmp^{\max}$ and
gradually reduced by a constant multiplicator $\tmp^\mathrm{mlt} < 1$ once the loop over
all $n^\mathrm{d}$ disks is completed. The entire algorithm terminates after $n^{\max}$
objective function evaluations. Moreover, we keep it restarting when the current
temperature $\theta$ is less than the threshold value $\tmp^{\min}$. Such a
re-annealing step was found beneficial, as the resulting problem is multi-modal
and discontinuous due to the presence of edge-constrained disks.
\nomenclature{$\theta$}{Algorithmic temperature}
\nomenclature{$\tmp^{\max}$}{Maximum temperature}
\nomenclature{$\tmp^{\min}$}{Minimum temperature}
\nomenclature{$\tmp^\mathrm{mlt}$}{Temperature multiplication}
\nomenclature{$n^{\max}$}{Maximum number of function evaluations}
\section{Results}\label{s:results}
The potential of the tile-based representation is demonstrated for the two-phase
composite medium appearing in \Fref{fig:original_microstructure}, \rev{with
default parameters shown in~\Tref{tab:default_parameters}}. Distinct sets
\Wa{8}{2}{2}, differing in (i)~the tile edge length $\ell$, (ii)~the number of
total and edge disks \conf{$n^\mathrm{d}$}{$n^\mathrm{d}_c$}$_{c=1}^{n^\textrm{c}}$, (iii)~the
weighting factor $w$, and in~\rev{(iv) phase properties contrast $E^\mathrm{\id}/E^\mathrm{m}$}
have been examined. In particular, our aim is to demonstrate that the proposed
tile morphology design procedure works well and that the
tile sets based on the specific tilings $\mathcal{O}_\mathrm{S}$ and $\dmn_\T$ can be used to
represent generic particulate media.
\begin{table}[ht]
\centering
\begin{threeparttable}
\caption{Default setting of parameters.}
\label{tab:default_parameters}
\begin{tabular}{lr}
\hline
\multicolumn{2}{c}{\bf{Microstructure}}\\
\hline
Volume fraction, $\phi$ & $26.8\%$ \\
Disk radius, $\rho$ & $8$~pixels \\
Young modulus of disk\tnote{a}, $E^\mathrm{\id}$ & 10 \\
Young modulus of matrix\tnote{a}, $E^\mathrm{m}$ & 1 \\
Poisson ratio of matrix and disks, $\nu^\mathrm{m} = \nu^\mathrm{\id}$ & $0.125$ \\
\hline
\multicolumn{2}{c}{\bf{Optimisation algorithm}}\\
\hline
Weighting factor\tnote{b}, $w$ & $10^5$ \\
Maximum temperature, $\tmp^{\max}$ & $10^{-3}$ \\
Minimum temperature, $\tmp^{\min}$ & $10^{-6}$ \\
Multiplicative factor, $\tmp^\mathrm{mlt}$ & $(\tmp^{\max} / \tmp^{\min})^{1/200}$ \\
Number of function evaluations, $n^{\max}$ & $10^4n^\mathrm{d}$ \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\begin{tablenotes}
\item[a] In what follows, all stress-related values are expressed in consistent
units.
\item[b] Determined as $w \approx \avg{\f^\mathrm{\T}} / \avg{\f^\mathrm{S}}$, with e.g.
$\avg{\f^\mathrm{S}}$ denoting the average value of $\f^\mathrm{S}$ determined for $20$ randomly
generated disk configurations.
\end{tablenotes}
\end{threeparttable}
\end{table}
\nomenclature{$E^\mathrm{\id}$, $E^\mathrm{m}$}{Young modulus of disk and matrix
\nomenclature{$\nu^\mathrm{\id}$, $\nu^\mathrm{m}$}{Poisson ratio of disk and matrix
\nomenclature{$\avg{\bullet}$}{Average value of $\bullet$
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{cc}
(a)~\conf{10}{1-1-0-0}, $\rec{\phi} = 23.6\%$ &
\conf{10}{1-0-1-1}, $\rec{\phi} = 28.0\%$ \\
\includegraphics[width=4cm]{fig07a1} &
\includegraphics[width=4cm]{fig07a2}
\\
(b)~\conf{17}{1-1-1-1}, $\rec{\phi} = 27.9\%$,
& \conf{17}{1-1-1-1}, $\rec{\phi} = 27.9\%$ \\
\includegraphics[width=4.96cm]{fig07b1} &
\includegraphics[width=4.96cm]{fig07b2} \\
(c)~\conf{27}{2-1-1-1}, $\rec{\phi} = 26.7\%$ &
\conf{27}{2-1-1-1}, $\rec{\phi} = 26.7\%$ \\
\includegraphics[width=6.08cm]{fig07c1} &
\includegraphics[width=6.08cm]{fig07c2} \\
(d)~\conf{32}{2-1-2-1}, $\rec{\phi} = 26.6\%$ &
\conf{32}{1-2-2-1}, $\rec{\phi} = 26.6\%$ \\
\includegraphics[width=7.04cm]{fig07d1} &
\includegraphics[width=7.04cm]{fig07d2} \\
$w = 10^4$ & $w = 10^5$ \\
\end{tabular}
\caption{Optimised sets \Wa{8}{2}{2} obtained for weighting
factors $w$ equal to $10^4$ and $10^5$ and for configurations with
(a)~$n^\mathrm{d} = 10$, $\ell = 42$~px,
(b)~$n^\mathrm{d} = 17$, $\ell = 52$~px,
(c)~$n^\mathrm{d} = 27$, $\ell = 64$~px and
(d)~$n^\mathrm{d} = 38$, $\ell = 74$~px;
\conf{$n^\mathrm{d}$}{$n^\mathrm{d}_c$}$_{c=1}^{n^\textrm{c}}$ refers to configuration of $n^\mathrm{d}$
disks in total with $n^\mathrm{d}_c$ disks intersecting edge $c$, $\ell$
is the tile edge length and $\rec{\phi}$ is the reconstructed volume
fraction.}
\label{fig:optimal_tile_sets}
\end{figure}
In \Fref{fig:results_S2}, we present the disk configurations and two-point
probability functions $\rec{S}_2$ obtained for the domain $\mathcal{O}$ being tiled by
optimised tile sets. We observe that all reconstructed functions $\rec{S}_2$ exhibit
local peaks exceeding the value of $\phi^2$, which reveals the presence of
characteristic length scales of order $\ell$ in the synthesised medium.
\complete{For the default value of the weighting factor $w = 10^5$,
Figs.~\ref{fig:results_S2}(a,b)}, the local extremes are notably smaller than
the value of $\phi$ corresponding to a periodic construction,
e.g.~\cite{Zeman:2007:FRM}. In addition, their number \rev{and magnitude} can be
substantially reduced by increasing the edge length $\ell$,
\Fref{fig:results_S2}(b), \rev{and practically eliminated when using more
general tile sets~\cite{Novak:2012:CRM}.} \complete{For lower values of $w$,
the disk distribution becomes more regular, \Fref{fig:results_S2}(c), and the
resulting representation is visually indistinguishable from the periodic
setting, cf.~\cite{Novak:2012:CRM}.}
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{ccc}
(a) &
\includegraphics[height=5cm]{fig08a1} &
\includegraphics[height=5cm]{fig08a2} \\
(b) &
\includegraphics[height=5cm]{fig08b1} &
\includegraphics[height=5cm]{fig08b2}\\
(c) &
\includegraphics[height=5cm]{fig08c1} &
\includegraphics[height=5cm]{fig08c2}
\end{tabular}
\caption{Reconstructed microstructures and two point probability functions
$\rec{S}_2$ for tile sets with (a)~$w = 10^5, n^\mathrm{d}=10$ disks and $\ell=42$~px,
(b)~$w = 10^5, n^\mathrm{d}=38$ disks and $\ell=74$~px, and
(c)~$w = 10^4, n^\mathrm{d}=38$ disks and $\ell=74$~px.}
\label{fig:results_S2}
\end{figure}
Such conclusions are further supported by \Fref{fig:alpha_acf_cuts} showing
cross-sections of the two-point probability functions in the $k_1$ direction for
two different values of the weighting factor $w$. The results demonstrate
that for higher values of $w$, the short-range phenomena are captured to a high
accuracy and the magnitude of local extremes are consistently reduced with the
increasing number of disks, albeit at a small rate. By decreasing the emphasis
on $S_2$ objective, \Fref{fig:alpha_acf_cuts}(b), the discrepancy
between the original and reconstructed medium substantially increases at short
distances, leading even to an inconsistent value of the volume fraction for $10$
disks. The local peaks also become more pronounced as the stress-based criterion
drives the system towards periodic configurations.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{cc}
(a)\includegraphics[width=.45\textwidth]{fig09a}
&
(b)\includegraphics[width=.45\textwidth]{fig09b}
\end{tabular}
\caption{Comparison of two-point probability functions $S_2(k_1, 0)$ for the
weighting factors (a)~$w=10^5$ and (b)~$w=10^4$.}
\label{fig:alpha_acf_cuts}
\end{figure}
\rev
\Fref{fig:traction_optimization}(a) illustrates the ability of the optimisation
algorithm to achieve self-equlibrated stress enrichment functions by comparing
the distribution of tractions $\Tfl{1}{3}$ obtained for an initial and the
optimised configuration of disks. Clearly, traction enrichments at contiguous
edges differ significantly in the initial configuration, and are reduced to
almost identical values by the proposed procedure. \complete{This also
automatically keeps the edge jumps in reconstructed traction enrichments
$\jmp{\rTfl{1}{3}}$ under control, \Fref{fig:traction_optimization}(b), since
their magnitude corresponds to the scatter found for representative eight tiles
from $\dmn_\T$ utilised in the reconstruction, recall
\Fref{fig:optimproc}(b).}
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{cc}
(a)\includegraphics[width=.45\textwidth]{fig10a}
&
(b)\includegraphics[width=.45\textwidth]{fig10b}
\end{tabular}
\caption{Distribution of (a)~traction enrichments $\Tfl{1}{3}$ and
(b)~reconstructed traction enrichment jumps $\jmp{\rTfl{1}{3}}$ at edges
$\Ge{\delta}$ of the tiling $\dmn_\T$, obtained for $n^\mathrm{d} = 38$ disks and $\ell =
74$~px. The grey/black patterns in (a) correspond to initial and optimised and
enrichment functions, respectively.}
\label{fig:traction_optimization}
\end{figure}
\complete{To what extent influences such choice of representative tiles
the synthesised enrichment functions?} To address this question, we consider a
particular reconstruction of stress enrichments functions $\rec{\M{\Sigma}}^* : \dmn_\T \rightarrow \set{R}^{3 \times 3}$,
assembled according to the the sequence of tiles found in the tiling $\dmn_\T$. It
is useful for the visualisation purposes to introduce a local error measure
\begin{align}
\fSigloc{ij}(\k)
=
\frac{
\left| \Sigma^*_{ij}(\k) - \rec{\Sigma}^*_{ij}(\k) \right|
}
\displaystyle
\max_{\M{m} \in \set{K}^{\dmnT}} \Sigma^*_{ij}(\M{m})
-
\min_{\M{m} \in \set{K}^{\dmnT}} \Sigma^*_{ij}(\M{m})
},
&&
\k \in \set{K}^{\dmnT};
i,j \in \{ 1, 2, 3 \},
\end{align}
\nomenclature{$\fSigloc{ij}$}{Local stress-based objective function
\nomenclature{$\f^{\Sigma}$}{Global stress-based objective function
quantifying a difference between the components of the stress enrichment
functions ${\M{\Sigma}}^*$ determined directly for the tiling $\dmn_\T$ by the
algorithm described in \Aref{app:mech_fields}, and their reconstruction
$\rec{\M{\Sigma}}^*$.
\begin{figure}[ht]
{\small
\begin{tabular}{cccc}
\multicolumn{4}{c}{$n^\mathrm{d}=10$ disks, $w = 10^5$} \\
\includegraphics[width=3.35cm]{fig11a1}
&\includegraphics[width=3.35cm]{fig11b1}
&\includegraphics[width=3.35cm]{fig11c1}
&\includegraphics[width=3.35cm]{fig11d1}\\
\multicolumn{4}{c}{$n^\mathrm{d} = 38$ disks, $w = 10^5$} \\
\includegraphics[width=3.35cm]{fig11a2}
&\includegraphics[width=3.35cm]{fig11b2}
&\includegraphics[width=3.35cm]{fig11c2}
&\includegraphics[width=3.35cm]{fig11d2}\\
(a) &(b) &(c) &(d)
\end{tabular}
}
\caption{Assessment of tiling-based enrichment functions,
(a)~microstructures obtained by tilings $\dmn_\T$, distribution of (b)~true
stress enrichment functions $\Sigma^*_{13} \equiv \sigfl{11}{3}$,
(c)~reconstructed stress enrichment functions $\rec{\Sigma}^*_{13} \equiv
\rsigfl{11}{3}$ and of (d)~the local reconstruction-based error
$\fSigloc{13}$.
\label{fig:reconstructed_stress_fields}
}
\end{figure}
Outcomes of this comparison are shown in~\Fref{fig:reconstructed_stress_fields}
in the form of (a)~tiling-based microstructures, (b)~distribution of the
corresponding enrichment functions $\Sigma^*_{13}$, (c)~their reconstructed
counterparts and (d)~spatial distribution of the relative error. For the
microstructure generated from tiles with $n^\mathrm{d}=10$ disks, we observe that the
reconstructed field displays distributed errors in tile interiors.
Similarly to $S_2$ criterion, these deviations are significantly reduced
and become highly localised when increasing the number of disks and the size of
tiles. This claim is further supported by~\Fref{fig:global_error_evolution},
plotting the evolution of the global error
\begin{equation}
\f^{\Sigma}
=
\frac{1}{\dmn_\T}
\sum_{i,j=1}^3
\sum_{\k \in \set{K}^{\dmnT}}
| \fSigloc{ij}(\k) |
\end{equation}
as a function of the number of disks. For both values of $w$, we observe
approximately linear convergence with increasing $n^\mathrm{d}$. In addition, the error
decreases for larger phase contrasts $E^\mathrm{\id}/E^\mathrm{m}$. This is caused by the
fact that stresses tend to concentrate more at stiffer disks, therefore reducing
variations of tractions at tile edges, see also~\cite{Novak:2012:MEF} for a
similar discussion.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{cc}
(a)\includegraphics[width=.45\textwidth]{fig12a}
&
(b)\includegraphics[width=.45\textwidth]{fig12b}\\
\end{tabular}
\caption{The global reconstruction error $\f^{\Sigma}$ as a function of the number
of disks $n^\mathrm{d}$ for different phase contrasts $E^\mathrm{\id}/E^\mathrm{m}$ and weighting factors
(a)~$w=10^5$ and (b)~$w=10^4$.}
\label{fig:global_error_evolution}
\end{figure}
Altogether, this indicates that the tile set was designed correctly, since the
optimisation was executed for independent objective functions, recall
\Eref{eq:err_tot}. Finally we stress that the significant compression has been
achieved by the tiling-based representation: the original microstructure
contains $\approx 1,300$ disks, whereas the most detailed tile-based
representation builds on $38$ disks only and is capable of producing much larger
microstructures at a negligible computational cost.
}
\section{Conclusions}\label{s:conclusions}
In this work, we have proposed an approach to the construction of aperiodic
local fields in heterogeneous media with potential applications in hybrid or
generalised FE environments. The method is based on the Wang tiling concept that
allows us to represent complex patterns using a limited set of representative
tiles, complemented by the Simulated Annealing-based algorithm to arrive at
optimal tile set morphologies. On the basis of the results obtained from
analyses of the medium under consideration we conjecture that:
\begin{itemize}
\item the proposed method provides a robust tool for compression of disordered
microstructures and can serve as an efficient microstructure generation
algorithm,
\item it allows for aperiodic extensions of local, possibly periodic,
fields to substantially larger domains while maintaining their compatibility,
\item the tiling-based fields can be utilised as
microstructure-based enrichment functions for generalised Partition of Unity methods or hybrid finite
element schemes.
\end{itemize}
We are fully aware that our conclusions are somewhat provisional, in the sense
that these are based on a single set of tiles and the specific class of
microstructures. Partial extension to general setting is available
in~\cite{Novak:2012:CRM,Doskar:2012:GMH} and remains in the focus of our current work.
\paragraph{Acknowledgements}
The authors thank Jaroslav Vond\v{r}ejc~(CTU in Prague) for providing us with a
MATLAB source code of FFT-based homogenisation algorithm and Adrian
Russell~(University of New South Wales), Michal \v{S}ejnoha and Milan
Jir\'{a}sek~(CTU in Prague) and anonymous referees for their criticism and
helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. We also gratefully
acknowledge financial support by the Czech Science Foundation through grants
No.~P105/12/0331~(JN), P105/11/P370~(AK), and P105/11/0411~(JZ). Our work was
partially supported by the European Social Fund, grant
No.~CZ.1.07/2.3.00/30.0005 of Brno University of Technology (Support for the
creation of excellent interdisciplinary research teams at Brno University of
Technology, JN), by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech
Republic through project MSM~6840770003~(AK), and by the European Regional
Development Fund under the IT4Innovations Centre of Excellence, project
No.~CZ.1.05/1.1.00/02.0070~(JZ).
|
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Q: How do I control tag order in Springdoc OpenAPI 3.0? I'm switching from Springfox 3.0 to OpenAPI 3.0 + Springdoc-openapi.
In Springfox the tag order is alphabetical, but in Springdoc's Swagger UI, the order appears to be random.
How do I control the Tag order on the UI?
I'd prefer an ordering of my choosing, but would be OK with ordering alphabetically by tag name.
@Tag(name = MY_CONTROLLER_TAG_NAME, description = MY_CONTROLLER_TAG_DESC)
public class MyController {
Desired Order:
*
*Paginated Endpoints
*User Access
*Tagging
*Tagging - Admin
*User Management
*User Management - Admin
Actual Order:
*
*User Access
*Tagging
*Paginated Endpoints
*Tagging - Admin
*User Management - Admin
*User Management
POM Dependencies:
<springdoc-openapi.version>1.6.4</springdoc-openapi.version>
...
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springdoc</groupId>
<artifactId>springdoc-openapi-ui</artifactId>
<version>${springdoc-openapi.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springdoc</groupId>
<artifactId>springdoc-openapi-security</artifactId>
<version>${springdoc-openapi.version}</version>
</dependency>
Application.yml:
springdoc:
show-actuator: ${SWAGGER_ENABLED:true}
swagger-ui:
doc-expansion: none
api-docs:
enabled: ${SWAGGER_ENABLED:true}
model-converters:
pageable-converter:
enabled: true
A: try either:
springdoc.swagger-ui.tagsSorter: alpha
springdoc.writer-with-order-by-keys: true
https://springdoc.org/properties.html
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
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Any Price (55) Under $100 (20) $100-499 (30) $500-4,999 (5)
3 Uncut Series No. 0100 - 3 Young Girls with costumes
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New York NY: McLoughlin Bros. 1911-1913. Three (3) different 10 1/2" x 10 1/2" uncut sheet with a 6" paper doll with 5 costumes and 3-5 hats or wigs for each. Each costume is holding an object and includes a school outfit, party dress, night shirt, a coat and and.....
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New York NY: McLoughlin Bros. 1911-1913. Three (3) different 10 1/2" x 10 1/2" uncut sheet of paper doll with costumes and hats for each. Sheet A is a 2 1/2" infant with 7 outfits a carriage, bath tub and many accessories. Sheet B is a 5" little girl with.....
48 complete sets of Lion Coffee "Nursery Rhyme", "Occupations" and "Doll House"
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Domestic Work, Advertising to Women
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Alphabet de la Phosphatine Falières
Learn to Read, Early Learning, Chromolithography, Children's Illustration
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Child Development, Parenting
Washington, D.C. United States Department of Labor, 1930. A government-issued advice booklet ("Publication No. 202") for American parents, published by the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor. Includes twelve "lessons" for parents including "Why and how do you punish your child?", "Does your child always obey you?".....
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Riverhead, Long Island: c.1878. The autograph book of Addie [Raynor?], resident in Riverhead, Long Island, New York c.1878. Includes a very fine calligraphic drawing by Usher B. Howell done in ink and gilt; Howell would go on to be President of the Riverhead Bank. Four leaves of loose autograph leaves.....
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Texas State Dept. of Public Welfare, 1959. An educational booklet for mothers published in 1959 with information about choosing the best day care for a child. "Day Care: A Guide for Mothers Who Work". [Austin:] Texas State Department of Public Welfare, 1959. 8vo (8.5" by 5.5"), pp. 16, wrappers inclusive.....
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MA: c. 1880. Eight (8) mounted photographs of the Phineas Bemis House in Dudley, Mass. Although the photographs use "Old House in Dudley", images appear to be from the Phineas Bemis house which was destroyed in 2005. One mentions it is the "South Room in the Dudley home", another "North.....
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|
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Q: How does thin film interference work? So thin film interference is when light is half-reflected half-refracted then the reflected and refracted wave interfere with each other to produce another color.
What I don't understand is that the waves are off-sync; not on top of each other. So why do they interfere? And doesn't interference change only amplitude? Why does it affect the wavelength?
A: Everything is explained in wikipedia at "thin film interference". What do you mean by "off-sync" ? In classical images like the wikipedia one (see below) only one ray is drawn, but in practice there are an infinity of parallele rays, so superimposition do occurs.
But if by "off-sync" you mean there is a phase difference in the "2" superimposed rays, this is the whole point: phases will positively or negatively (or intermediatly) interfere based on this phase difference. And since the phase corresponds to wavelength/offset, the phase difference varies with wavelength.
A: All the rays are reflected at some point. One is reflected immediately and never enters the thin film. There, it is reflected at an angle $\alpha$, equal to the angle of incidence. Another ray might enter the thin film, being refracted to an angle $\beta$, is then reflected on the inside of the film, and then leaves again on the same side it entered, thereby again being refracted, so it too leaves at an angle $\alpha$. Any other rays might be reflected any (odd) number of times on the inside of the film (each time at an angle $\beta$), but in the end they all leave at the angle $\alpha$ they entered at. Thus, all those rays are indeed "on top of each other" in terms of angle (wave vector), but their relative "optical path lengths" differ depending on how often they have been reflected on the inside.
The color one sees depends on the thickness of the film. The two phase boundaries act as a resonance cavity. This effect is used in so-called Fabry-Perot interferometers. It is not that the color of the light changes, but rather light of certain wave lengths is enhanced by the interference (constructive, large amplitude) whilst all the other wave lengths interfere destructively (small amplitude). Thus, if you shine white light on such a film, you will only see the colors which resonate with the films thickness. The variety of color in, say, a soap bubble is due to variations in the thickness of the film.
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# Table of Contents
1. Title page
2. Copyright page
3. Figures
4. Epigraph
5. Chapter 1: Introduction
1. Notes
6. Chapter 2: Beginnings
1. Notes
7. Chapter 3: Addictionology 101
1. Notes
8. Chapter 4: Cultural Impact
1. Notes
9. Chapter 5: Sexual Stories
1. Notes
10. Chapter 6: Diagnostic Disorder
1. Notes
11. Chapter 7: Sexual Conservatism
1. Notes
12. Chapter 8: Conclusion
1. Notes
13. Index
14. End User License Agreement
## List of Tables
1. Table 1 References to 'sex addict', 'sexual addiction' and 'sex addiction' in _The New York Times_
## List of Illustrations
1. Figure 1 Curt Aldrich, _Love Addict_ (1966). Author's collection.
2. Figure 2 William Donner, _The Sex Addicts_ (1964). Author's collection.
3. Figure 3 'Overcoming Sex Addiction': Android app on Google Play. Reproduced by permission of KoolAppz.
4. Figure 4 Sex addiction terms on Google Ngram. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.
5. Figure 5 Author screening test, 17 June 2014.
6. Figure 6 _I Am a Sex Addict_ (2006: Caveh Zahedi).© IFC Films/Photofest.
7. Figure 7 _Chelsea Lately_ , 'Interview with Gwyneth Paltrow', 16 September 2013.
8. Figure 8 Selma Blair in _A Dirty Shame_ (2004: John Waters). Free desktop wallpaper.
9. Figure 9 'I Booked Myself into a Sex Addict Rehab Clinic.' Tom Scott cartoon, 2010. Reproduced by permission of Tom Scott.
10. Figure 10 PsycINFO terms for sex addiction publications, 1960–2013.
## Guide
1. Cover
2. Table of Contents
3. Start Reading
4. CHAPTER 1
5. Index
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#
Copyright © Barry Reay, Nina Attwood and Claire Gooder 2015
The right of Barry Reay, Nina Attwood, Claire Gooder to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7035-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7036-2 (pb)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9804-5 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9803-8 (mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reay, Barry.
Sex addiction : a short history / Barry Reay, Nina Attwood, Claire Gooder.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-7035-5 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-7036-2 (paperback. : alk. paper) 1. Sex addiction. 2. Sex addiction–History. I. Attwood, Nina. II. Gooder, Claire. III. Title.
RC560.S43R42 2015
616.85′833–dc23
2014045194
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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# Figures
Curt Aldrich, _Love Addict_ (1966). Author's collection.
William Donner, _The Sex Addicts_ (1964). Author's collection.
'Overcoming Sex Addiction': Android app on Google Play. Reproduced by permission of KoolAppz.
Sex addiction terms on Google Ngram. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.
Author screening test, 17 June 2014.
_I Am a Sex Addict_ (2006: Caveh Zahedi). © IFC Films/Photofest.
_Chelsea Lately_ , 'Interview with Gwyneth Paltrow', 16 September 2013.
Selma Blair in _A Dirty Shame_ (2004: John Waters). Free desktop wallpaper.
'I Booked Myself into a Sex Addict Rehab Clinic.' Tom Scott cartoon, 2010. Reproduced by permission of Tom Scott.
PsycINFO terms for sex addiction publications, 1960–2013.
Mental health professionals often take the symptoms of structured disorders at face value. They create treatment centers and techniques that cater to particular disorders. Psychiatric researchers devote their careers to studying particular disorders and journals arise to publish their results. Support groups emerge to reinforce the reality of the symptoms. Disorders become aspects of social movements that invest in, create, and reinforce the reality of the conditions. Sociologists, however, need to study how these disorders come to be socially defined as real, rather than accept the taken-for-granted notion that diagnostic measures reflect natural entities.
Allan V. Horwitz, 2002
# Chapter 1
Introduction
In America, if your addiction isn't always new and improved, you're a failure.
Chuck Palahniuk, 20021
_Daddy's Secret Cedar Chest_ (2013) is for the 'children of sex addicts'. An unnamed boy discovers a huge box in Daddy's bedroom (the cedar chest of the book's title) full of magazines and DVDs with 'pictures of women with no clothes on!' The dad (we are not told why he has his own bedroom unless Mummy's bedroom is called Daddy's bedroom too) also spends too much time with his computer in his home office. 'Everything Daddy did was a secret.' The boy tells his mother, and his parents argue about his father's 'habit'. The boy becomes unsettled – 'I was feeling scared.' He has bad dreams: 'A big hairy lady monster was crawling out of the humongous cedar chest. She stood up on her big hairy legs and opened up her big empty black hole of a mouth.' In the dream this rather clumsy metaphor swallows his father. The boy's concerned mother takes him to a therapist. Daddy moves out to seek help for his 'habit' and then returns home to an improved family environment. The big hairy lady monster and the chest have gone.2
Why have we come to a stage in our history and culture where it is even conceivable that 'children ages 6 to 12' might have to be told 'that they are not alone in their suffering, that help is available to them, and...that they did not cause their parent's sex addiction'?3
The aim of the book that follows is to trace the history of a new sexual concept, a modern sexual invention called sex addiction, and its sufferer the sex addict. Though we will discuss definitional complexities in due course, the sex addict has usefully been described as 'a person who is obsessed with some type of sexual behavior, and whose behavior is compulsive and is continued despite significant adverse consequences'.4 Aviel Goodman characterized it to the readers of the _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_ as 'simply the addictive process being expressed through sex, the compulsive dependence on some form of sexual behavior as a means of regulating one's feelings and sense of self'.5
The idea's beginnings are somewhat imprecise. One possible origin at a practical level was in the self-help or recovery culture of the 1970s (we will discuss the link between sex and alcohol addiction later). Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous grew out of a local Alcoholics Anonymous support group in Boston in 1976 and other national sexual-addiction recovery fellowships were utilizing the Twelve-Step programme by the late 1970s and early 1980s. Sex Addicts Anonymous (1977) had its headquarters in Minneapolis; Sexaholics Anonymous (1978) was centred in Simi Valley, California; while the New York and Los Angeles Sexual Compulsives Anonymous was operational by 1982 as were gay and bisexual sexually compulsive support groups in New York.6
We know that a linkage between sex and addiction was informally entertained in popular culture in the late 1950s and 1960s. Pulp fiction during that period included Don Elliott's _Love Addict_ (1959) and Curt Aldrich's _Love Addict_ (1966) (see Figure 1). The latter was about a promiscuous man so the term 'addict' referred to lust rather than affection.7 But it was William Donner's _The Sex Addicts_ (1964) that can actually claim first usage of the precise words 'sex addict' in the correct context (see Figure 2). It was about a couple of womanizers on a cruise ship: 'It's the way he is...Compulsive. He can't stay with a woman more than a single night, he says. At least, not if others are available...He's slept with almost nine hundred women.'8 One friend observed of the other, 'You're compulsive. You've got a monkey on your back', and suggested analysis. Later the man, who was close to his nine hundred, admitted 'Monkey on my back is right. Only I'm a sex addict, not a drug fiend.'9
Figure 1 Curt Aldrich, _Love Addict_ (1966). Author's collection. Figure 2 William Donner, _The Sex Addicts_ (1964). Author's collection.
Pulp fiction aside, we also know that homosexual psychotherapy patients were referring to 'sex heads' – in the sense of addicts – in the 1960s: 'I'm not only a pot head...I'm a sex head...it's completely eaten into everything.' In short, the term may have arisen independently at a more grassroots level.10 When we later discuss the intellectual origins and viability of the concept, it is worth recalling this evidence for its humble origins.
Conceptually, as we will see, Lawrence Hatterer and Stanton Peele in the US and Jim Orford in Britain played roles in the malady's history. The New York sex therapist Avodah Offit mentioned 'sex addicts' in 1981 (immediately after a discussion of nymphomania and hypersexuality), citing a link between sex and the release of endorphins: 'Thus sex, in addition to whatever else it does, may actually reduce pain and promote euphoria in much the same fashion as small doses of the morphinelike drugs. The sex addict, then, may literally be a junkie, in one sense.'11 However, the actual term 'sex addiction' is most clearly associated with the work of the US psychologist Patrick Carnes and his book _The Sexual Addiction_ (1983), republished as _Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction_ (1983). Carnes's centrality, for better or for worse, will become clear in the pages that follow.
The idea of sexual addiction enjoyed varied reception in these early years, and there was already an indication that endorsements might vary. It appeared in the 'Current Trends' section of the journal _Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality_ in 1985.12 A comment in the _British Journal of Sexual Medicine_ in 1986 by a Chicago psychiatrist indicated both that the concept had arrived and a certain amount of scepticism about its usefulness:
the theory of sexual addiction as an illness is so wide a net that it has the danger of being used on the one hand as an excuse to cover or continue a whole range of inappropriate or law-breaking sexual behaviours, and on the other it is a catchall that has scooped up normal sexual behaviours as well.13
It was included momentarily in the American Psychiatric Association's _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual_ DSM-III-R in 1987, but was absent from all subsequent editions, a struggle that we will return to later in this book.14 Psychologists discussed in the same year whether the complaint was best termed sexual addiction, hypersexuality, compulsive sexual behaviour or (their preference) sexual impulsivity.15 It was mentioned in a 1988 text on disorders of sexual desire, but without elaboration and minus its own chapter, in a book that devoted more attention to _lack_ of sexual desire than to its excesses.16 It came to the attention too of the famous John Money, emeritus professor of medical psychology and professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University and Hospital, though not with the notice that addictionologists might have sought:
Sexual addiction...is a newly coined term for a disorder as fictitious as thirst addiction, hunger addiction, or reading addiction...Sexual addictionology does not address the specificity of addiction. Instead it decrees that the only non-addictive form of sexual expression is lifelong heterosexual fidelity and commitment in monogamous marriage. Everything else is the gateway of sin through which exits the broad road to sexual depravity, degeneracy and addiction. Within addictionology, the wheel of degeneracy has made a full turn!17
Certainly the notion of perceived, out-of-control sexual behaviour moved from a situation in 1972 where hypersexuality was proclaimed 'a rare phenomenon' to the moment in the late 1980s when a relatively early publication in the addictionology genre, Charlotte Davis Kasl's _Women, Sex, and Addiction_ (1989), began with reference to the 'epidemic proportion of addictive behavior in this country'.18 The best-selling therapist Anne Wilson Schaef echoed Kasl dramatically: 'Sexual addiction is a progressive disease and...results in destruction and early death for addicts and often those with whom they are involved. Sexual addiction is of epidemic proportions in this society and is integrated into the addictiveness of the society as a whole.'19 However, this may merely have indicated a split between professional psychiatry and the enthusiasm of popular medicine. The New Jersey psychiatrists who edited the state-of-the-art statement on desire disorders in 1988 said of sexual addiction that they had not 'encountered clinically more than a handful of such cases in the past decade'.20 Yet they also noted the 'popular appeal' of the concept and hinted at a potential clientele:
There are, however, numerous individuals who are on the high end of the desire continuum – who are sexually enthusiastic with little provocation, who never seem to become satiated, and who engage in high frequencies of both self- and partner stimulation. These individuals tend to be admired or envied rather than diagnosed!21
Sexual addiction played a part in the issues-based, sexuality studies reader _Taking Sides_ (1989) but as part of a debate – a 'controversial issue' rather than an established problem – in the clashing-views format, with Carnes's uncritical acceptance of the disorder pitted against a highly critical counter-argument, 'The Myth of Sexual Addiction', by two sociologists, Martin Levine and Richard Troiden.22 Janice Irvine (another sociologist) summarized this early history in 1995: 'Claims-makers for the sex addiction diagnosis have...achieved a reasonable level of success thus far.'23 Its consolidation thereafter would prove more impressive.
The historiographical starting point for what follows in this book is indeed Irvine's 1995 argument that sex addiction was a social construction, a product of late twentieth-century cultural anxieties.24 She was not the first critic to put this case. Levine and Troiden had similarly argued that 'The concepts of sexual addiction and compulsion constitute an attempt to repathologize forms of erotic behavior that became acceptable in the 1960s and 1970s.'25 The principal facilitators in this making, these early critics argued, were an addiction discourse (gambling, alcohol) that leant itself almost seamlessly to sexual matters; a strange and momentary combination of conservative Christian and radical feminist social purity; and the initial impact of AIDS in the 1980s that so dramatically intensified such sexual apprehensions. The rapid spread of the concept was aided by its imprecision: 'Claims about what constitutes sex addiction are so vague...that they can potentially include large numbers of the population.'26 Sex addiction's success as a concept lay with its medicalization, both as part of a self-help movement in terms of self-diagnosis, and as a rapidly growing industry of therapists on hand to deal with the new disease. And the media also played a vital role: TV, the tabloids, and the case histories of claimed celebrity victims all helped to popularize this newly invented term. As Irvine wrote, 'The power of sex addiction lay not in the number of sufferers but in the expansion of this particular narrative of sexual disease.'27
Irvine and her fellow sociologists were writing and researching in the 1980s and early 1990s. By the time her article appeared, the sexual addiction specialists had their own journal, _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention_ (founded in 1994), and Carnes and his team were treating health professionals, primarily doctors, accused of sexual misconduct and referred by regulatory boards and health programmes (half the group were adjudged to be sex addicts).28 Carnes's Golden Valley Health Center in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis–Saint Paul) in Minnesota had treated over 1,500 alleged addicts from 1985 to 1990, around 10 per cent of whom were ministers of the church.29 As a claimed disorder, sexual addiction achieved endorsement with its own section (by Goodman) in the third edition of _Substance Abuse: A Comprehensive Textbook_ (1997) and mention in the seventh edition of the influential psychiatric text, _Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry_ (2000), used by generations of medical students and practitioners. 'In the author's view sex addiction is a useful concept heuristically because it can alert the clinician to seek an underlying cause for the manifest behavior.'30 The next edition of _Kaplan & Sadock_ in 2005 had a chapter on sex addiction by none other than Patrick Carnes.31
Moreover, Irvine's 'sexualized society' was on the eve of what Linda Williams has described as 'on/scenity', capturing pornography's everyday visibility and presence – in huge volume – in the early twenty-first century, where sex became central to everyday discourse and representation, termed variously pornographication or pornification, 'striptease culture', a hypersexual society, mainstreaming sex or the 'sexualization of culture'.32 Feona Attwood has nicely captured this cultural turn as 'the proliferation of sexual texts' and we will see that sexual addiction was very much one of those texts.33
Irvine's media was also a media without the power of the Internet and the ubiquity of Internet sex.34 In 1997, as a joke on an Internet bulletin board, a New York psychiatrist invented IAD or 'Internet Addiction Disorder' and found that it was immediately taken seriously as a syndrome.35 He was tapping into a zeitgeist. Kimberly Young, a psychologist from the University of Pittsburgh, had already raised the possibility in 1996, and announced 'Internet Addiction: The Emergence of a New Clinical Disorder' in the pages of the new journal _CyberPsychology & Behavior_ in 1998, which would go on to be cited in 342 different publications.36 When the contributors to the _Handbook of Clinical Sexuality for Mental Health Professionals_ (2003) wrote their section on sexual compulsivity, they focused on 'online sexual compulsivity'.37 Both Jennifer Schneider and Robert Weiss featured cybersex in their chapters in the 2004 _Handbook of Addictive Disorders_.38 Carnes's entry on sexual addiction for _Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry_ (2005) referred to cybersex as the 'Crack Cocaine of Sex Addiction'.39 The entry on sex addiction in the sexuality studies textbook _Our Sexuality_ (2008) was paired with a think-piece 'Cybersex Addiction and Compulsivity: Harmless Sexual Outlet or Problematic Sexual Behaviour?'40
A critic of the diagnostic value of sexual addiction, the Denver family therapist Tracy Todd, wrote that 'More and more people are showing up at my door with it branded on their foreheads. "I learned it from a talk show", one man told me...Clients arrive with a wealth of information obtained from the Internet.' He was clearly impressed, though concerned, at the speed with which the label was 'gaining popular attention and acceptance'.41 And this was only 2004.
The technological sexual temptations faced by the sex addict in 1990 were the VCR and phone sex. By the 2010s the addictionology timeline of sexual access had expanded to include chat rooms, porn sites, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, Sexting, GRINDR and many other sites and applications. Smartphones had replaced laptops.42 The afflicted have their own aids to counter temptation: the iRecovery app for iPhone or iPad, a kind of digital workbook with links to networks of support and charts to monitor progress, and the rather alluringly illustrated Android app on Google Play called 'Overcoming Sex Addiction' (see Figure 3).43
Figure 3 'Overcoming Sex Addiction': Android app on Google Play. Reproduced by permission of KoolAppz.
If sex addiction was a response to cultural anxiety, then, a historical construction, what of its history since Irvine's 1995 intervention? What happened to its early-hinted social opportunism and diagnostic amorphism? Did the combination of therapeutic self-interest and popular cultural endorsement persevere? We know that by 2010 sex addiction had another variant, 'hypersexual disorder', but what of the histories in between and thereafter?
Sexual addiction was part of a wider addiction discourse. 'In common parlance we now extend addiction to relate to almost any substance, activity or interaction', Hatterer wrote in 1982: 'People now refer to themselves as being addicted to food, smoking, gambling, buying, forms of work, play and sex.'44 As early as the end of the 1980s, Stanton Peele, a specialist in the area of alcohol and drug abuse, was warning against what he termed the addiction treatment industry. Although his work in the 1970s had contributed to the expansion of the concept of addiction, he was critical of the misappropriation of his ideas in the decade that followed. He was concerned about the move from alcoholism counselling to therapy for sexual addiction and the sheer expansion of the variety of such newly defined diseases – his book was called _Diseasing of America_ (1989). It seemed as if 'each American must have at least one such disease and, in addition, must know of many other people who altogether have a score of other diseases. It is hard to escape the conclusion that ownership of an emotional-behavioral-appetitive disease is the norm in America.'45 Sex addiction's link to other dependencies was clear from the start, as outlined in an interview with a rare creature, a lesbian sex addict:
I didn't realize that I was a sex addict until I stopped drinking and doing drugs. I was in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) at the time. I realized that I had to stop having sex or I would start drinking again. I was using sex with men to avoid dealing with my sexual feelings about women. I decided to go to Sexual Compulsives Anonymous (SCA).
The poor woman was obviously addicted to addiction:
Yes, I've spent my whole life juggling my addictions to stay alive. I went to Overeaters Anonymous (OA) first for bulimia...Then I was sent to AA by OA. For years I substituted one addiction for another. I've been addicted to alcohol, drugs, sex, food, caffeine, cigarettes, shopping, and gambling.46
By the start of the new millennium, Eva Moskovitz was noting America's obsession with the psychological: 'Today Americans turn to psychological cures as reflexively as they once turned to God.'47 Addiction had become identity. She listed the choice of support groups meeting during the course of a week at one Colorado church in 1990: Cocaine Anonymous, Survivors of Incest, Alcoholics Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, Codependents of Sex Addicts Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, Adult Overeaters Anonymous, Codependents Anonymous, Self-Abusers Anonymous.48 The numbers she gave were impressive. Forty per cent of adult Americans were attending recovery meetings, around 75 million people. There were more than 3 million such groups in the USA, including 6,000 for sex addicts, and 260 different Twelve-Step programmes.49 These numbers are dwarfed by the estimates of those who actually suffered from such disorders, which Moskovitz took from the websites of the organizations involved in trying to treat them: 20 million alcoholics, 20 million gamblers, 30 million overeaters, 25 million sex addicts, 15 million compulsive shoppers, and the 80 million codependents of all of the preceding. If those estimates were accurate (a huge if ), these addicts would have comprised nearly 70 per cent of the entire 2001 US population!50 From a transatlantic perspective Frank Furedi called it therapy culture, where addiction became a fetish, with all the powerlessness, vulnerability and passivity associated with that state.51
The other crucial setting for the early history of sex addiction was the rise of madness in America, and the roles both of the American Psychiatric Association's _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders_ (DSM) and the pharmaceutical companies in this turn to mental disorder. The DSM, the 'Psychiatric Bible' that has been criticized for creating mental disorder where it does not exist, can, as one commentator has expressed it, 'in effect usher diseases in and out of existence with the stroke of a pen'.52 Homosexuality famously was excised from DSM-II in 1974.53 Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder (a child's over-familiarity with unfamiliar adults) and Restless Legs Syndrome (an urge to move the legs) are but two interesting examples of newer inventions.54 (One enterprising neurological unit in Italy has discovered a case of pathological gambling, hypersexuality, impotence and restless legs syndrome, all in the one patient.55) It is noticeable that the move has been to include rather than exclude (sex addiction's experience notwithstanding): the DSMs have increased their tally of mental illnesses from 180 in 1968 to over 350 in 1994, and DSM-5 (2013) has maintained that upper level.56
Hence the histories of other psychiatric complaints are crucial when we consider sex addiction, especially given the relationship between the DSM and the pharmaceutical companies. 'Once upon a time, drug companies promoted drugs to treat their diseases', a former editor in chief of the _New England Journal of Medicine_ has observed: 'Now it is often the opposite. They promote diseases to fit their drugs.'57 There is an impressive list of ailments whose diagnoses and treatment have increased exponentially in recent decades in what has been termed the medicalization of society (or, less elegantly, 'disease mongering'): Bipolar Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Autism, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (added to DSM in 1980 as a diagnosis for the complaints of war veterans but then extended to describe victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence), Social Phobia and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).58
Sociologists and cultural historians of medicine and psychiatry have outlined the ingredients for the expansion of a syndrome – whereby, say, what was considered mere shyness could, in less than a decade, become the widespread mental disorder 'Social Anxiety Disorder'.59 First, the illness was named: for example, DSM-III's 300.23 Social Phobia, later DSM-5's 300.23 Social Anxiety Disorder (Social Phobia).60 Then it needed a drug (or the drug needed it), in this case the SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and the pharmaceutical companies to market both the ailment and its supposed cure. In the US the naming in the symptom-based DSM provided the medical legitimacy for insurance claims, and coverage, where appropriate, through Medicaid and Medicare; in short, the funding for treatment. Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk have dubbed DSM endorsement 'the psychotherapist's password for insurance coverage'.61 Then there was the role of patient advocacy (consumers who already thought they knew what their ailment was) and self-help groups, therapists of various sorts, including the primary care physicians with prescribing powers (far more numerous than psychiatrists), other agents with access to possible sufferers (teachers have played a role in brokering ADHD), open-ended tests to locate the complaint, celebrity confessions, sufferers' memoirs, self-help guides, research institutes and projects, new specialist journals, and constant promotion by a less-than-critical media.62 (It will all become very familiar.) Christopher Lane's careful psychiatric history _Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness_ (2007) analysed this process.63 Similarly Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield's _Loss of Sadness_ (2007) has demonstrated the transformation of sadness (an everyday social response) into an epidemic of depressive disorder.64 The facilitators and processes – the 'diagnostic inflation' – are almost identical.65 And this was in an environment accepting of the ubiquity of untreated mental maladies, where such disorders were taken as a cultural commonplace, what Horwitz has called 'a shared culture of medicalized mental disorders'.66 If health policy researchers were to claim in 2005 that in the course of their lives nearly half of all Americans would meet the criteria for a DSM-IV disorder, it is scarcely surprising that sex might become part of this national inclusion.67
In her history of Alcoholics Anonymous and what she has termed the 'recovery movement' Trysh Travis outlined the various layers, levels or components of this culture: the addicts themselves or those in recovery, their organizations (Alcoholics Anonymous and similar groups), a 'vast network' of clinics, treatment centres, what she described as 'professional therapeutic entities', and finally a 'subculture' of memoirs, novels, handbooks, and TV and Internet discussion dealing with addiction and recovery.68 Unsurprisingly, for sex addiction is part of Travis's recovery movement (though not integral to her account), our book will be traversing similar territory.
Where we differ, however, is with Travis's refusal to take a position, her studied neutrality on recovery (recall that she was dealing with alcohol rather than sex addiction).69 Let us be clear about our approach. We are cultural historians, not clinicians, but we have read the clinically related literature – as contemporary history – and remain unpersuaded of the existence of this supposed malady. Why we are so sceptical will become clear by the end of the book. Though it is essentially mythical, creating a problem that need not exist, sex addiction has to be taken seriously as a phenomenon. It is a socio-psychological discourse that has taken hold on the public imagination – and proven an influential concept in academic circles too. What follows is a critical examination of the power of the idea and its cultural and (short) historical context.
## Notes
1 C. Palahniuk, _Choke: A Novel_ (New York, 2002), p. 203. 2 G. Goodman, _Daddy's Secret Cedar Chest_ (Mustang, OK, 2013), no pagination. 3 Ibid. 4 R. R. Irons and J. R. Schneider, 'Sexual Addiction: Significant Factor in Sexual Exploitation by Health Care Professionals', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 1:3 (1994), 198–214, quote at 204. 5 A. Goodman, 'Sexual Addiction: Designation and Treatment', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 18:4 (1992), 303–14, quote at 312. 6 G. Manley, 'Treatment and Recovery for Sexual Addicts', _Nurse Practitioner_ , 15:6 (1990), 34–41, esp. Table 2 on 38; L. J. Hatterer, _The Pleasure Addicts: The Addictive Process – Food, Sex, Drugs, Alcohol, Work, and More_ (Cranbury, NJ, 1980), pp. 119, 120; M. C. Quadland, 'Compulsive Sexual Behavior: Definition of a Problem and an Approach to Treatment', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 11:2 (1985), 121–32, at 123. 7 D. Elliott, _Love Addict_ (n.p., but USA, 1959); C. Aldrich, _Love Addict_ (San Diego, 1966). 8 W. Donner, _The Sex Addicts_ (n.p., but USA, 1964), p. 84. 9 Ibid., pp. 107, 129. 10 L. J. Hatterer, _Changing Homosexuality in the Male: Treatment for Men Troubled by Homosexuality_ (New York, 1970), pp. 113 (for quote), 415. 11 A. K. Offit, _Night Thoughts: Reflections of a Sex Therapist_ (New York, 1981), p. 123. 12 M. F. Schwartz and W. S. Brasted, 'Sexual Addiction', _Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality_ , 19:10 (1985), 103–7. 13 D. C. Renshaw, 'Comment: What is Sexual Addiction?', _British Journal of Sexual Medicine_ , 13:11 (1986), 305–6, quote at 306. 14 _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition – Revised): DSM-III-R_ (Washington, DC, 1987), p. 296. 15 R. J. Barth and B. N. Kinder, 'The Mislabeling of Sexual Impulsivity', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 13:1 (1987), 15–23. 16 S. R. Lieblum and R. C. Rosen (eds.), _Sexual Desire Disorders_ (New York, 1988), pp. 9 ('hyperactive desire', 'sexual compulsion', 'sexual addiction'), 42–4 ('Hyperactive Sexual Desire'). 17 J. Money and M. Lamacz, _Vandalized Lovemaps: Paraphilic Outcomes of Seven Cases in Pediatric Sexology_ (Buffalo, NY, 1989), p. 36. 18 L. Salzman, 'The Highly Sexed Man', _Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality_ , 6:1 (1972), 36–49, quote at 49; C. D. Kasl, _Women, Sex, and Addiction: A Search for Love and Power_ (New York, 1989), p. ix. 19 A. W. Schaef, _Escape from Intimacy_ (New York, 1989), p. 10. 20 S. R. Lieblum and R. C. Rosen, 'Introduction', in Lieblum and Rosen (eds.), _Sexual Desire Disorders_ , p. 9. 21 Ibid. 22 'Issue 6 Can Sex Be an Addiction?', in R. T. Francoeur (ed.), _Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Human Sexuality_ (Guilford, CT, 1989), pp. 84–97. 23 J. M. Irvine, 'Reinventing Perversion: Sex Addiction and Cultural Anxieties', _Journal of the History of Sexuality_ , 5:3 (1995), 429–50, quote at 435. 24 Irvine, 'Reinventing Perversion'. 25 M. P. Levine and R. R. Troiden, 'The Myth of Sexual Compulsivity', _Journal of Sex Research_ , 25:3 (1988), 347–63, quote at 349. 26 Irvine, 'Reinventing Perversion', 438. 27 Ibid., 440. 28 Irons and Schneider, 'Sexual Addiction', 206, 208, 209. 29 M. R. Lasser, 'Sexual Addiction and Clergy', _Pastoral Psychology_ , 39:4 (1991), 213–35, esp. 215. 30 A. Goodman, 'Sexual Addiction', in J. H. Lowinson, P. Ruiz, R. B. Millman, and J. G. Langrod (eds.), _Substance Abuse: A Comprehensive Textbook_ (Baltimore, 1997), pp. 340–54; V. A. Sadock, 'Normal Human Sexuality and Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders', in B. J. Sadock and V. A. Sadock (eds.), _Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Seventh Edition_, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 2000), vol. 1, p. 1599. 31 P. J. Carnes, 'Sexual Addiction', in Sadock and Sadock (eds.), _Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Eighth Edition_, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 2005), vol. 1, pp. 1991–2001. 32 Irvine, 'Reinventing Perversion', 442; L. Williams, 'Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene: An Introduction', in L. Williams (ed.), _Porn Studies_ (Durham, NC, 2004), pp. 1–23. See also B. McNair, _Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire_ (New York, 2002); L. M. Ward, 'Understanding the Role of Entertainment Media in the Sexual Socialization of American Youth: A Review of Empirical Research', _Developmental Review_ , 23:3 (2003), 347–88; S. Paasonen, K. Nikunen and L. Saarenmaa (eds.), _Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture_ (New York, 2007); K. C. W. Kammeyer, _A Hypersexual Society: Sexual Discourse, Erotica, and Pornography in America Today_ (New York, 2008); F. Attwood (ed.), _Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture_ (New York, 2010). 33 F. Attwood, 'Sexed Up: Theorizing the Sexualization of Culture', _Sexualities_ , 9:1 (2006), 77–94, quote at 78. 34 See, for example, B. L. A. Mileham, 'Online Infidelity in Internet Chat Rooms: An Ethnographic Exploration', _Computers in Human Behavior_ , 23:1 (2007), 11–31; N. M. Döring, 'The Internet's Impact on Sexuality: A Critical Review of 15 Years of Research', _Computers in Human Behavior_ , 25:5 (2009), 1089–101; D. K. Wysocki and C. D. Childers, ' "Let My Fingers Do the Talking": Sexting and Infidelity in Cyberspace', _Sexuality & Culture_, 15:3 (2011), 217–39; C. Brickell, 'Sexuality, Power and the Sociology of the Internet', _Current Sociology_ , 60:1 (2012), 28–44. 35 D. Wallis, 'Just Say No', _The New Yorker_ , 13 January 1997; H. Kutchins and S. A. Kirk, _Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders_ (New York, 1997), p. 12. 36 K. S. Young, 'Psychology of Computer Use: XL. Addictive Use of the Internet: A Case That Breaks the Stereotype', _Psychological Reports_ , 79:3 (1996), 899–902; K. S. Young, 'Internet Addiction: The Emergence of a New Clinical Disorder', _CyberPsychology & Behavior_, 1:3 (1998), 237–44. 37 A. Cooper and I. D. Marcus, 'Men Who Are Not In Control of Their Sexual Behavior', in S. B. Levine, D. B. Risen and S. E. Althof (eds.), _Handbook of Clinical Sexuality for Mental Health Professionals_ (New York, 2003), ch. 18, quote at p. 313. 38 J. P. Schneider, 'Understanding and Diagnosing Sex Addiction', in R. H. Coombs (ed.), _Handbook of Addictive Disorders: A Practical Guide to Diagnosis and Treatment_ (Hoboken, NJ, 2004), ch. 7, esp. pp. 208–13, 214; R. Weiss, 'Treating Sex Addiction', in Coombs (ed.), _Handbook of Addictive Disorders_ , ch. 8, esp. pp. 262–5. 39 Carnes, 'Sexual Addiction', p. 1995. 40 R. Crooks and K. Baur, _Our Sexuality_ (Belmont, CA, 2011), pp. 510–13. First published in 2008. 41 T. Todd, 'Premature Ejaculation of "Sexual Addiction" Diagnoses', in S. Green and D. Flemons (eds.), _Quickies: The Handbook of Brief Sex Therapy_ (New York, 2004), ch. 5, quote at p. 68. 42 R. Weiss and C. P. Samenow, 'Smart Phones, Social Networking, Sexting and Problematic Sexual Behaviors – A Call for Research', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 17:4 (2010), 241–6. 43 S. J. Campling, 'A Review on iRecovery – iPhone/iPad Application', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 18:3 (2011), 188–90; <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.koolappz.EP77708470001>. 44 L. J. Hatterer, 'The Addictive Process', _Psychiatric Quarterly_ , 54:3 (1982), 149–56, quote at 149. 45 S. Peele, _Diseasing of America_ (San Francisco, 1995), pp. 140–1. First published in 1989. 46 S. R. Edwards, 'A Sex Addict Speaks', _SIECUS Report_ , 14:6 (1986), 1–3, quote at 2. 47 E. S. Moskowitz, _In Therapy We Trust: America's Obsession With Self-Fulfillment_ (Baltimore, 2001), p. 1. 48 Ibid., pp. 246–7. 49 Ibid., pp. 248, 252, 253. 50 Ibid., pp. 255, 307 n. 22. 51 F. Furedi, _Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age_ (London, 2004), esp. pp. 120–4. 52 H. B. Hansen and others, 'Independent Review of Social and Population Variation in Mental Health Could Improve Diagnosis in DSM Revisions', _Health Affairs_ , 32:5 (2013), 984–93, quote at 984. 53 Kutchins and Kirk, _Making Us Crazy_ , ch. 3. See also A. De Block and P. R. Adriaens, 'Pathologizing Sexual Deviance: A History', _Journal of Sex Research_ , 50:3 (2013), 276–98, esp. 287–9. 54 _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fifth Edition): DSM-5_ (Washington, DC, 2013), pp. 268–70, 410–13. 55 G. d'Orsi, V. Demaio and L. M. Specchio, 'Pathological Gambling Plus Hypersexuality in Restless Legs Syndrome: A New Case', _Neurological Sciences_ , 32:4 (2011), 707–9. 56 For previous DSMs, see C. Lane, _Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness_ (New Haven, 2007), p. 43. See also De Block and Adriaens, 'Pathologizing Sexual Deviance'. 57 M. Angell, _The Truth About the Drug Companies_ (New York, 2004), p. 86. 58 See P. Conrad, _The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders_ (Baltimore, 2007), chs 1, 3, 6, 7. See also Kutchins and Kirk, _Making Us Crazy_ , ch. 4; D. Healy, 'The Latest Mania: Selling Bipolar Disorder', _PLoS Medicine_ , 3:4 (2006), 0441–4; R. Moyniham and D. Henry, 'The Fight Against Disease Mongering: Generating Knowledge for Action', _PLoS Medicine_ , 3:4 (2006), 0425–8; A. Frances, _Saving Normal_ (New York, 2013), ch. 5; G. Greenberg, _The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry_ (London, 2013), ch. 5; and J. M. Pierre, 'Overdiagnosis, Underdiagnosis, Synthesis: A Dialectic for Psychiatry and the DSM', in J. Paris and J. Phillips (eds.), _Making the DSM-5, 2013: Concepts and Controversies_ (New York, 2013), ch. 8. 59 See C. Lane, 'How Shyness Became an Illness: A Brief History of Social Phobia', _Common Knowledge_ , 12:3 (2006), 388–409; Lane, _Shyness_. 60 _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition): DSM-III_ (Washington, DC, 1980), pp. 227–30; DSM-5, pp. 202–8. 61 Kutchins and Kirk, _Making Us Crazy_ , p. 12. 62 See A. V. Horwitz, _Creating Mental Illness_ (Chicago, 2002); Healy, 'Latest Mania'; C. B. Phillips, 'Medicine Goes to School: Teachers as Sickness Brokers for ADHD', _PLoS Medicine_ , 3:4 (2006), 0433–5; Lane, _Shyness_ ; A. V. Horwitz and J. C. Wakefield, _The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder_ (Oxford, 2007); Conrad, _Medicalization of Society_ ; Frances, _Saving Normal_ ; J. Z. Sadler, 'Considering the Economy of DSM Alternatives', in Paris and Phillips (eds.), _Making the DSM-5_ , ch. 2. 63 Lane, _Shyness_. 64 Horwitz and Wakefield, _Loss of Sadness_. 65 Ibid., p. 7. 66 Horwitz, _Creating Mental Illness_ , p. 213. 67 R. C. Kessler and others, 'Lifetime Prevalence and Age-of-Onset Distributions of _DSM-IV_ Disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication', _Archives of General Psychiatry_ , 62 (2005), 593–602. 68 T. Travis, _The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey_ (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), ch. 1, esp. pp. 3–4, 6. 69 Ibid., p. 17.
# Chapter 2
Beginnings
Although sex addiction has undoubtedly been around for centuries, it is only over the past few years that we have started to fully understand it.
Paula Hall, 20131
The documentation of excessive sexual desire and conduct by sexologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been the usual starting point for proponents of the sex addiction concept – when they have found it necessary to sketch out its history, or are not assuming that it has always existed (as with the epigraph to this chapter). 'There is a long history of characterizing behaviorally enacted excesses of sexual behaviors as "hypersexual" ', Martin Kafka has written, citing the famous Richard von Krafft-Ebing to support the case that his new category was 'consistent' with an extensive clinical heritage.2 Kafka's proposal in 2010 for the inclusion of 'hypersexual disorder' in the 'Sexual Disorders' section of DSM-5 had a brief paragraph, 'Historical Overview of "Excessive" Sexual Behaviors', that contained references to works by Benjamin Rush (1812), Krafft-Ebing (1892), Havelock Ellis (1905) and Magnus Hirschfeld (1948). They, he claimed, were the 'precursors' to the 1960s and 1970s sex researchers – Clifford Allen (1962), Albert Ellis and Edward Sagarin (1965) and Robert Stoller (1975) – who dealt with the 'protracted promiscuity' that Kafka saw as a type of hypersexuality: Don Juanism or satyriasis in males and nymphomania in women.3 In Kafka's article – and he was not alone there – these were scholarly references, without elaboration or discussion, to provide authority and depth to a justification for a new psychiatric category. (Havelock Ellis, for instance, actually had nothing to say on the subject.4) But how close were these sexual phenomena, Kafka's 'excessive sexual behaviors', to sex addiction or hypersexuality? Rather than merely using these earlier sexologists and psychiatric clinicians as scholarly paraphernalia, it is worth spending some time to consider what it was that they were actually saying.
It is true that 'irresistible hypersensuality' and 'hypersexuality' are among Krafft-Ebing's names for the condition of excessive sexual desire. But his essential category was 'hyperaesthesia' or 'pathologically exaggerated sexual instinct', what he called the 'abnormal excitability of the imagination'.5 And he had many other terms to describe this sexual state ('abnormally increased sexual desire', 'psycho-sexual extravagances', 'excessive libido', 'pathologically exaggerated sex life', 'priapism', 'satyriasis') and for those who suffered from it ('Don Juans', 'nymphomaniacs').6 Moreover, a history of excessive sexual desires and behaviour is not the same as a history of sex addiction. This sort of conflation risks misrepresenting evidence to serve a particular narrative. The meanings of sexual categories that we take for granted today – heterosexuality, homosexuality and lesbianism – have dissolved when considered historically. Acts and desires are not transhistorical.7 Societal notions of normative and transgressive sexual behaviour have changed over time, and appreciating the complexities of specific historical, social and cultural contexts allows for a more nuanced understanding of the kinds of sexual classifications that are the subject of this book. Kafka's twenty-first-century 'increase in intensity and frequency of normophilic sexual behaviours that are associated with significant adverse consequences' was very different to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century nosology.8
Krafft-Ebing's cases of sexual hyperaesthesia were small in number, varied in scope and differed markedly between men and women. The manifestations of irresistible hypersensuality in men were acts of sexual violence and crime, and it was to those more serious cases that he paid attention. He acknowledged milder forms of hypersexuality but said that such sufferers were 'not afflicted with a pathological sexual condition'.9 Krafft-Ebing's three male cases of hyperaesthesia involved a man who tried to force both his ward and his own child to have sex with him at gunpoint, a teacher at a girls' school who masturbated while teaching in class, and another whose high sex drive resulted in pederasty and bestiality (or, more specifically, 'employment of the tongue of a dog').10 The three cases of satyriasis included a man whose sexual episodes ended in assault and rape attempts, another who attempted rape, committed incest and bestiality, and one who had had sex as many as fifteen times in a twenty-four-hour period and forced his wife to have sex with men and animals while he watched.11
The pioneering sexologist Iwan Bloch (not mentioned by Kafka) also discussed 'sexual hyperaesthesia' in his _Sexual Life of Our Time_ (1908): 'The abnormal increase in the sexual impulse (sexual hyperaesthesia, satyriasis, nymphomania) begins at the point in which the normal sexual impulse is exceeded; and that point is subject to wide individual variations, according to the age, race, habits, and external influences.'12 He considered hyperaesthesia more frequent in men (satyriasis) than women (nymphomania), but varied in its duration. His claim that the disorder was 'accompanied by a greater or less diminution of responsibility, or even by complete lack of responsibility' had a semblance to the claims of modern sex addiction, but his recommendations to wear cooler clothing and use colder bedding at night to quell lascivious thoughts were a reminder of a very different historical context.13 Like Krafft-Ebing, Bloch focused his (brief) discussion on the severer forms where sexual desire and the attendant 'reaction on the part of the genital apparatus' attained such a degree
that the man (or woman) may really be 'sexually insane', and, like the wild animals, rush at the first creature he meets of the opposite sex in order to gratify his lust; or he may be overpowered by some abnormal variety of the sexual impulse, so that he seizes in sexual embrace any other living or lifeless object, and in this state may perform acts of paederasty, bestiality, violation of children, etc. In these most severe cases we can always demonstrate the existence of mental disorder, general paralysis, mania, or periodical insanity...as a cause.14
This does not quite conform to present-day notions of sex addiction – except perhaps in the wilder fantasies of the talk show. His reference to women who consulted gynaecologists as often as possible because of the 'sexual excitement' they got from the speculum suggested an emphasis on the physical sexual female response very different from today's female love and sex addicts, whose compulsions are usually seen more in terms of relationships than raw sex.15 The discussion of satyriasis and nymphomania was limited. Bloch's focus was rather on its opposite: sexual anaesthesia or 'sexual loss of appetite'.16
These claimed antecedents were highly gendered in their perceptions of sexual compulsion. Krafft-Ebing was a proponent of the oft-mentioned, nineteenth-century belief that 'woman has less sexual need than man' and, accordingly, that evidence of 'predominating sexual desire' in women aroused 'suspicion of its pathological significance'.17 'The normal, untainted wife guided by ethical reasons knows how to conquer herself' when faced with 'unrequited love' outside the marriage.18 Those who could not restrain themselves and sought sex outside of marriage were 'pathological', demonstrating 'an utter want of understanding of the bearings and consequences of the scandalous behaviour, jeopardizing the honour and dignity of wife and family'.19 Krafft-Ebing differentiated such cases from nymphomania because 'the illicit intercourse was of a strictly monogamic character'.20 Yet he treated such disorders with the same psychological and behavioural seriousness as he did with the men and their sex crimes. We would see things rather differently today.
The difference gender played in evaluating the severity of the disorder was one of the more revealing aspects of the sexological literature. The male sex crimes already detailed were of course serious 'and of great importance for the criminal court', especially because, as Krafft-Ebing claimed, 'the individual so affected can scarcely be held mentally responsible'.21 But these male cases were at the criminal end of the hypersexual spectrum. He did not medicalize (to the same degree) or criminalize those men whose behaviour fell short of sex crimes. The implication of female sexual infraction was far greater than for men, well before any actual sex crimes were committed.
Chronic conditions of nymphomania are apt to weaken public morality and lead to offenses against decency. Woe unto the man who falls into the meshes of such an insatiable nymphomaniac, whose sexual appetite is never appeased. Heavy neurasthenia and impotence are the inevitable consequences. These unfortunate women disseminate the spirit of lewdness, demoralize their surroundings, become a danger to boys, and are liable to corrupt girls also, for there are homosexual nymphomaniacs as well.22
It is true, then, that nineteenth-century sexology has documented and discussed the concept of excessive sexual desire and behaviour – though to a very limited extent. Modern addictionologists have had some justification for including it in their brief historical résumés. But in the earlier period it was largely characterized as sexual criminality in men and moral corruption in women. Its rarity – as we will also see in the case of twentieth-century nymphomania – was key. There was no sign of the epidemic proportions favoured in later, twentieth-century, sexual addictionology. David Ley has similarly warned against picking and choosing from the annals of sexology in an effort to validate the concept of sex addiction. Krafft-Ebing's work did catalogue hyperaesthesia, satyriasis and nymphomania, but he also said that masturbation led to social and moral degeneration.23 Benjamin Rush, the American physician and signatory to the Declaration of Independence, invoked by Kafka and others as an early documenter of excessive sex, did indeed write that such appetites were 'both a disease of the body and mind'.24 But he also believed that too much sex and masturbation could create impotence, blindness, vertigo, epilepsy, loss of memory and death. For Rush the causes of the disease included rich food, intemperance and idleness, and his recommended treatments comprised marriage, a simple diet, temperance, constant employment and cold baths.25 In the case of unrequited love, the remedy was 'bleeding and blistering'.26
Intriguingly, the early psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel was not among the authorities cited by Kafka, though his work _Bi-Sexual Love_ , published first in 1922, contained a section on the Don Juan figure in male sexuality and a whole chapter on satyriasis and nymphomania.27 His extended discussion of individual cases included those who might well have been claimed as precursors to sex addicts: an inventor who kept a second house to receive his women and who never passed a day without possessing 'some woman – any woman – in addition to his wife'; the clerk whose every waking thought was of women – 'I feel as if something within me has taken possession of my soul driving me on from one adventure to another'; and the beautiful married woman who was unable to resist temptation – 'She is easily the victim of any man who comes near her...a woman who does not know how to say "no".'28 Yet Stekel's heterosexual hypersexuality was different to sex addiction:
One would think that a man who devotes his whole life to women, who dreams day and night only of new conquests, who considers every woman worth while when opportunity favors him, a man for whom no woman is too old, or too ugly, if he desires her, that such a man would be far removed from any homosexual trend. Yet the contrary is the fact and the greater my opportunity to study the 'woman chaser' the stronger my conviction becomes that, back of the ceaseless hunt, stands the longing after the male.29
For Stekel, who believed in a natural bisexuality, hypersexuality indicated homosexual rather than heterosexual desire. The womanizer's contempt for women and his constant reaffirmation of his masculinity masked his hidden homosexual desires; his quest for 'new and untried gratifications' stopped short of the same-sex sexual acts that he secretly longed for but denied in his paraded disgust for any hint of homosexuality.30 Thus, wrote Stekel, 'His search is endless because he is truly, though secretly, attracted by the male. His sexual goal is man.'31
Similarly for the 'Messalina type', Don Juan's female equivalent, perpetually in pursuit, and never satisfied because their hunger for men was really unacknowledged desire for their own sex: 'Nymphomania shows the same homosexual basis as satyriasis.'32 Stekel's treatment of such cases, through psychoanalysis, was to get his patients to recognize their underlying homosexualities – not quite the goal of modern-day, sex addiction therapists.
Albert Ellis and Edward Sagarin's 1964 study of nymphomania, one of the more substantial and better-known works on the topic that Kafka did refer to, actually demonstrated the rarity of 'true' nymphomania.33 The issue of gender remained central to definitions of compulsive sex: 'What is often termed nymphomania is _usually_ promiscuity, relatively well controlled, probably highly selective, and of a nature that would be considered relatively normal if found in almost any male in our society. Aside from their having several lovers, the promiscuous woman and the nymphomaniac have little in common.'34 Although the characteristics of the true nymphomaniac were lack of control, continuous need, compulsivity and self-contempt – terms similar to the languages of modern sex addiction – the condition was so rare that despite their many years in sex research and clinical practice they had never encountered a single case.35 Their book _Nymphomania_ was effectively about female promiscuity.
As Carol Groneman has argued in her history of nymphomania, there was no straightforward narrative but rather 'multiple ways, at particular moments in time, in which doctors and their patients understood certain expressions of sexual desire as disease or disorder'.36 Groneman has charted this history through its roots in organic disease to when it became a psychological disorder, and into its more modern incarnations. Treatments varied according to the claimed causes: surgical (tumour removal, clitorodectomy), hormonal, psychoanalytical and psychological. Psychology brought an even longer list of possible causes: narcissism, masochism, thwarted maternal instincts, childhood repression, incestuous attraction, latent homosexuality and frigidity.37 And throughout this history, as with sex addiction after it, the eternally unanswerable question remained: how much is too much sex? Groneman was alert to the historical range of sex once considered to be hypersexual for women – masturbation, oral, post-menopausal, pre- and extra-marital – that was less contentious by the 1970s. Changes in the sexual culture of the 1960s and 1970s meant that nymphomania could no longer be defined by the intensity of sex drive or the number of partners. The sex therapist Avodah Offit wrote of psychiatrists scrambling to 'comprehend the new, sexually aggressive woman', the 'hypersexual trend among women'.38 Emphasis then shifted from the frequency of the sexual act to its meaning. The new 'criterion for excess', the new pathology, became sex without love or affection.39
The biggest claims to continuity between modern sex addiction and the historical existence of excessive sexual desire – though they are certainly not the ones that the proponents of sex addiction have had in mind – are the instability of definitions and the mythmaking that accompanied them. Where 'true' nymphomania and satyriasis were discussed, the emphasis was on their extreme rarity and their physical as well as psychological origins. Even when medical specialists published work on these states, they ended up discussing not the 'true' forms but the more common 'selective promiscuity' that, as the word 'selective' implied, suggested some premeditation and self-control.40 Such was (and is) the public fascination with sexual excess that cheap paperbacks on nymphomania and satyriasis were published in the early 1960s with the aim of 'educating' about these 'harsh truths' – again despite their rarity.41 Thus the reframing of promiscuity as extreme medical disorder and the role of sensationalized publishing to buttress it were where the greater similarity with today's sex addiction and its inclusivity rested.
If anything, sex addiction has continued on from nymphomania in functioning as a metaphor for the fears, fantasies and anxieties surrounding male and female sexuality.42 Despite the relief that some individuals have claimed to derive from its currency, Janice Irvine has argued that 'sex addiction is a deeply problematic metaphoric system...Its languages site deviance in the individual physical body, reinscribe stereotypic ideas of gendered sexuality, and expose deep cultural anxieties about sex.'43
It is rather ironic that Kafka used the work of Alfred Kinsey's team in his background discussion of an 'operational definition' for hypersexuality, turning to Kinsey's figures for the total sexual outlets (that is, orgasms) of the 'underworld' (that is 'deviant') section of his male population sample. The total sexual outlet of around half this subgroup was at least seven orgasms a week, exactly the threshold for Kafka's definition of hypersexual desire in adult males.44 We say ironic because Kinsey's mid-twentieth-century sex research marked a significant departure in the discussion of sexual desire 'disorders'. His work challenged the notion that any sexual behaviour should be judged normal or abnormal, arguing that any such categorization was moral rather than scientific. Setting aside modern evaluations of his professed objectivity, Kinsey's perspective on excessive sexual desire and behaviour is what is of interest here. The idea that someone could have too much sex was nonsensical in Kinsey's view:
Psychologic and psychiatric literature is loaded with terms which evaluate frequencies of sexual outlet. But such designations as infantile, frigid, sexually under-developed, under-active, excessively active, over-developed, over-sexed, hypersexual, or sexually over-active, and the attempts to recognize such states as nymphomania and satyriasis as discrete entities, can, in any objective analysis, refer to nothing more than a position on a curve which is continuous. Normal and abnormal, one sometimes suspects, are terms which a particular author employs with reference to his own position on that curve.45
'The most significant thing about this curve...is its continuity', Kinsey claimed. 'No individual has a sexual frequency which differs in anything but a slight degree from the frequencies of those placed next on the curve.'46 For Kinsey, the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal' threatened scientific objectivity, were morally framed and were always relative to the observer. LeMon Clark cited this line of reasoning in his article on satyriasis, 'The Insatiable Male', published in the popular magazine _Sexology_ in 1963. Referring to Kinsey's male subjects aged between fifteen and forty and averaging more than twenty-one orgasms per week, Clark questioned whether having sex at this frequency was any more 'abnormal' than limiting such activity to once a month or less. None of these men should be classed as having satyriasis 'if they obtained a sense of relief following a climax, and for a time were able to direct their energies towards something else'.47 While Clark, unlike Kinsey, believed the condition of satyriasis existed, he followed Kinsey in arguing that there was a very broad spectrum of normal. The article's byline read: 'Is there such a thing as male "nymphomania" – is one man's "normal frequency" another man's disease?'48
In what was really a prophetic insight of developments to come in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Kinsey argued that it was the attempt to medicalize and pathologize difference that was the problem. It was the reaction of individuals to perceived aberrations – not the aberrations themselves – that needed studying:
The real clinical problem is the discovery and treatment of the personality defects, the mental difficulties, the compulsions, and the schizophrenic conflicts which lead particular individuals to crack up whenever they depart from averages or socially accepted custom, while millions of other persons embrace the very same behaviour, and may have as high rates of activity, without personal or social disturbance.49
He noted further that postulating the incidence of 'sexual irregularities' across the general population from the basis of clinical presentation was an inaccurate measure.50 If the behaviour did not upset you, you did not go to a clinic. The problem, therefore, was not the behaviour itself, but how it was being interpreted. There were no 'deviants' without 'deviance'.51
This more sex-positive approach to excessive sexual desire was likewise followed by others in the field of sexology (though Kinsey was of course a zoologist, not a sexologist as such). The magazine _Sexology_ , published in the US from 1933, fielded letters from concerned readers on all manner of sexual issues, including nymphomania and satyriasis. Specialists also wrote feature-length articles on these disorders from time to time, but with relative infrequency and no more fanfare than the rest of the cornucopia of sexual subjects they covered. When Mrs B. G. from Texas wrote to the journal in 1952 to complain that sex once a day was not enough to satisfy her, the reply was: 'How often are any of us fully and positively satisfied about, or with anything?' Mrs B. G. was 49 years old, had been married for 32 years, was faithful to her husband, but missed the days when they had sex 'several times a night'. The editors mentioned the term 'nymphomania', but avoided any further medicalization in their reply. 'Sex is natural', they said: 'There are all sorts of beliefs about what is normal or abnormal in sex, or moral and immoral.' They recommended that she masturbated, restrained her expectations of her husband, and tried to be as happy as she could in the situation.52 When Mrs B. W. from Nevada complained in 1960 that her husband was 'highly over-sexed', they replied that 'individuals have varying sex needs and abilities and coordination is necessary for husbands and wives'. They implored her 'to realise that each of you must compromise in order to achieve as happy a sexual partnership as possible'.53
Discourses of sexual excess overlapped in an untidy manner; it was not a case of one worldview replacing another. A 1949 _Sexology_ article, 'What Causes Nymphomania?', rehearsed Bloch half a century earlier: the possible physical causes (brain tumours, hormonal imbalances); the main symptoms ('excessive sensitiveness of the vulva'); and possible psychological causes ('in the patient's mind', congenital insanity). It discussed women who 'react passionately to the insertion of speculums', women who ask to have their clitorises removed, and the 'many instances' where 'sterility is the price paid for the satiation of the sexual cravings of the nymphomaniac'. But in the fashion of the magazine's more measured overall tone it claimed that many normal women had been suspected of being afflicted merely due to a 'healthy desire for sexual intercourse', 'the same as an ordinary healthy man'; 'just because amorous women are usually not supposed to broach the subject of their sexual desire so openly as men, they have no doubt often been harshly misjudged as nymphomaniacs'.54 Twelve years later – in 1961 – another letter to the editor received a mixed reply when Mrs W. G. of New York asked for information about nymphomania. She was given a dictionary definition ('a woman who has almost insatiable sexual desires'), told that the cure depended on the cause ('if the cause is some local irritation or inflammation in the region of the clitoris or vagina, removal of this may give great relief'), informed that 'actually not too much is known about this condition' and then advised to see a doctor, preferably a psychiatrist!55
Apart from the name 'hypererotism', which he preferred to 'satyriasis' and 'nymphomania', and his amusing description of the hypererotist as 'a set of genital organs with a person attached to it', Magnus Hirschfeld added almost nothing to the nosology of 'excessive sexuality' with his citing of the cavalry officer who wanted marital sexual intercourse eight times a day and the woman whose marriage lasted six weeks because her sexual demands on her husband limited him to an hour's sleep each night.56 The impression given in a mere eight pages of his posthumously published 538-page book _Sexual Anomalies_ (1948) was of a rare condition that was difficult to define.57 Compared to the attention that he devoted there and elsewhere to homosexuality, transvestism and sadomasochism, his interest in excessive sexuality seemed slight. Clifford Allen (1962), another of Kafka's cited authorities, was equally cursory in his textbook summary of the 'psychosexual disorder'. 'Sexual hyperperversion' (his name) was discussed mainly in terms of the heightened desire of the tubercular and those suffering from brain disease, mania, schizophrenia and epilepsy.58 He thought hyperperversion rare in men and rarer in women ('a wish-fulfilling fantasy').59 It is difficult to see how his account could be of any real relevance to modern notions of sex addiction or hypersexuality.
The histories of nymphomania, satyriasis and excessive sexual desire were ambiguous, then. Definitions were never clear or stable, actual incidence was rare, and case studies were of exaggerated and limited examples. Stekel's patient histories, referred to earlier, were of just three people, including a man who practised a 'very curious form of infantile sexuality', lying in his own faeces and masturbating in an 'orgy of filth'.60 Stephen Levine's reconsideration of nymphomania, on the eve of the impact of sex addiction, stressed its rarity and provided instances of one woman who for nearly thirty years had 'masturbated herself to orgasm between 30–100 times per day', another who 'begged her husband to claw at her vaginal walls', and a clerk, in her mid-twenties, who 'roamed the streets and had intercourse in cars or alleyways with strangers'.61 Offit's 'Nymphomania Reconsidered' revealed that she had treated only one such case – there are 'so few true nymphomaniacs – perhaps there are none' – a beautiful woman who picked up a different man every night for fifteen years and who had approached the sex therapist not because she wanted to change her lifestyle but because she 'didn't have orgasms with everyone!'62 A 1980 case study of satyriasis – again 'a rare complaint' – was of a man who was referred for psychiatric evaluation after he was detained rubbing up against women at a race course. He claimed to have sex with his wife two or three times a day and would also masturbate, using what the psychiatrist termed 'quite elaborate aids' – a vacuum cleaner and an inflatable doll, as well as a rope and chain. He had a recurring erotic dream in which he was 'miniaturized to enable him to explore the vaginas of his female acquaintances'.63 This unusual, fantastical, shrinking man belongs more on the pages of the novelist Nicholson Baker than in the annals of sex addiction.64
Krafft-Ebing and other pioneers of sexology were classifying and recording, for the first time, the varieties of human sexual behaviour. It was clear in the terminology used (psychopathia, perversion) that a myriad of acts and desires were deemed abnormal or perverted. For example, Krafft-Ebing noted one patient's impulse to perform oral sex on his wife as 'perverse' and referred to the 'pathological love of married women for other men'.65 This is not to say that the sexological enterprise was a wholly negative exercise in stigmatization. In the case of same-sex desires, the creation of the nomenclature and category of homosexuality (if 'inverted' and 'contrary to nature') meant an identity or label at that early stage of development and sense of community for those previously isolated and troubled by their desires.66 That homosexuals were also denoted perverts was the double-edged sword. But the point is that the cultural context is all-important in understanding how ideas like hypersexuality were and are understood. The nineteenth-century man who committed incest, rape and bestiality and the nineteenth-century woman having her single adulterous affair are not the equivalents of Robert Stoller's twentieth-century 'cryptoperversions' of Don Juanism and nymphomania and the twenty-first-century sex addict.67
What this prehistory of excessive sexual desire indicates is not so much the validation or existence of a real medical condition but rather a range of terminology used to denote historically contingent breaches of normative sexual, gender and moral codes: what in 1973 Eugene Levitt (with reference to nymphomania) called a 'muddy semantic situation' involving a 'stigmatic word'.68 Levitt argued for discontinuing the term 'nymphomania' not only because it was 'full of value judgments and male chauvinistic prejudices' but also because of lack of actual research on the topic, 'an ominous absence that suggests a chronic problem in defining the phenomenon'.69 He was at pains to distinguish it from drug and alcohol dependency: 'Such extreme implications seem totally inapplicable to any form of female sexual behavior.'70
The one thing that these experts agreed on was the rarity of the disorder. A study of sixty doctors in California in the 1960s, cited by Levitt, found that of the nearly 14,000 estimated patient sexual complaints only 0.15 per cent – in other words, 15 in 10,000 – involved nymphomania or satyriasis. (In contrast: lack of orgasm, frigidity and impotence formed 37 per cent of the calculated total cases.)71 A few further articles continued to claim either the scarcity of the phenomenon or the lack of data concerning it – even as they attempted to explain those very behaviours and desires.72 As late as 1973, then, excessive desire for intercourse (whatever that was) was far from the everyday problem of modern addictionology. Virginia Sadock's claim that sex addiction dated back to 'classical times' and was derived from satyriasis ('male sex addiction') and nymphomania ('female sex addiction') was highly misleading.73
Where does sex addiction come in? While indelibly associated with Patrick Carnes by the 1980s, it did have earlier origins, both cultural and conceptual. In his 1945 work _The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis_ , Otto Fenichel stated that 'the great majority of neurotics have gross and manifest sexual disturbances' of both the hypo and hyper varieties, and that 'severe cases of "sexual addictions" ' did exist.74 For the psychoanalyst Fenichel such sexual behaviour derived from original neuroses; thus the motivations for hypersexual behaviour were narcissistic (to use Fenichel's term) rather than sexual. He mentioned the words 'sexual addictions' only once, but had more to say about 'love addicts', no doubt because the focus on non-sexual attachments better aligned with the favoured Freudian theories of infantile experiences, fear of abandonment and so on. In Fenichel's reasoning, all addictions were 'unsuccessful attempts to master guilt, depression or anxiety by activity'.75 Victor Eisenstein wrote in 1956 of sex becoming 'an addiction rather than the spontaneous culmination of the tendency to love'. But this was a fleeting reflection in a brief discussion of hypersexuality in marriage, which he saw (like Fenichel) as the 'manifestation' of many psychiatric disorders rather than 'a clinical entity' in itself.76 Morey Segal's 1960s psychoanalytic observations on impulsive sexuality referred to 'an avidity for object addiction' amidst its Freudian theorizing about parental loss, ego integration, infantile regression and orality.77 The Californian psychologist Stanley Willis was arguing in 1967 that sexual promiscuity could have addictive properties, 'a kind of addictive dependence in which all-too-brief nirvanic release sets in motion a vicious cycle which is likely to get more and more compelling and less and less satisfying'.78 In terms of theory, the British clinical psychologist Jim Orford was one of the first (in 1978) to make a conceptual link between addiction – normally associated with alcohol and drugs – and sex. Though he actually used the terms 'hypersexuality' and 'excessive sexuality', he was extending consideration of dependence and 'excessive appetite behavior' beyond drugs to gambling (which would become his academic speciality) and 'sexual behavior which is compulsive or excessive' (which would not).79 Ironically, he felt that the concept of hypersexuality would find little favour with the permissive spirit of the times, 'the general relaxation of sexual inhibitions'; a prediction that could not have been more misplaced.80
The early work of the psychologist Stanton Peele certainly included love and relationships (though not sex in particular) among the addictions. Peele's book _Love and Addiction_ (1975) (written with Archie Brodsky) claimed that the interpersonal dependency that some people had for each other was 'not _like_ an addiction, not something analogous to addiction; it _is_ an addiction. It is every bit as much an addiction as drug dependency.'81 In an article entitled 'Interpersonal Heroin', published a year prior to the book's publication, Peele and Brodsky had represented this idea with a photograph of a man's arm with lipstick marks in lieu of a drug addict's needle marks.82 Peele's work advocated a broadened theory of addiction; he wanted to make addiction 'a viable concept once again'.83 The difference between Peele and others working with an expanded definition of addiction was that he did not believe in addiction (including to alcohol and drugs) as a chemical reaction or physiological dependency. For Peele, addiction was 'an _experience_ – one which grows out of an individual's routinized subjective response to something that has special meaning for him – something, anything, that he finds so safe and reassuring that he cannot be without it'.84 'Anything that people use to release their consciousness can be misused.'85 Peele might have eschewed the disease or medical basis of addiction but his language often contradicted this intent: 'Addiction can be considered a pathological habit'; 'It is a malignant outgrowth, an extreme, unhealthy manifestation, of normal human inclinations.'86 Somewhat confusingly this 'outgrowth' was also the 'norm': 'Addiction is not an abnormality in our society. It is not an aberration from the norm; it is itself the norm.'87 His view of addiction was certainly inclusive and he was one of the first to connect love (and by implication sex) with addiction. 'Interpersonal addiction – love addiction – is just about the most common, yet least recognized, form of addiction.'88 Although Peele would later decry the appropriation of his expanded addiction theory in what he called 'the diseasing of America', he clearly laid some serious groundwork for what followed in the history of the concept of sex addiction (and continues to be cited as doing so).89
However, the actual expression 'sex addict' had appeared for the first time in academic usage (recall the pulp fiction of the 1960s) in 1974 in the work of Lawrence Hatterer, a psychiatrist at Cornell University Medical School, who published a two-page discussion paper claiming that a culture of instant gratification was contributing to addictive personalities.90 One of the examples he gave was the sex addict.
When Hatterer used the term 'sex addict' in 1974 he was also invoking those other process or behavioural addictions that would become all too culturally familiar as the century ended:
Addicts are not just skid-row alcoholics or heroin users. The mother who avoids family conflict by swallowing a tranquilizer or can't socialize till she has a drink; the father who drops his paycheck at the track or in a poker game; the insecure teenager who gulps food as a defense against unpopularity; the compulsive shopper; the working girl whose sex life is a series of empty encounters – all are showing addictive traits.91
In Hatterer's definition of addiction, actions performed for temporary escape became addictive 'when a person does them excessively, impulsively, and compulsively'.92 The trigger for the 'sex addict' might have been 'an array of porno magazines'; 'Life for the addict is a powerful network of stimuli, reminding him of the compulsive urge to drink, gamble, take drugs, have sex.'93 The language of Hatterer's short article anticipated the rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s: 'Addiction, because it offers an illusive escape from seeking real remedies to life's problems, is a chronic, crippling disease each of us must fight against. It _can_ be overcome.'94
Yet it was Hatterer's book _The Pleasure Addicts_ (1980) that can lay claim to being the foundational text of sex addictionology. This curiously neglected work – which began life in 1969 as a television script called 'Hooked People: Food, Sex, and Drug Addicts', and which drew on many years of work with those Hatterer identified as addicts, including a 'three-year audiotaped study of the therapy of a sex addict' – elaborated on sex as part of what he termed 'the addictive process', encouraged by a society that promoted and revelled in varieties of excess.95 In fact his therapy, including the linkage of certain forms of sexual behaviour to addiction, stretched back to the 1950s and 1960s with his treatment of 'homosexual illness' in _Changing Homosexuality in the Male_ , published in 1970.96 While there is no way of knowing from the published versions of his case notes exactly how early he was using the language of sexual addiction, we can be certain that it was employed by the late 1960s at the latest. _Changing Homosexuality_ referred to 'addictive homosexuality', of men whose lives were 'sex, sex, and more sex', who were consumed by 'sexual preoccupation and practice...like an alcoholic', of 'addictive homosexual sex', 'addictive hypersexualized living' and an 'addictive sexual pattern'.97
Rick showed a determination to rid himself of the destructive aspects of his homosexual addiction. He agreed for the first time in his life to work at changing his pattern. Hours of repetitive interpretations finally showed him how he had, like a chronic alcoholic, become so addicted to sexual activity that he used it to solve every problem, as his sole means of dealing with anger, anxiety, depression, and failure.98
Most of these men, like Rick, were homosexual (Hatterer's area of specialization at that time), but there were heterosexuals too 'who are as addicted to sex as any homosexual'.99
In contrast to the invariably superficial case studies of 'sex addiction' in later addictionology, Hatterer's _Changing Homosexuality_ and _Pleasure Addicts_ provided detailed, explicit and extensive psychoanalytic summaries from recorded sessions at New York's Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic; the tapes formed part of the therapy as the patient was asked to listen to and comment on their contents 'away from the emotionally charged context of a psychiatric encounter'.100 It is the power of what Hatterer described as these 'internal monologues of...addicts in states of addictive crisis' that makes his work such compelling reading.101
Hatterer also anticipated something that we will discuss later: the pornographic elements of sex addiction discourse. Of the four case histories (alcohol, drugs, food and sex) in _Pleasure Addicts_ , Tom the homosexual/heterosexual sex addict's was easily the most explicit: 'that was what I needed...some guy's mouth wrapped around my dick'; 'She was getting wetter and wetter and moving all over my tongue and lips. She loved it! And her ass...' 102 One publisher told the author of _Pleasure Addicts_ that the case study of the sex addict was 'really just porno'.103 Hatterer justified this explicitness in his analysis of the tape extracts and patient history:
Tom's taped monologues constantly revealed his addictiveness. His hours of memories and free associations were saturated with sexuality; in fact almost every action, feeling, fantasy, and impulse was sexualized. He was compulsively driven to one form or another of sexual interaction with the world around him. Even his language had become highly eroticized. He had reached the point of coping with every pressure, conflict, failure, insecurity, anxiety, or depressive reaction, by turning to a sexual act or fantasy.104
The psychotherapist wanted his readers to know his patients before he embarked on his analysis of their addictions.
Hence his 'Portraits of Addicts' was the prelude to a candid discussion of identifying and treating addicts, admitting to the experimental nature of the therapeutic process and not denying setbacks – 'I, like others, often failed with the chronic and multiply addicted.'105 He discussed the unreliability of the addicts' narratives, the complicity of family and loved ones, the pleasures that seemed to outweigh the pain ('Addiction is itself the excessive use of pleasure to remove pain') and the relative invisibility of the 'disease' ('he submits to it without admitting it exists').106 He admitted that his work had mostly been with upper- and middle-class whites and acknowledged the plight of poorer, 'inner-city addicts' who were additionally faced with the task of mere survival.107
Hatterer is not beyond critique. We will return later to the role of homosexuality in his perceived addictive process. However, when we later encounter the banality of twenty-first-century addictionology it is worth remembering that Hatterer has demonstrated that it was not always so. It is curious that he has been ignored in the addictionologists' own history.
When the new Internet tool Google Ngram Viewer plots the usage of the terms 'sex addiction', 'hypersexuality', 'nymphomania' and 'satyriasis' in books in English from 1800 to 2008, it tells only part of the story (see Figure 4). We are now able to provide more detail. 'Satyriasis' and 'nymphomania' were strongly identified with the long nineteenth century but have proven remarkably resilient in modern culture, if Ngram is a rough guide. However, they, as we have seen, are not synonymous with 'sex addiction'. 'Hypersexuality' was essentially a twentieth-century word that enjoyed increased usage as the century progressed, reinforced, no doubt, by its adoption – post-sexual addiction – as an alternative for that diagnosis: the word remained the same but its meanings, we have seen, changed. What is not in doubt is the trajectory of 'sexual addiction'. It begins around 1980 and overtakes usage of all the other terms. This is the history that we are now concerned with.
Figure 4 Sex addiction terms on Google Ngram. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.
## Notes
1 P. Hall, _Understanding and Treating Sex Addiction_ (New York, 2013), Ebook, locs. 156–9. 2 M. P. Kafka, 'Hypersexual Disorder: A Proposed Diagnosis for DSM-V', _Archives of Sexual Behaviour_ , 39:2 (2010), 377–400, quote at 378. 3 Ibid. 4 See H. Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_ (New York, 1936). 5 R. von Krafft-Ebing, _Psychopathia Sexualis. With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study_ , trans. F. S. Klaf (New York, 1998), pp. vi, 49. 6 Ibid., pp. 46–52, 322–9. 7 One of the authors has argued this at length elsewhere: K. M. Phillips and B. Reay, _Sex Before Sexuality: A Premodern History_ (Cambridge, 2011). 8 Kafka, 'Hypersexual Disorder', 378. 9 Krafft-Ebing, _Psychopathia Sexualis_ , p. 47. 10 Ibid., pp. 48–51. 11 Ibid., pp. 325–9. 12 Iwan Bloch, _The Sexual Life of Our Time: In its Relations to Modern Civilization_ (London, 1928), p. 429. First published in 1908. 13 Ibid., p. 432. 14 Ibid., p. 429. 15 Ibid., p. 430; R. Weiss, _Sex Addiction 101: A Basic Guide to Healing from Sex, Porn, and Love Addiction_ (Longboat Key, FL, 2013), Ebook, locs. 241, 770. 16 Bloch, _Sexual Life of Our Time_ , p. 429. 17 Krafft-Ebing, _Psychopathia Sexualis_ , p. 48. 18 Ibid., p. 51. 19 Ibid., p. 52. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 46. 22 Ibid., pp. 324–5. 23 D. J. Ley, _The Myth of Sex Addiction_ (Lanham, MD, 2012), p. 11. 24 B. Rush, _Medical Inquiries and Observations, Upon the Diseases of the Mind_ (Philadelphia, 1812), p. 347. 25 Ibid., p. 350–3. 26 Ibid., p. 315. 27 W. Stekel, _Bi-Sexual Love_ , trans. J. S. Van Teslaar (New York, 1950), pp. 97–172. First published in 1922. 28 Ibid., pp. 116, 141, 164. 29 Ibid., p. 97. 30 Ibid., p. 102. 31 Ibid., p. 103. 32 Ibid., p. 163. 33 A. Ellis and E. Sagarin, _Nymphomania: A Study of the Oversexed Woman_ (New York, 1964), p. 29. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., p. 26. 36 C. Groneman, _Nymphomania: A History_ (London, 2001), p. 8. 37 Ibid., p. 91. 38 A. K. Offit, _Night Thoughts: Reflections of a Sex Therapist_ (New York, 1981), pp. 121, 122. 39 Groneman, _Nymphomania_ , p. 142. 40 See Ellis and Sagarin, _Nymphomania_. 41 See, for example, L. Klein, _Normal and Abnormal Sex Ways_ (New York, 1962); V. Morhaim, _Casebook: Nymphomania_ (New York, 1964); F. S. Klaf, _Satyriasis: A Study of Male Nymphomania_ (New York, 1966). See also N. A. Shiff, _Diary of a Nymph_ (New York, 1961). 42 Groneman, _Nymphomania_ , p. 8; J. M. Irvine, 'Reinventing Perversion: Sex Addiction and Cultural Anxieties', _Journal of the History of Sexuality_ , 5:3 (1995), 429–50, esp. 430–1. 43 Irvine, 'Reinventing Perversion', 431. 44 Kafka, 'Hypersexual Disorder', 379, 381. 45 A. C. Kinsey, W. B. Pomeroy and C. E. Martin, _Sexual Behavior in the Human Male_ (Philadelphia, 1948), p. 199. 46 Ibid. 47 L. Clark, 'The Insatiable Male', _Sexology_ , 29:6 (1963), 415–17, quote at 416. 48 Ibid., 415. 49 Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin, _Sexual Behavior in the Human Male_ , p. 202. 50 Ibid., p. 201. 51 For changes in deviance theory, see J. M. Irvine, ' "The Sociologist as Voyeur": Social Theory and Sexuality Research, 1910–1978', _Qualitative Sociology_ , 26:4 (2003), 429–56. 52 'Nymphomania', letter in _Sexology_ , 19:2 (1952), 51–2. 53 'Oversexed Husband', letter in _Sexology_ , 26:10 (1960), 676. 54 Editorial, 'What Causes Nymphomania?', _Sexology_ , 15:9 (1949), 561–7, quote at 562. 55 'Nymphomania', letter in Sexology, 27:8 (1961), 568–9. 56 M. Hirschfeld, _Sexual Anomalies: The Origins, Nature, and Treatment of Sexual Disorders_ (New York, 1956), ch. 6, quote at p. 89. First published in 1948. 57 Ibid., pp. 86–93. 58 C. Allen, _A Textbook of Psychosexual Disorders_ (London, 1969), ch. 16. First published in 1962. 59 Ibid., p. 355. 60 Stekel, _Bi-Sexual Love_ , pp. 145–6. 61 S. B. Levine, 'A Modern Perspective on Nymphomania', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 8:4 (1982), 316–24, quotes at 320, 323. 62 Offit, _Night Thoughts_ , p. 122. 63 S. L. Moore, 'Satyriasis: A Case Study', _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ , 41:8 (1981), 279–81. 64 We have in mind N. Baker, _House of Holes_ (New York, 2011). 65 Krafft-Ebing, _Psychopathia Sexualis_ , p. 51, for both examples. 66 See, for example, H. Oosterhuis, _Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity_ (Chicago, 2000). 67 For Stoller, also mentioned by Kafka, see R. J. Stoller, _Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred_ (London, 1986), p. 8. First published in 1975. 68 E. E. Levitt, 'Nymphomania', _Sexual Behavior_ , 3:3 (1973), 13–17, quotes at 17. 69 Ibid., 13. 70 Ibid., 17. 71 Our calculations from D. W. Burnap and J. S. Golden, 'Sexual Problems in Medical Practice', _Journal of Medical Education_ , 42:7 (1967), 673–80, esp. Table 2, 675. 72 A. Auerback, 'Satyriasis and Nymphomania', _Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality_ , 2:9 (1968), 39–45; L. Salzman, 'The Highly Sexed Man', _Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality_ , 6:1 (1972), 36–49; T. P. Detre and J. M. Himmelhoch, 'Hyperlibido', _Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality_ , 7:9 (1973), 172–86. 73 V. A. Sadock, 'Sexual Addiction', in P. Ruiz and E. C. Strain (eds.), _Lowinson and Ruiz's Substance Abuse: A Comprehensive Textbook, Fifth Edition_ (Philadelphia, 2011), ch. 26, at p. 393. 74 O. Fenichel, _The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis_ (New York, 1945), pp. 234, 384. 75 Ibid., p. 382. 76 V. W. Eisenstein, 'Sexual Problems in Marriage', in V. W. Eisenstein (ed.), _Neurotic Interaction in Marriage_ (New York, 1956), ch. 7, quotes at p. 118. 77 M. S. Segal, 'Impulsive Sexuality: Some Clinical and Theoretical Observations', _International Journal of Psychoanalysis_ , 44 (1963), 407–18, quote at 408. 78 S. E. Willis, 'Sexual Promiscuity as a Symptom of Personal and Cultural Anxiety', _Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality_ , 1:2 (1967), 16–23, quote at 17. 79 J. Orford, 'Hypersexuality: Implications for a Theory of Dependence', _British Journal of Addiction_ , 73:3 (1978), 299–310, quotes at 299. The article was adapted in Orford's _Excessive Appetites: A Psychological View of Addictions_ (Chichester, 1985), ch. 6: 'Excessive Sexuality'. 80 Orford, 'Hypersexuality', 305. 81 S. Peele and A. Brodsky, _Love and Addiction_ (New York, 1975), p. 13. Emphasis in original. 82 S. Peele and A. Brodsky, 'Interpersonal Heroin: Love Can Be an Addiction', _Psychology Today_ , 8:3 (1974), 22–6, image on 22. 83 Peele and Brodsky, _Love and Addiction_ , p. 15. 84 Ibid., p. 18. Emphasis in original. 85 Ibid., p. 55. 86 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 87 Ibid., p. 18. 88 Ibid., p. 17. 89 S. Peele, _Diseasing of America_ (San Francisco, 1995), pp. 140–1. First published in 1989. For example, Benoit Denizet-Lewis uses Peele and his quote 'Addiction is our way of life' in his book _America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life_ (New York, 2009), Ebook, p. 13. Peele later referred to Patrick Carnes as having 'picked up on our idea of sex addiction': S. Peele and A. Brodsky, _Love and Addiction_ (New York, 2014), Ebook, loc. 311. 90 L. J. Hatterer and J. Ramsey, 'Are You an Addictive Personality?', _Family Circle_ , 6 (1974), 138–9. 91 Ibid., 138. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 139. 94 Ibid. 95 L. J. Hatterer, _The Pleasure Addicts: The Addictive Process – Food, Sex, Drugs, Alcohol, Work, and More_ (Cranbury, NJ, 1980), quotes at pp. 12, 15, 188. 96 L. J. Hatterer, _Changing Homosexuality in the Male: Treatment for Men Troubled by Homosexuality_ (New York, 1970), p. 63. 97 Ibid., pp. 56, 111, 185, 403, 440. 98 Ibid., p. 182. 99 Ibid., p. 197. 100 Hatterer, _The Pleasure Addicts_ , p. 37. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., pp. 94, 99. 103 Ibid., p. 12. 104 Ibid., p. 117. 105 Ibid., p. 188. 106 Ibid., p. 189. 107 Ibid., p. 188.
# Chapter 3
Addictionology 101
Patrick Carnes is the acknowledged expert in a field that until recently didn't exist.
Promotional quote for Patrick Carnes, 19831
Although we have argued that others can lay claim to being the originators of the concept of sex addiction, it is Patrick Carnes who is most often described as its leading proponent – 'guru', 'pioneer', 'expert', 'founder', 'crusader', 'leader'. These labels are not surprising considering the prominence that Carnes has had in the creation and promotion of the syndrome. Carnes himself acknowledged Jim Orford's role.2 We have argued too for the importance of Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky and especially of Lawrence Hatterer, but it is true that Carnes has been involved at almost every stage in the history of sex addiction. Carnes has proven the most influential. His book _Out of the Shadows_ (1983), rather than Peele and Brodsky's _Love and Addiction_ (1975) or Hatterer's _Changing Homosexuality in the Male_ (1970) and _The Pleasure Addicts_ (1980), is usually seen as the first sex addiction text, and he has gone on to publish many more books as sole author or in collaboration with others.3 It was Carnes who featured when _The New York Times_ ran an article on excessive sex as an addiction in 1984.4 He has created and influenced a number of screening and diagnostic tools including the Sex Addiction Screening Test (SAST), the Sexual Dependency Inventory (SDI) and PATHOS, the brief assessment tool for clinicians. He established the Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT) programme, which is offered at the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals (IITAP), an institute that he also founded. He was editor-in-chief of _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention_, the journal of the Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health (SASH), formerly the National Council of Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity (NCSAC). He was the creator of the Gentle Path Treatment Programs for sexual addiction and founder of Gentle Path Press. His name occurs 165 times in P. J. Carnes and K. M. Adams's edited sex addiction text _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ (2002).5
Many of Carnes's disciples have gone on to forge careers specializing in sexual addiction: authors and therapists whose names will reoccur in this book, including Robert Weiss, Stefanie Carnes (Patrick's daughter), Jennifer Schneider and Alexandra Katehakis. SASH now bestows a Carnes Award for those considered to have made a significant contribution to the field of sexual addiction. Previous winners include Schneider (1998), Weiss (2008) and Katehakis (2012).
Sex addictionology is the study and treatment of sex addiction or, as Patrick Carnes has called it, 'the science of addiction'.6 This chapter unpacks sex addictionology, how sex addiction has been defined, built and reinforced through the industry of therapists and therapy-speak; in workbooks for addicts and partners, and textbooks for clinicians; through websites, and social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook. Our concern in this chapter is essentially an introductory presentation of sex addiction discourse. Although there are voices of dissent, including much of what follows in other chapters, we try to set those aside for the moment for ease of presentation. This chapter takes sexual addiction at face value. It is primarily concerned with those who have created, embraced and fashioned sex addiction – and its variants, more of which later – as a concept, a disease, a malady.
Sex addiction has been defined as when a person exhibits sexual behaviour or thoughts that they or someone else (partner, family, friends) finds problematic, and by their inability to stop this conduct which, in itself, indicates loss of control. In the opening to his foundation text _Out of the Shadows_ Carnes said that the realization of addiction comes when 'the consequences are so great or the pain is so bad that the addict admits life is out of control because of his or her sexual behavior'.7 SASH defines sex addiction as 'a persistent and escalating pattern or patterns of sexual behaviors acted out despite increasingly negative consequences to self or others'.8 The diagnosis is often made by addicts themselves, or by their loved ones. The range of what constitutes such acts or desire is endless; each individual decides what _they_ feel is problematic sex. Of course, they are guided in such decisions through the questions asked in the self-tests, the examples given in the workbook vignettes, the media coverage of celebrity sex addicts, the messages contained in therapy websites, and social or cultural ideas about appropriate sexual behaviour.
In 2014, for example, those who consult the IITAP website SexHelp.com seeking an answer to the question 'Am I a sex addict?' are asked: 'Are you concerned that you may have an addiction to sex and/or pornography? Do you feel you cannot stop once you start...? Do you have a secret life that you do not want others to find out about?'9 These questions illustrate that the initial focus is on the impact on the person's life, not the specific behaviours that could be causing these problems. It goes on to say
Sex addition takes many forms. In other words, there are many types of sex addicts and sexual addiction. If your sexual behavior is causing problems in your life – personal or professional, take the free and anonymous online test to determine if sex addiction is a problem. At the end of the test, it will show a graph and give you the 'typical' range and show where your answers score compared to the that [sic] group. If you find that your behavior is problematic, we strongly encourage you to seek help from a qualified, CSAT trained therapist. There are treatment centers that can provide help too. There is help and there is hope!10
When specific behaviours are delineated, they include compulsive masturbation, pornography, prostitution, simultaneous or frequent affairs, exhibitionism, multiple anonymous partners, voyeurism, unsafe sexual activity, indecent phone calls, phone sex, cybersex, sexual aversion, child molesting, incest, rape and violence.11 Sometimes these are written as lists, as with Carnes's three levels of sex addiction. Level One behaviours are culturally accepted but are 'devastating when done compulsively': masturbation, heterosexual relationships, pornography and strip shows, prostitution and homosexuality.12 Level Two behaviours 'warrant stiff legal sanctions' and involve a victim; they include exhibitionism, voyeurism and indecent phone calls.13 The final level, Level Three, represents those behaviours where 'some of our most significant boundaries are violated', for example child molesting and incest, and rape and violence.14 The problematic behaviour is characteristically illustrated through case studies where addicts engage in behaviour that leads to their demise. The vignettes are discussed in more detail later.
However, the telltale signs of a problem come from Carnes's ten 'sex addiction criteria': compulsive behaviour; loss of control; efforts to stop; loss of time; preoccupation; inability to fulfil obligations; continuation despite consequences; escalation; social, occupational and recreational losses; and withdrawal.15 The consequences of sex addiction include 'work problems; broken relationships; emotional/physical health, financial and legal problems...the ugly face of sex addiction'.16 Carnes has always stressed that addiction has 'nothing to do with "amount" or "number of times" a person has sex or masturbates'.17
For diagnosing and treating sex addiction, Carnes used the addiction model developed in relation to substance addiction – alcohol and drugs – and the Twelve-Step therapy model developed for alcoholics by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Addiction, according to that model, involved behaviour that was repeated despite adverse consequences, loss of control over the intake of the substance or the engaged in conduct, and an increasing tolerance resulting in greater frequency, quantity or strength of the substance or behaviour. For Carnes, sex addiction was when repeated sexual conduct, with damaging results, led the addict's life to become unmanageable.18 For Weiss, sex addiction was when people 'use sex and relationships in a repetitive, objectified, and ultimately self-destructive way'.19
The underlying basis for Carnes's theory was his early work with sex offenders. His unpublished 1976 paper, 'The Sex Offender: His Addiction, His Family, His Beliefs', claimed, he told readers later, that most sex offenders were suffering from an addiction and that the origins of this addiction lay in the family either as an inherited addiction or as the result of ongoing family dynamics.20 The 'theoretical assumptions' in the paper formed the basis for programmes and workshops for sex addiction, using the logic that sex addicts 'were not "sex offenders", but suffered from the same pathology'.21 His programmes incorporated the Twelve Steps of AA and 'general systems theory', which recognized behaviours as self-regulating, habitual, influenced by context and interrelated.22
Carnes was not the first one to think about behavioural problems as addictions. Gamblers Anonymous (founded in 1957) and Overeaters Anonymous (founded in 1960), and also modelled on AA, were already addressing behavioural issues in this manner. We have seen that in 1974 Hatterer was warning of 'addictive personalities'.23 Like Carnes, Hatterer believed that such dispositions were the result of genetic inheritance and family patterns. He also promoted the idea of the co-addict, where one addict married another whose 'needs mesh with their own'.24 And, like Carnes, Hatterer believed ultimately in overcoming such addictions through distraction, willpower, Twelve-Step programmes and group or family therapy.25 But it was Carnes who would prove to deal with the perceived problem the most extensively and be considered within the industry as the concept's founder.
Adapting AA's Twelve Steps to his workbooks and residential programmes, Carnes established treatment specifically catering for the new malady. The original Twelve Steps of AA appeared in _Out of the Shadows_ alongside Carnes's adaption of the steps for sexual addicts.26 In fact the steps remained the same, except for minor word changes. Step 1, 'We admitted we were powerless over our sexual addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable', had the phrase 'our sexual addiction' replacing the word 'alcohol'. Step 12 changed 'carry this message to alcoholics' to 'carry this message to others'. The remaining ten steps were unchanged, including retaining the overtly religious references of the original: seven of the Twelve Steps mentioned God or spiritual matters. The Twelve Steps are to be carried out in order. Steps 1–3 give the message that the addict must admit their powerlessness over their addiction and yield to a higher power to address their addiction successfully. Steps 4–10 involve personal reflection, where the addict identifies the problems within themselves, their character, their behaviour, and recognizes how they may have affected others in order to take responsibility for these 'shortcomings', while also asking God to 'remove all these defects of character'. Steps 11–12 are about moving forward through a spiritual awakening to a new life guided by a new set of principles, and encouraging others to live under those moral guidelines.27
At the same time that Carnes was promoting the use of Twelve-Step treatment programmes for sexual addiction, addicts had formed groups for support as we have seen: Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA), also called the Augustine Fellowship; Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA); and Sexaholics Anonymous (SA). Each group operated with slightly different guidelines, particularly around defining 'sexual sobriety', but the timing of the creation of these groups indicated that they were part of a developing public discourse around issues of sexual behaviour borne out of the historical and cultural context of the late 1970s. Janice Irvine has observed that while the individuals themselves might have initially applied the addiction discourse to sexual behaviour, 'professionals soon took note. And their participation helped popularize and legitimize the concept.'28 Carnes certainly took note that 'the simultaneous foundings' of SLAA, SAA and SA 'spoke to the need and readiness for these programs'.29
So the label 'sex addiction' and its conceptualization as a disease came into existence initially from the 'addicts' themselves – the ultimate in self-diagnosis. These individuals identified their sexual behaviour as problematic and, already being _au fait_ with addiction discourse through AA groups and self-help texts, applied this logic and discourse to their sexual behaviour.30 And self-diagnosis has continued to be a feature of sex addiction identification and treatment-seeking. As noted earlier, one of the main channels whereby people have entered therapy for sexual addiction is as the result of a self-test where they or someone close to them answers a series of questions to determine whether or not they have a problem.
The window that opens at SexHelp.com when one clicks to take the SAST has a Carnes quote at the top: 'Knowing you are a sex addict doesn't mean you are bad or perverted or hopeless. It means you may have a disease, an obsession from which many have healed.'31 Before taking the test, the user is being given the framework from which to consider the questions and from which to answer: powerlessness, a disease, an obsession. There is a glimmer of hope for redemption and cure, as well as the inference that the abnormality affects many.
There are a number of self-tests available – in workbooks and online. For example, if you type 'sex addiction test' into Google you are given options for thousands of links to self-tests, with only minor differences between them.32 Carnes created the SAST and published it in _Contrary to Love: Helping the Sexual Addict_ (1989), and it has formed the basis for most of the variously adapted self-tests.33 In _Contrary to Love_ Carnes acknowledged that the test did not cater for women or for homosexual men, and he later 'updated' the 1989 test 'to reflect changes in sexual behavior since the 1980's sic] and to be of assistance whatever your gender or sexual orientation might be'.34 The original twenty-five questions were increased to fifty-two. Alongside the SAST, [SexHelp.com has a range of other tests and surveys that visitors to the website can take to assess their own or their loved one's behaviour. The Sex Addiction Risk Assessment test (SARA), for example, is a fee-based survey that elicits a 'personalized 23-page report to help you determine your next course of action'.35 It 'compares your answers with thousands of other sex addicts who have preceded you in treatment. Thus, you have the benefit of comparing your life with the lives of others who share the same problem.'36 Then there is the Partner Sexuality Screening test (PSS), which involves gathering information from partners of sex addicts as part of Stefanie Carnes's research 'to identify and analyse the impacts sex addiction has on the partners of addicts'.37 The website explains that by answering the PSS the user benefits by 'knowing you are advancing research in the field of sex addiction' as well as experiencing 'some insights about how your sexuality has been impacted by the addiction' and receiving 'a brief report, free of charge, that outlines areas of your sexuality that may have been impacted by the addiction'. Users are warned that answering the survey involves the risk of raising 'some emotions relating to your experience in this relationship' and they are advised to visit www.iitap.com for a list of certified sex addiction therapists.38 This is demonstrative of the circular nature of the sex addiction therapy industry: those who already consider the diagnosis of sex addiction find the website, SexHelp.com, administered by Carnes's IITAP organization, then take a survey or test with leading questions, based on Carnes's own research, and through answering these, in some cases, help 'advance the field' of (construct a case for?) sex addiction!
The first three pages of the SAST self-test establish a background for the prospective 'addict'. The first page asks the user to select gender and sexual orientation. The second page moves on to perceptions of behaviour and motivation for taking the test, from 'I have no concerns about my sexual behavior but am curious how I would score' through to 'I know I am a sex addict' and 'I have sought therapy because of my sexual problems.' The third page seeks a reason for the 'addiction': 'Were you sexually abused as a child or adolescent?'; 'Did your parents have trouble with sexual behavior?'; 'Do you often find yourself preoccupied with sexual thoughts?' Once the user has answered these questions there is a final page with a further forty-two questions. The first eighteen focus on how problematic (but unnamed) sexual activities make the person feel. After the initial 'Do you feel that your sexual behavior is not normal?', the remaining questions determine whether that behaviour fits Carnes's ten sex addiction criteria discussed earlier. These are framed in ways such as 'Has your sexual behavior ever created problems for you and your family?', 'Have you made efforts to quit a type of sexual activity and failed?' or 'Is sex almost all you think about?' There are also questions about shame, such as 'Have you felt degraded by your sexual behaviors?' and 'When you have sex, do you feel depressed afterwards?' The last twenty-four questions ask about specific acts. Nine of the twenty-four mention Internet or online behaviour, such as 'Have you purchased services online for erotic purposes (sites for dating, pornography, fantasy and friend finder)?' or the broader 'Has the Internet created sexual problems for you?' Then those tested are asked about sexually explicit material, going to strip clubs or adult stores, bath houses and sex clubs, paying for sex, having casual or anonymous sex, and cheating on a partner. In amongst these are questions about being sexual with minors, being in a physically or emotionally abusive relationship, and engaging in illegal or risky sexual behaviour. Each question only allows for a 'yes' or 'no' answer, and some, such as 'Do you spend too much time online for sexual purposes?' or 'Have you spent considerable time and money on strip clubs, adult bookstores and movie houses?', illustrate the subjective nature of the test, with no guideline given for how much time would be considered 'too much' or how much money 'considerable'.
The SAST questions all fall into a category of ten types or patterns of behaviour that Carnes identified as the ways people 'act out' when they have sexual addiction: fantasy sex; voyeurism; exhibitionism; seductive role sex; trading sex; intrusive sex; paying for sex; anonymous sex; pain exchange sex; and exploitive sex.39 This list was based on Carnes's analysis of his nearly 1,000-strong sex addict survey (published in _Don't Call it Love_ ).40 All of these were seen negatively simply by being put on this list. But what is acceptable sex? From this list we can deduce that committed, monogamous, non-fantasy sex is probably acceptable. One of Carnes's distinctions is preoccupation. Sexual fantasy, for example, is common but becomes problematic when it causes the 'neglect of responsibilities and commitments and by inordinate amounts of time spent in preparation for sexual episodes'.41 This is the crux of the perceived 'problem' that the logic of sexual addictionology identifies: unacceptable priorities. Instead of prioritizing family, work or social pursuits, the person prioritizes sex. The 'addict' is not fulfilling their role as a productive and helpful citizen. Addicts affected by sexual fantasy face losses of 'intimacy, time, energy and productivity'.42 Another way of distinguishing healthy sex from addictive sex is that 'sexual addiction always involves exploitation, dissatisfaction, shame, fear, objectification, and a lack of mutual consent. Healthy sex almost always involves the opposite.'43
At the completion of the test, the user is presented with a summary of their results and a graph. The summary (for one of the authors of this book) began: 'We have compared your answers with people who have been diagnosed with sex addiction. Your answers HAVE MET a score on a basis of six criteria that indicate sex addiction is present. To help you understand, the graphic below plots your score in relation to the scores of others.'44 In fact the line graph was somewhat difficult to follow (see Figure 5). Titled 'Number of SAST Core Scale Items Endorsed', it had a non-clinical and a clinical line plotted next to unlabeled _x_ \- and _y_ -axes. The _y_ -axis marked percentages from 0.0 per cent up to 20.0 per cent (though it is unclear what these were percentages of) and the _x_ -axis was numbered from 0 to 20 (again it was uncertain what these numbers represented). An arrow pointed to the number 6 on the _x_ -axis and stated 'Most addicts are above 6.'45 The two graph lines were the inverse of each other, with the non-clinical peaking near the number 2 and steadily declining to 0.0 per cent by number 18. The clinical line started at 0.0 per cent and rose to a peak of 14 per cent at number 17. If this sounds confusing, it is because it is confusing. But the message, that your score qualifies you to seek further treatment, was clearly received.
Figure 5 Author screening test, 17 June 2014.
Alongside the graph were summarized results from the test. The summary was not personalized. Although one of the authors of this book selected 'heterosexual female' in their test they were given the summary of 'A profile consistent with men who struggle with sexually compulsive behavior', 'A profile consistent with women who struggle with sexually compulsive behavior' and 'A profile consistent with homosexual men who struggle with sexually compulsive behavior', all in the summary of one test. The summary then said, in measuring the 'key characteristics of addiction', that the results show 'the following dimensions of an addictive disorder': 'Preoccupation: obsessive thinking about sexual behavior, opportunities, and fantasies'; 'Loss of control: inability to stop behavior despite commitments to self and others and despite problems caused by behavior'; 'Relationship disturbance: sexual behavior has created significant relationship problems'; and 'Affect disturbance: significant depression, despair, or anxiety over sexual behavior'.46 At the end of the summary the user was consoled that although they may be 'frightened confused or overwhelmed' now that the test has 'confirmed your fears', the experts 'know how you feel – we've been helping people like yourself since 1983'. The user was then advised to take the anonymous, but fee-based, SARA.
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Carnes dominated the early discourse, cementing sex addiction as a condition, and establishing symptoms, consequences and modes of treatment. However, as sex addiction started to take hold as a concept, and as Carnes gathered a following of therapists and recovering addicts, they started to contribute to the literature; in effect a developing professionalization of sex addictionology. Carnes's influence could be seen in their work, but there was now a plethora of authoritative voices sometimes simply replicating Carnes's ideas, and, in other cases, carving out new specializations.
One way of expanding the reach and developing the sex addiction industry was through incorporating groups beyond Carnes's focus on the heterosexual male. Carnes and Adams's edited collection _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ had a section entitled 'Special Populations' which dealt with sex addiction related to cybersex, women, pastors, healthcare professionals, homeless people, gay men and adolescents.47 Weiss's _Sex Addiction 101_ (2013) had separate chapters for women, gay men and teens.48 (There is apparently still a gap in the market for workbooks dedicated to lesbian sexual compulsives.49) But despite the individualized discussions and specialized therapists dealing with these 'others', their work reinforced how all sex addicts were essentially the same, encouraging a sense of cohesion and camaraderie within the addict population, rather than diversity.
Although called 'Females: The Forgotten Sexual Addicts', much of former sex addict, family therapist and author Marnie Ferree's chapter in Carnes and Adams's collection was taken up with explaining the similarities between male and female sexual addicts (range of experiences, ways of acting out, consequences, root causes, process of recovery). Ferree, and authors and therapists such as Kelly McDaniel, Deborah Corley and Alexandra Katehakis, have focused on providing a voice for female sex addicts, with the results including amendments to the SAST, and an edited collection focused on this clientele, _Making Advances: A Comprehensive Guide for Treating Female Sex and Love Addicts_ (2012).50 Although sex addiction had a 'masculine face' and fewer women in treatment, Ferree surmised that 'research may eventually show that females struggle with sexual addiction at nearly the same rate as do males', and that shame and cultural conflict about gendered ideals caused the small numbers.51 The differences seemed to lie in the perception of the addicts and the judgements placed on them – in other words, on culturally constructed ideas about gender.
Yet the female sex addiction specialists (perhaps unwittingly) reinforced rather than critiqued gender stereotypes. They focused on a woman's need for security, her use of sexual manipulation, or they stressed the prevalence of the love or relationship addict in work discussing female sex addicts.52 Ferree wrote that while the presentation of sex addiction is similar in men and women, the treatment process is different:
Women need a more relational and slower approach, and the clinician must take extra care regarding the therapeutic container. A clinician's setting, energy, wardrobe, touch, and environment require special consideration. Transference, countertransference and enactments must be handled with skill and empathy. The timing of using the thirty recovery tasks is important, as many FLSAs [Female Love and Sex Addicts] feel dismissed or misunderstood if the tasks are introduced prematurely or in the absence of a well-established therapeutic relationship.53
Surely these are all considerations for treating male sex addicts as well. In fact these same issues are outlined in Weiss's chapter 'Treating Sex Addiction', aimed at clinicians treating all sex addicts.54
Women have also featured in the literature on co-addiction and codependency, where addiction has spawned co-addicts and codependents just as the very concept of the co-addict depends on the existence of the sex addict. Sexual addiction was a family disease: 'Family members become as sick as the sex addict, denying the reality of the disease as vehemently as – or more vehemently than – the addict.'55 Carnes called co-addicts 'mirrors of obsession'.56 Both addict and co-addict were seen as experiencing fixation, unmanageability and sexual dysfunction: 'coaddiction is an obsessive illness in which reaction to addiction causes the loss of self'.57 Thus co-addicts have had parallel support groups based on Twelve-Step principles: Co-SLAA, S-Anon, Codependents of Sex Addicts (COSA) and Recovering Couples Anonymous (RCA) (specifically for couples).58 In theory the co-addict was assumed to be the partner or spouse of the addict, but support groups have proved more inclusive, open to 'men and women whose lives have been affected by another person's compulsive sexual behavior'.59 S-Anon even created a special subgroup for teenagers – S-Ateen.60 Carnes's metaphor of obsessional mirroring applied to the statistics that he used to bolster the notion of co-addiction. The abuse histories of sex addicts – sexual (81 per cent), physical (72 per cent) and emotional (97 per cent) – were almost identical to those of co-addicts – 81 per cent, 71 per cent and 91 per cent respectively.61 However, the point about co-addiction is that it has been heavily associated with women. Mostly it was a hidden default position, as in the references to family and spouses already quoted. But sometimes the association was more explicit. Men were the addicts: women were the co-addicts. 'While not all sexual co-dependents are women', wrote Douglas Weiss and Dianne DeBusk in 1993, 'the majority are.'62 And their book provided examples: 'My name is Julie. I'm a woman who loves sex addicts'; 'Hi, I am Becky, and I am a woman who loves and is attracted to sex addicts.'63 The First Step for women who loved sex addicts was 'We admitted we were powerless over our co-dependency with the sex addict, and that our lives became unmanageable.'64
Adolescents' liminal status in society is reflected in the way they have been discussed in the sex addiction literature – exhibiting behaviour that _may_ become something significant in adulthood. Although Eric Griffin-Shelley wrote about adolescent sex addicts in 1994, they are now framed as an outcome of the rapidly changing, digital world.65 They provide a platform for anxieties about 'modern' life and the new challenges that digital technology has brought for sex addiction. In a 2011 interview Patrick Carnes stated, 'Sexual addiction: we're now at a place where we have an epidemic. Where we have two-thirds of our kids watching pornography while they're doing their homework...thirty-four percent of them go on to really pursue that and are at risk for what we call sexually compulsive behavior.'66 The implication was that the numbers of addicts would increase as the young progressed into adulthood.
Proponents of sex addiction cite large but unverified numbers of those afflicted with the disease. And because of the element of shame attached to non-normative sexual behaviour, those from within the industry have the perfect reason as to why they cannot get precise figures: 'Exact statistics of sexual addiction are hard to determine, due to the taboo nature of the compulsivity.'67 One critic of the diagnostic definition of sex addiction pointed out that just because individuals perceived their sexual behaviour or fantasies to be 'out-of-control' and sought psychological help for their perceived condition, that was not empirically strong evidence that such a condition existed.68
There have been sex therapists who have questioned the very notion of sexual addiction. Domeena C. Renshaw, professor of psychiatry and director of the Sexual Dysfunction Clinic at Loyola University, Chicago, wrote in 1991 to advice columnist Ann Landers at the _Chicago Tribune_ that
the term 'sexual addiction' has become a popular catch phrase these past few years. People tend to believe that wildly promiscuous sexual behavior is an addiction in the way that alcoholism is an addiction. This is entirely false. Alcoholism involves the abuse of a chemical that categorizes the problem as physiological. There is no such component in out-of-control sexual behavior.69
This letter stemmed from Renshaw's dismay that a woman came to her clinic requesting assistance for sex addiction on the basis of advice she had read in Landers's column about someone else's story of sexual promiscuity. Renshaw's assessment was that the woman in fact suffered from manic-depressive illness. Renshaw's letter was a critique of the process of lay diagnoses of sexual addiction. But such diagnosis is central to the sex addiction paradigm, and has been abetted both by the role of the media in disseminating the information and by the encouragement for people to medicalize and problematize their own behaviour on the basis of another person's experiences.
The vague and broad way sex addiction has been defined has led to ballooning numbers of potential 'addicts' and collapsing distinctions between the sexually abusive and the sexually unfettered. One workbook equated rape with phone sex under the broad umbrella of 'sexual self-control problems'.70 Another author claimed that 'Sex addicts do not necessarily become sex offenders...Roughly 55 percent of convicted sex offenders can be considered sex addicts. About 71 percent of child molesters are sex addicts.'71 And with this definition of sex addiction as 'engaging in persistent and escalating patterns of sexual behavior acted out despite increasing negative consequences to self and others', then it is surprising that only 55 per cent of sex offenders qualify. Such a broad definition can include such diverse behaviours as to be meaningless.
As mentioned earlier, equating sex addiction with substance addiction was a way to promote its 'authenticity and harmfulness' and constitute it as a real 'disease'.72 Paula Hall wrote, 'Sex addiction can be viewed as a particularly powerful mood-altering drug.'73 And in a text designed to assist therapists treating sexual addiction, psychologist Anne Hastings gave the example that 'a sexual addict might miss work in order to pursue a drug-like _sexual trance_ ' where 'work can seem less important than the "fix" – unless the addict is also addicted to work'.74 Clinical psychologist Michael Herkov warned that 'seeking help for sex addiction is difficult because your addicted brain wants sexual stimulation and pleasure in much the same way a cocaine addict wants cocaine'.75 Sex addiction and substance dependence were seen as almost interchangeable. Jennifer Schneider's chapter on sex addiction in _The Handbook of Addictive Disorders_ (2004) encouraged therapists to 'extrapolate a framework for the use of the term [sexual addiction] from the DSM-IV's diagnostic criteria for substance dependence'.76
Claims of the progressive element of the disease helped intensify assertions of the urgency for seeking treatment. Robert Weiss warned that sex addicts must 'understand the progressive nature of their disease – that their addiction can over time steer their fantasies and behavior in unexpected, unwanted, possibly even illegal directions'.77 Mark Laaser's book aimed at Christian sex addicts was alarmist in its claims: 'In adulthood the disease grows progressively worse. Ultimately, if untreated, its victims will die.'78 In her book _Escape from Intimacy_ , Anne Schaef used the term 'progressive, fatal disease' or 'progressively fatal' eighteen times.79 Workbooks for addicts and therapists alike pushed the point about the life-threatening consequences of sex addiction. They could be 'life-threatening' in that the parts of life that the addict should hold dear (marriage, job, children, social status) were threatened, or in terms of actually causing death. In _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ one author wrote that 'consequences may include an arrest for solicitation of prostitutes, contracting AIDS, a pending divorce, or incarceration for lewd acts'.80 Hall listed the consequences of sex addiction (on the basis of her own survey) as shame, low self-esteem, losing a relationship, loss of employment, wasted time, wasted money, debt, impaired parenting, physical health problems, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), mental health problems, suicidal thoughts, sexual dysfunctions, legal action and press exposure.81 Hall's table listed actual and potential percentages of these consequences, though it is unclear how a researcher could quantify the latter.82
According to sex addiction lore it was often an unmanageable consequence that led an addict to therapy: 'Unmanageability is the therapist's ally' and 'severe consequences...provide leverage to help the addict break the addictive cycle'.83 The story of one sex addict, 'Tragic Consequences, Great Rewards', in the personal stories section of _Sex Addicts Anonymous_ outlined the extreme consequences that led the addict to recovery: their childhood of sexual abuse, an arrest for solicitation, being robbed and beaten, hospitalization for depression, contraction of HIV and contemplated suicide.84 Contraction of HIV/AIDS has been one of the most dramatic and frequently used examples in sex addiction workbooks. _Contrary to Love_ (1989) had an unsophisticated story about a couple having contracted AIDS as a result of the man's sexual addiction.85 Ferree cited the news of a former sexual partner's death from AIDS as the event that brought her to her first Twelve-Step meeting.86 Another addict's story began, 'Even though I risked alienating my children, contracting AIDS, and losing my husband, I continued to act out sexually.'87 Weiss pondered, in the preface to his book _Cruise Control_ , 'how many men became infected with HIV because they are untreated sex addicts who tend to have sex first and then worry about the consequences later'.88 As cited in _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , the American Society of Addiction Medicine's _Guidelines for HIV Infection and AIDS in Addiction Treatment_ (1998) encouraged physicians to be 'alert to sexual addictive/compulsive behavior' and stated that becoming infected or infecting others with HIV is one of the 'most profound consequences of out-of-control sexual behavior'.89 HIV/AIDS became shorthand for the dangers of non-normative sexual behaviour.
Culturally bound notions of normative sexual behaviour and desirable lifestyles (marriage, heterosexuality, children and productive employment) were implicit in the definitions of sex addiction and were held as both a key to recognizing the problem (where those aspects of life were compromised) and an incentive for recovery. They were what Helen Keane has identified as 'cultural norms and ethical judgments about what people should value and what makes life meaningful...The addict is the virtual opposite of the ideal of the rational, productive and self-reliant citizen.'90 Or as Weiss has expressed it, 'it can be difficult to understand why someone would put their livelihood or family life at risk for the sake of a shallow, two-dimensional online sexual experience or momentary sexual interaction'.91 Addiction provided explanation for the inexplicable.
Workbooks and the Twelve-Step process of sharing experiences encouraged addicts to compare notes and seek solidarity and familiarity in others' stories. In his first book, _Out of the Shadows_ , Carnes explained that its vignettes were 'fictionalized composites...carefully designed to be characterizations in order to protect individual anonymity. To the degree that they represent any individual [it] is a comment on the commonality of the addicts' experiences.'92 Such stories have long been part of the fabric of the Twelve-Step recovery programme. Robyn Warhol and Helena Michie have argued that such recovery narratives have established an archetype that provided a sense of cohesion, but that also encouraged people to experience, remember and then share using the same narrative paradigm – to make their story fit the established model.93 Parallels can be seen with Douglas Mason-Schrock's observations about transsexual narratives and the construction of a 'true' self.94 The authors of an article about online help for sex addicts felt that 'Reading these stories helps people to feel less isolated with their problem and may assist them in breaking through denial. Many end up seeking face-to-face help as a result of the process.'95 Stories shared in support groups and outlined in workbooks have been integral to the ongoing conceptualization and construction of the sex addict.
A workbook vignette requires the reader to identify with the main character. This discursive technique means that the reader starts to conceptualize their experiences in the language of addiction, and through the lens of the narrative. The characters in these brief stories are described as successful – businesswomen, lawyers, doctors – people with social standing and, by implication, a lot to lose, which bolsters the claim that their behaviour is an addiction or disease rather than the result of choice. They have to be someone with whom the reader identifies, either through similarity or because they have cultural capital. One workbook author questioned the use of physical descriptors in the vignettes, saying, '[i]n a book about addictive love and sex...these details are problematic. They serve to titillate or separate.'96 But when such characters are described, it is as attractive or powerful. If they had no friends, job-prospects or family, then the consequences associated with sex addiction (loss of family, loss of job, loss of friends) would lose their force. The cameos do not focus on sex offenders or the imprisoned. The case histories were designed to draw the reader in, and for them to identify and sympathize with the character's plight. There had also to be a possibility for redemption; the therapy industry relied on it.97
Sex addiction literature has focused primarily on family (environment and biological) and previous abuse as the main causes of sex addiction. Ferree felt that sexual addiction was the result of some form of abandonment, either in childhood or in adulthood 'through divorce, death, parental absence...lack of appropriate nurturing'.98 Those who believed in sexual addiction looked for these correlations to provide some causal explanation. But their conclusions were drawn from people identifying as addicts, already influenced in perceiving their life experience through the prism of sex addiction. In the introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition of _Silently Seduced_ (2011), Adams wrote that since the book was originally published it had been quoted back to him in therapy sessions and in lectures and that it had 'not only been informative to its readers, but transformative'.99 Adams said this with pride, and not a hint of critical reflection about how he, and the addiction industry, had shaped and created a language and concept that had then become self-fulfilling.
The scientific fields of neuroscience and genetics have both been used to frame the causes discussed earlier. The genogram process was one therapeutic tool used to uncover what role genetics has played in sex addiction. The fictional couple Dan and Laura who opened _Contrary to Love_ (1989) did a genogram and made links between their own sexual dysfunction and that of their family: porn and chemical addictions of siblings; womanizing and alcoholic grandfather; prostitute grandmother; overweight, sexually abusive, alcoholic father; sexually addicted uncle. The 'genogram had done what it always does...clients developed a clearer picture of their family history and of the role that addiction played in their lives. They weren't bad people; rather they had an illness that affected the whole family.'100 Likewise, the high incidence of multiple addictions was linked to family predisposition: a result of 'family illness' that manifested in a variety of ways. Carnes argued that 'each member [of the family] must use a discipline such as the Twelve-Steps as an ongoing antidote to the addictive process'.101
Although genetics still plays a role in explaining sex addiction, neuroscience has surpassed it. When asked to define addiction in 2011, Carnes said: 'Addiction is a brain disease. The brain has become altered.'102 This illustrated the shift from Carnes's tentative entry into the world of neuroscience in _Don't Call it Love_ (1991) – 'breakthroughs in neuroscience are occurring almost daily, but we still have much to learn' – to his position in _A Gentle Path_ (2012), where he stated more confidently, 'We also have solid scientific evidence that working a Twelve Step program literally rewires our brains for recovery.'103 In the world of sex addictionology there must remain hope for recovery, and so neurological issues and genetic predispositions can be overcome with awareness and therapy. Neuroscience is becoming more popular as a way of explaining sex addiction, but it is no more than a new mode to express old ideas.104 Or as Carnes has put it, neuroscience 'simply helps us to understand the mechanisms of what addicts have been telling us about for years'.105
Like neuroscience, the Internet has been woven into sex addiction discourse, playing an increasing role in the twenty-first century. It has provided an _idée fixe_ as well as a new medium for disseminating information and promoting the concept of sex addiction. The Internet arrived in the sex addiction literature in the late 1990s as sex addictionologists incorporated the subcategory of cybersex addiction into their new or revised recovery workbooks, with new texts dedicated entirely to the subject.106 David Delmonico's article 'Cybersex: High-Tech Sex Addiction' (1997) was an early entry in the field.107 When researching his article, Delmonico bemoaned the 131 hits from his Internet search for the terms 'cybersex and addiction', 'many of which were contrary to promoting recovery from addictive behavior'.108 In 2014 the same search has generated 66,400 results, indicating an increase in discussion and visibility of the term 'cybersex'.109 But again, a profusion of information does not necessarily indicate anything more than a canny ability of those in the industry towards excessive output and publicity. And despite claims that the Internet has fundamentally changed sex addiction, the messages remain largely the same.
Concerns about the sexual implications of the Internet have reached hyperbolic proportions, as evidenced in Carnes's 'cybersex revolution'.110 Weiss has claimed that in the pre-Internet age 3–5 per cent of the adult population struggled with sex addiction, but the Internet had meant 'sexual addiction is both escalating and becoming more evenly distributed among men and women'.111 In (the pre-Internet) _Contrary to Love_ (1989) Carnes had outlined the six phases of sex addiction: initiation, establishment, escalation, de-escalation, acute and chronic.112 Moving through the stages could be a long, drawn-out process. However, in 2004 Schneider warned 'Progression from the initiation to the acute phase usually takes years, but with the advent of the Internet, the process is often accelerated to months or even weeks.'113 In an interview from 2011 Carnes explained:
The Internet is changing everything: it's changing our sexuality; it's changing our culture. No spouse can compete with the Internet...We call it the MESA factor: Machine Enhanced Sexual Arousal. Takes the brain and elevates it to a level that requires so much stimulation that being with just one woman doesn't do it. I hear it from my patients all the time.114
As well as increasing the numbers of patients to treat, the Internet provided a platform for greater publicity. It is true that the Internet's 'Triple A Engine' lure of accessibility, affordability and anonymity was outlined as encouraging cybersex addiction.115 Yet it was recognized that these same traits could be harnessed to help with sex addiction identification and treatment: 'Technology is changing the nature of problems people are having as well as how we treat them.'116 The reach of online articles about sex addiction is surely just as large as (if not larger than) that of published authors in the sex addiction genre, considering the way that the Internet is used for accessing information quickly. For example, Michael Herkov has brought sex addiction to a wide audience with his numerous articles posted on PsychCentral.com in 2006.117 PsychCentral.com is an example of popular access to current ideas and debate regarding psychology. Its Facebook page has 88,798 'likes' and the Twitter account @PsychCentral has 73,512 followers.118
In this twenty-first-century, technology-saturated, Western culture, addictionologists must engage with the technology in order for their message to appear current. Introducing Weiss's updated edition of _Cruise Control_ (2013), Gentle Path Press editor Corrine Casanova reminisced, 'Back in 2001, we had no idea where technology would take us in the future and how that would specifically impact sex addiction. _Cruise Control_ does a great job of showing how recovery is possible in this digital age.'119 The second edition of _Cruise Control_ included a new chapter, 'Technology and the Changing Face of Sex Addiction'.120 The malleable case studies were also subtly changed. For example, the opening story remained essentially the same: Ed went to the gym to work out and to make contact with men. However, he no longer cruised 'the nearby mall or corporate park restrooms during lunch' but instead 'keeps his smart-phone sex app open at work'.121 The message is effectively unchanged: sexual addiction will 'take over' a person's life. The Internet and new technologies have not fundamentally altered sex addiction as an idea, but they have added a sense of urgency to the warnings. The Internet has become simply another vehicle for the same concept.
## Notes
1 Promotional quote for P. Carnes, _Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction_ (Minneapolis, 1983). 2 P. J. Carnes and others, 'PATHOS: A Brief Screening Application for Assessing Sexual Addiction', _Journal of Addiction Medicine_ , 6:1 (2012), 29–34, at 29. 3 See for example, as sole author: _The Sexual Addiction_ (Minneapolis, 1983); _Out of the Shadows; Contrary to Love: Helping the Sexual Addict_ (Minneapolis, 1989); _Don't Call It Love: Recovery from Sexual Addiction_ (New York, 1991); _Counseling the Sexual Addict: Systems, Strategies and Skills_ (Center City, MN, 1994); _The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships_ (Deerfield Beach, FL, 1997); _Facing the Shadow: Starting Sexual and Relationship Recovery_ (Carefree, AZ, 2001). And, as co-author, with: L. J. Rening, _27 Tasks for Changing Compulsive, Out-of-Control, and Inappropriate Sexual Behavior_ (Plymouth, MN, 1994); J. M. Moriarity, _Sexual Anorexia: Overcoming Sexual Self-Hatred_ (Center City, MN, 1997); D. Laaser and M. Laaser, _Open Hearts: Renewing Relationships with Recovery, Romance and Reality_ (Wickenburg, AZ, 1999); P. Carnes, D. L. Delmonico and E. Griffin, _In the Shadows of the Net: Breaking Free of Compulsive Online Sexual Behavior_ (Center City, MN, 2001); K. M. Adams, _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ (New York, 2002); and D. L. Delmonico, _Assessment of Sexual Dependency_ (New York, 2006). 4 D. Goleman, 'Some Sexual Behavior Viewed as an Addiction', _The New York Times_ , 16 October 1984. 5 Calculated from the Ebook version of P. J. Carnes and K. M. Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ (New York, 2013). 6 Carnes, _Don't Call It Love_ , p. 30. 7 Carnes, _Out of the Shadows_ , p. v. _Out of the Shadows_ was the republished title of Carnes, _The Sexual Addiction_. The contents are the same. We use _Out of the Shadows_ because it is the more commonly known book and the title of two subsequent editions (1992 and 2001). Unless indicated otherwise, we use the first (1983) edition. 8 <http://www.sash.net/sexual-addiction>. 9 <http://www.sexhelp.com/am-i-a-sex-addict>. 10 Ibid. 11 See lists at <http://www.sash.net/sexual-addiction>. 12 Carnes, _Out of the Shadows_ , p. 28. 13 Ibid., p. 37. 14 Ibid., p. 45. 15 P. Carnes, 'Sex Addiction 101: Assessment and Treatment' (2012): IITAP Material for Sex Addiction, http://www.google.co.nz/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CC8QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.iitap.com%2Fimages%2FSexAddiction101.ppt&ei=sVlMU5XJM5P98QWehYHYCA&usg=AFQjCNGe11LG8RYBiyXcnodBIig_eks-HA&bvm=bv.64542518,d.dGc. 16 R. Weiss, _Cruise Control: Understanding Sex Addiction in Gay Men_ , 2nd edn (Carefree, AZ, 2013), p. 6. 17 Carnes, 'Sex Addiction 101'. 18 Carnes, _Out of the Shadows_ , p. 25. 19 Weiss, _Cruise Control_ , p. xv. 20 P. Carnes, _Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction_ (Center City, MN, 2001), p. xvii. 21 Ibid. 22 Carnes, _Out of the Shadows_ , pp. i–ii. 23 L. J. Hatterer and J. Ramsey, 'Are You an Addictive Personality?', _Family Circle_ , 6 (1974), 138–9, quote at 138. 24 Ibid., 139. 25 Ibid. 26 Carnes, _Out of the Shadows_ , pp. 136–7. 27 Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, _Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism (The Big Book)_ , 4th edn (New York, 2001), pp. 58–60. See also J. Parker and D. Guest, 'The Integration of Psychotherapy and 12-Step Programs in Sexual Addiction Treatment', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 8, p. 117. 28 J. M. Irvine, 'Reinventing Perversion: Sex Addiction and Cultural Anxieties', _Journal of the History of Sexuality_ , 5:3 (1995), 429–50, quote at 432. 29 Carnes, _Don't Call It Love_ , p. 220. 30 Irvine, 'Reinventing Perversion', 432. 31 <http://www.recoveryzone.com/tests/sex-addiction/SAST/index.php>. 32 For just a sample of the tests available, see: <http://psychcentral.com/sexquiz.htm>; www.freedomeveryday.org; www.sexhelp.com/am-i-a-sex-addict/sex-addiction-test; www.sash.net/am-i-a-sex-addict; www.sexualrecovery.com/resources/self-tests/wsast.php; sexaddictionhouston.squarespace.com/storage/Addict_Test.pdf; www.doctoroz.com/quiz/are-you-sex-addict; www.copacms.com/resources/diagnostic-quizes/sexual-addiction-quiz. 33 Carnes, _Contrary to Love_ , pp. 218–19. 34 Quote from <https://www.recoveryzone.com/tests/sex-addiction/SAST/SASTresults.php>. For the limitations of SAST, see Carnes, _Contrary to Love_ , pp. 217, 221. 35 www.sexhelp.com/am-i-a-sex-addict/sexual-addiction-risk-assessment. 36 www.recoveryzone.com. 37 Ibid. 38 www.recoveryzone.com/tests/sex-addiction/PSS/index.php. 39 Carnes, 'Sex Addiction 101'. 40 Carnes, _Don't Call It Love_ , pp. 42–67. 41 Ibid., p. 42. 42 Ibid., p. 46. 43 Ibid., p. 68. 44 <https://www.recoveryzone.com/tests/sex-addiction/SAST/SASTresults.php>. 45 <https://www.recoveryzone.com/tests/sex-addiction/SAST/images/patient_sast_score19.jpg>. 46 <https://www.recoveryzone.com/tests/sex-addiction/SAST/SASTresults.php>. 47 Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , Section 3 (chs 15–23). 48 R. Weiss, _Sex Addiction 101: A Basic Guide to Healing from Sex, Porn, and Love Addiction_ (Longboat Key, FL, 2013), Ebook, chs 16–18. 49 K. McDaniel and S. Boggs, _Ready to Heal_ , 3rd edn (Carefree, AZ, 2012), p. xii. 50 M. C. Ferree (ed.), _Making Advances: A Comprehensive Guide for Treating Female Sex and Love Addicts_ (Royston, GA, 2012). See also C. Kasl, _Women, Sex and Addiction: A Search for Love and Power_ (New York, 1990); K. McDaniel, _Ready to Heal: Women Facing Love, Sex and Relationship Addiction_ (Carefree, AZ, 2008); T. Rodriguez, 'Sex "Addiction" Isn't a Guy Thing', _The Atlantic_ , 19 November 2013: <http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/sex-addiction-isnt-a-guy-thing/281401>. 51 M. C. Ferree, 'Females: The Forgotten Sexual Addicts', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 16, quote at p. 240. See also M. C. Ferree, 'Making Advances: Treating Female Sex and Love Addicts', _IITAP_ , March 2013: www.iitap.com/images/03_13_IITAP_NEWS_final4.pdf. 52 Ferree, 'Females: The Forgotten Sexual Addicts', p. 258. 53 Ferree, 'Making Advances', no pagination. 54 R. Weiss, 'Treating Sex Addiction', in R. H. Coombs (ed.), _Handbook of Addictive Disorders: A Practical Guide to Diagnosis and Treatment_ (Hoboken, NJ, 2004), ch. 8. 55 R. Earle and G. Crow, _Lonely All the Time: Recognizing, Understanding, and Overcoming Sex Addiction, For Addicts and Co-Dependents_ (New York, 1989), p. 5. 56 Carnes, _Don't Call It Love_ , p. 143. 57 Ibid., p. 152. 58 M. R. Laaser, 'Recovery for Couples', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 9, esp. pp. 122 and 130. Originally published in 1996. See websites: <http://www.sanon.org>; <http://www.coslaa.org>; <http://www.cosa-recovery.org>; <http://www.recovering-couples.org>. 59 <http://www.cosa-recovery.org>. 60 <http://www.sanon.org/sateen/whatissateen.html>. 61 Carnes, _Don't Call it Love_ , p. 146. 62 D. Weiss and D. DeBusk, _Women Who Love Sex Addicts: Help For Healing from the Effects of a Relationship With a Sex Addict_ (Fort Worth, TX, 1993), p. 9. 63 Ibid., pp. 17, 37. 64 Ibid., p. 185. 65 E. Griffin-Shelley, _Adolescent Sex and Love Addicts_ (Westport, CT, 1994). 66 Carnes's interview with Joe Polish, 2011: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1pQfGD_MQI>. 67 C. K. Belous, T. M. Timm, G. Chee and M. R. Whitehead, 'Revisiting the Sexual Genogram', _American Journal of Family Therapy_ , 40:4 (2012), 281–96, quote at 283. 68 C. Moser, 'Hypersexual Disorder: Searching for Clarity', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 20:1–2 (2013), 48–58, quote at 48. 69 D. C. Renshaw, 'Promiscuity is Not a True Addiction', _Chicago Tribune_ , 14 January 1991: <http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-01-14/features/9101040818_1_dear-ann-landess-sexual-column>. 70 T. P. Sbraga and W. T. O'Donohue, _The Sex Addiction Workbook: Proven Strategies to Help You Regain Control of Your Life_ (Oakland, 2003), p. 2. 71 M. Herkov, 'What Is Sexual Addiction?', PsychCentral: <http://psychcentral.com/lib/what-is-sexual-addiction/000748>. 72 H. Keane, 'Disorders of Desire: Addiction and Problems of Intimacy', _Journal of Medical Humanities_ , 25:3 (2004), 189–204, quote at 191. See also H. Keane, _What's Wrong With Addiction?_ (New York, 2002). 73 P. Hall, _Understanding and Treating Sex Addiction_ (New York, 2013), Ebook, locs. 162 and 334. 74 A. S. Hastings, _Treating Sexual Shame: A New Map for Overcoming Dysfunction, Abuse, and Addiction_ (Northvale, NJ, 1998), p. 70. Emphasis in the original. 75 M. Herkov, 'If You Think You Have a Problem with Sexual Addiction', PsychCentral (2006): <http://psychcentral.com/lib/if-you-think-you-have-a-problem-with-sexual-addiction/000750>. 76 J. P. Schneider, 'Understanding and Diagnosing Sex Addiction', in Coombs (ed.), _Handbook of Addictive Disorders_ , ch. 7, quote at p. 198. 77 Weiss, _Sex Addiction 101_ , loc. 1088. See also locs. 311, 783, 798, 1074. 78 M. Laaser, _Healing the Wounds of Sexual Addiction_ (Grand Rapids, MI, 2009), Ebook edn, loc. 158. 79 A. W. Schaef, _Escape from Intimacy: Untangling the 'Love' Addictions: Sex, Romance, Relationships_ (New York, 1989). 80 M. C. Fulton, 'Breaking Through Defenses', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 3, quote at p. 34. Originally published in 1999. 81 Hall, _Understanding and Treating Sex Addiction_ , loc. 402. 82 Ibid. 83 Carnes, _Contrary to Love_ , p. 189. 84 Sex Addicts Anonymous, _Sex Addicts Anonymous_ , 3rd edn (Houston, TX, 2012), Ebook, loc. 2789. 85 Carnes, _Contrary to Love_ , pp. 3–4. 86 M. C. Ferree, _No Stones: Women Redeemed from Sexual Addiction_ (Downers Grove, IL, 2013), Ebook, p. 199. 87 _Sex Addicts Anonymous_ , loc. 3614. 88 Weiss, _Cruise Control_ , p. xvi. 89 Cited in J. R. Sealy, 'Dual and Triple Diagnoses: Addictions, Mental Illness and HIV Infection Guidelines for Outpatient Therapists', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 14, quote at p. 216. Originally published in 1999. 90 Keane, 'Disorders of Desire', 193. 91 Weiss, 'Treating Sex Addiction', p. 233. 92 Carnes, _Out of the Shadows_ , p. xi. 93 R. R. Warhol and H. Michie, 'Twelve-Step Teleology: Narratives as Recovery/Recovery as Narrative', in S. Smith and J. Watson (eds.), _Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography_ (Minneapolis, 1996), pp. 327–50. 94 D. Mason-Schrock, 'Transsexuals' Narrative Construction of the "True Self" ', _Social Psychology Quarterly_ , 59:3 (1996), 176–92. 95 D. E. Putnam and M. M. Maheu, 'Online Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity: Integrating Web Resources and Behavioral Telehealth in Treatment', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 7:1–2 (2000), 91–112, quote at 101. 96 McDaniel and Boggs, _Ready to Heal_ , 3rd edn (2012), p. xi 97 Warhol and Michie, 'Twelve-Step Teleology'. 98 Ferree, 'Females: The Forgotten Sexual Addicts', p. 259. 99 K. M. Adams, _Silently Seduced: When Parents Make Their Children Partners (Revised and Updated)_ (Deerfield Beach, FL, 2011), p. 1. 100 Carnes, _Contrary to Love_ , pp. 1–2. 101 Carnes, _Out of the Shadows_ (2001), p. xviii. 102 Carnes's interview with Joe Polish, 2011: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1pQfGD_MQI>. 103 Carnes, _Don't Call It Love_ , p. 32; P. Carnes, _A Gentle Path Through the Twelve Steps_ (Center City, MN, 2012), p. 8. 104 A. Katehakis, 'Affective Neuroscience and the Treatment of Sex Addiction', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 16:1 (2009), 1–31. 105 Carnes, _Don't Call It Love_ , p. 32. 106 Carnes, Delmonico and Griffin, _In the Shadows of the Net_ ; J. P. Schneider and R. Weiss, _Cybersex Exposed: Simple Fantasy or Obsession?_ (Center City, MN, 2001); A. Cooper (ed.), _Sex and the Internet: A Guidebook for Clinicians_ (New York, 2002). 107 D. Delmonico, 'Cybersex: High-Tech Sex Addiction', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 4:2 (1997), 159–67. 108 Ibid., 161. 109 Google search, 17 June 2014. 110 Carnes, _Out of the Shadows_ , p. xiii. 111 Weiss, _Sex Addiction 101_ , loc. 409. 112 Carnes, _Contrary to Love_ , pp. 52–102. 113 Schneider, 'Understanding and Diagnosing Sex Addiction', p. 216. 114 Carnes's interview with Joe Polish, 2011: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1pQfGD_MQI>. 115 A. Cooper, 'Sexuality and the Internet: Surfing into the New Millennium', _CyberPsychology & Behavior_, 1:2 (1998), 187–93; A. Cooper, D. E. Putnam, L. A. Planchon and S. C. Boies, 'Online Sexual Compulsivity: Getting Tangled in the Net', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 6:2 (1999), 79–104; A. Cooper, D. Delmonico and R. Burg, 'Cybersex Users, Abusers, Compulsives: New Findings and Implications', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 7:1–2 (2000), 5–29. 116 Putnam and Maheu, 'Online Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity', 91. 117 M. Herkov, 'What Is Sexual Addiction?', PsychCentral: <http://psychcentral.com/lib/what-is-sexual-addiction/000748>; M. Herkov, 'Symptoms of Sexual Addiction', <http://psychcentral.com/lib/symptoms-of-sexual-addiction/000745>; M. Herkov, 'What Causes Sexual Addiction?', <http://psychcentral.com/lib/what-causes-sexual-addiction/000744>; M. Herkov, 'Sex Quiz: Am I Addicted to Sex?', <http://psychcentral.com/lib/self-quiz-am-i-addicted-to-sex/000751>; M. Herkov, 'Is Someone I Know Addicted to Sex?', <http://psychcentral.com/lib/is-someone-i-know-addicted-to-sex/000749>; M. Herkov, 'Is Sex Addiction a Recognized Disorder?', <http://psychcentral.com/lib/is-sexual-addiction-a-recognized-disorder/000746>; M. Herkov, 'Understanding More about Sexual Addiction', <http://psychcentral.com/lib/understanding-more-about-sexual-addiction/000747>; M. Herkov, 'If You Think You Have a Problem with Sexual Addiction', <http://psychcentral.com/lib/if-you-think-you-have-a-problem-with-sexual-addiction/000750>; M. Herkov, 'Treatment for Sexual Addiction', <http://psychcentral.com/lib/treatment-for-sexual-addiction/000752>. All these pieces appeared in 2006. 118 Numbers as of 9 June 2014. 119 C. Casanova, 'From the Gentle Path Press Editor's Desk', _IITAP_ , March 2013: www.iitap.com/images/03_13_IITAP_NEWS_final4.pdf. 120 Weiss, _Cruise Control_ , p. 4. 121 R. Weiss, _Cruise Control: Understanding Sex Addiction in Gay Men_ (Los Angeles, 2005), p. 2, and Weiss, _Cruise Control_ (2013), p. 2.
# Chapter 4
Cultural Impact
Your girl catches you cheating...Fifty fucking girls? God _damn_...You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda. You compose a mass e-mail disowning all your sucias. You block their e-mails. You change your phone number. You stop drinking. You stop smoking. You claim you're a sex addict and start attending meetings.
Junot Díaz, 20121
It seems an axiom of modern sexual addiction that the ailment is both widespread and ever increasing. 'Sexual compulsivity seems more prevalent now than ever', warned the _Handbook of Clinical Sexuality for Mental Health Professionals_ (2003). Even these rather restrained advisors were somewhat unrestrained in their estimates that up to 22 million Americans were addicted to sex in 1998 and that perhaps 40 million had 'online sexual problems' by the year 2000.2 _The Sex Addiction Workbook_ (2003) said 'Although we have no good data on the prevalence of such problems, they appear to be escalating at an alarming rate, possibly because of the impact of modern technology, in particular the Internet.'3 A 2008 article by a clinician in _Psychiatric Clinics of North America_ , with the obligatory reference to Carnes and the rather negating use of the words 'possibly' and 'may', claimed that 'Possibly 4 out of 10 adults in United States culture may be sexually compulsive.'4 One believer was blunter still: 'Like it or not, sexual addiction is a rapidly growing problem, and predicted to be the next tsunami of mental health.'5
There is little doubt that much of the hype around sex addiction – either in endorsement or in denial – has been media-driven: 'Duchovny in rehab for sex addiction', 'Are people becoming addicted to sex because of the financial crisis?' and 'Are you addicted to sex?' were just some of the titles in the late 2000s.6 By the end of 2011 'The Sex Addiction Epidemic' was the cover story in _Newsweek_ , that gauge of the US cultural mainstream.7 The concept rapidly achieved a taken-for-granted status. The now deceased Cleveland kidnapper and rapist Ariel Castro allegedly blamed his crimes on sex addiction.8 And police officers have added sexual addiction as a coping mechanism for the trauma and stress associated with their work.9
One of the concerning aspects of this familiarization, and we will return to it later, has been the lack of critical inquiry in the reporting, even in quality publications like _The New York Times_ , _The Guardian_ and _The Independent_. Hence Joanna Moorhead's piece 'Sex Addiction: The Truth About a Modern Phenomenon' that seriously reported a psychotherapist's claims that 10 per cent of the sex addicts she surveyed were under 10 years old when their sex addiction started, and 40 per cent were under 16. This (retrospective) claim for 'how young sex addiction starts' was never questioned.10
If _The New York Times_ can be used as a rough guide to educated popular usage, there has been an increasing familiarization with the concept of the sex addict since the early 1990s (Table 1).11
Table 1 References to 'sex addict', 'sexual addiction' and 'sex addiction' in _The New York Times_
Years| No. of references
---|---
1971–1980| 1
1981–1990| 11
1991–2000| 87
2001–2009| 129
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the dynamics of the media's role in this habituation, where hardcopy combined with digital delivery and printed stories were reinforced by the moving image. Television, newspapers, magazines and the Internet converged in what became, in effect, the marketing of a concept. News blurred with entertainment in the form of reality TV, chat shows, celebrity culture, documentary and film, while the sex addiction industry itself, the subject of this familiarization, made impressive use of these myriad forms and genres of media delivery. We will see later that the Clinton/Lewinsky affair of 1998 was pivotal in this media merging and that sex addiction featured in the discourse surrounding the scandal. But what we are concerned with here is the public's habituation with a term, a relatively un-interrogated concept with an appeal that resided in its simplicity. What is remarkable is the ease with which 'sex addiction' became part of what Fedwa Malti-Douglas has dubbed (in another not unrelated context) the 'American imaginary'.12 This process did not have the dramatic intensity of 1998, when, as it has been observed, 'One could literally spend 24 hours a day watching, listening to, and reading about the Clinton scandal.'13 Sex addiction's media legitimation was a far more protracted affair – a drip, drip rather than John Fiske's event of 'maximum visibility and maximum turbulence' in his 'river of discourses' metaphor for media culture.14 But it did share some of that late 1990s moment's characteristics, including the unlimited number of sources with rather limited perspectives (a kind of inverse relationship between quantity and quality), and the folding of the distinctions between hard news and entertainment and producer and consumer.15 Though its genesis preceded such developments, the rise of sex addictionology was arguably facilitated by what has been called the 'collapse of media gatekeeping'.16 Over time, it would become, like addiction culture generally, to quote Trysh Travis, 'a matter of common sense, a concept so familiar that it seemed to evade – or perhaps not even require – definition'.17
_Newsweek_ 's cover story, we have seen, was an iconic instant. However, a better example of the phenomenon is its rival _Time_ magazine's earlier feature at the beginning of 2011, 'Sex Addiction: A Disease or a Convenient Excuse?', with its follow-up piece on NBC's daily American morning TV, _The Today Show_ , and then on the Internet on Today.com. The author of the written piece, John Cloud, started with a time-honoured technique, personalization, as he outlined the case of an individual addict, Neil Melinkovich. If the accompanying photograph of the said addict reposing in bed puzzled the reader, the reason for it soon became evident:
A difference between an addict and a recovering addict is that one hides his behavior, while the other can't stop talking about it. Self-revelation is an important part of recovery, but it can lead to awkward moments when you meet a person who identifies as a sex addict...within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich...he told me about the time in 1987 that he made a quick detour from picking up his girlfriend at the Los Angeles airport so he could purchase a service from a prostitute. Afterward, he noticed what he thought was red lipstick on himself. It turned out to be blood from the woman's mouth. He washed in a gas-station bathroom, met his girlfriend at the airport and then, in the grip of his insatiability, had unprotected sex with her as soon as they got home – in the same bed he said he had used to entertain three other women in the days before.
The feature was by no means an uncritical acceptance of its subject. Cloud noted both the financial and cultural implications of acknowledgement by the _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders_ (DSM): 'recognition of sex addiction would create huge revenue streams in the mental-health business. Some wives who know their husbands are porn enthusiasts would force them into treatment. Some husbands who have serial affairs would start to think of themselves not as rakes but as patients.' He was ambiguous about definitional aspects of the alleged disease. Martin Kafka's diagnosis of the threshold of hypersexuality at seven or more orgasms a week was problematic; 'by Kafka's definition, virtually every human male undergoes a period of sex addiction in his life. It's called high school.' The general tone of the piece was noncommittal: 'they are still trying to address very basic questions. Should we regard out-of-control sexual behavior as an extreme version of normal sexuality, or is it an illness completely separate from it? That question lies at the heart of the sex-addiction field, but right now it's unanswerable.'18
The video follow-up on NBC and Today.com was less guarded. 'This disease, this particular affliction is so misunderstood', declared 'sex addict' Melinkovich as he outlined marital infidelities that in his opinion became life threatening. Cloud, the _Time_ journalist, seemed less circumspect when in front of the camera, as the segment cut to his explanation of his subject's almost hallucinatory sexual needs: 'The urges were so strong that he was powerless to overcome them.' The anchor's commentary referred briefly (very briefly) to critics, and immediately moved on: 'But medical experts say sex addiction can be a serious problem.' The item then moved to 'Dr Jeff Gardere, Psychologist', a widely known media medical expert, for the stereotypical seconds of authoritative sound and visuals: 'For someone who has a real sexual addiction to the point of their being destructive in their lives there is a major treatment option available and that's checking yourself into an in-patient program that's based on a 12-step-system.' The video was, in other words, sex addiction 101. The addict Melinkovich explained that his recovery was 'a process that will last a lifetime...it just envelops you, it takes your being, when you're in it and you don't think you can get out, it's a very dark place'. Cloud reappeared to state that the sex addicts that he had met reminded him of drug and alcohol dependents in their descriptions of the power of their needs. Then Dr Gail Saltz, a psychiatrist and another well-known TV commentator, clarified that she saw the problem more as compulsion than addiction, 'a compulsive, incredibly overwhelming, urge: I need to do this and it destroys their functioning, that's the operative part.' And the programme ended with Saltz's words: 'you keep doing it and you cannot stop'.19 The likelihood was that viewers of this item would have been left with the opinion that sex addiction was real, characterized by overwhelming, uncontrollable sexual impulses, and was best conceived and treated as an addiction, like alcoholism. The original _Time_ article, while guarded about aspects of the diagnosis, never really questioned its ontology, and, like NBC's _Today_ , helped to popularize the concept. An article in the _Columbia Journalism Review_ has referred aptly to the manner in which an all-too-common, uncritical journalism has effectively fetishized sex addiction.20
Hence the term 'sex addiction' has become firmly entrenched in twenty-first-century popular culture. Season 1 of the UPN sitcom _Girlfriends_ (2001) has an episode, 'They've Gotta Have It', that features sex addiction, when one of the principal characters, the lawyer Joan (Tracee Ellis Ross), dates a man who refuses to touch her. When confronted, he says 'I'm a sex addict.' She looks sceptical: 'What man isn't?' The man, Sean, explains: 'I'm a recovering sex addict...Once I get turned on, there's no turning off.' The episode also includes a scene in a sex addiction meeting. Despite the laughs (it was situation comedy), and Joan's friend Lynn (Persia White) registering positive to every item on the sex addiction self-test, and Joan's initial scepticism and recoil at the number of women that Sean had 'slept' with ('almost three hundred'), sex addiction was taken seriously in the episode. As another friend Maya (Golden Brooks) says, 'Do not take that lightly. Michael Douglas is a sex addict...It's real.'21
Sex addiction figures similarly in Charlie Sheen's comedy series _Anger Management_ , when Charlie gets sexually involved with a recovering addict. Again the malady provokes comedy, heightened no doubt by the actor's own alleged real-life addiction, but its authenticity was never questioned: 'She has a disease...sex addiction.'22
From its beginnings, sex addiction seemed perfectly suited to the issue-oriented format of what has been termed the 'first generation of daytime talk shows' (their beginnings coincided).23 We will see later that Patrick Carnes was appearing on _Donahue_ in 1985.24 The baseball star Wade Boggs claimed that he first realized that he was a sex addict when he watched an episode of _Geraldo_ (1989) that dealt with the subject:
I was watching Geraldo Rivera a couple of weeks ago, and there was a show on about oversexed people, and things like this, and Geraldo had psychologists on there and everything, and they were calling it a disease, and I feel that's exactly what has happened – that a disease was taking over Wade Boggs, and it just did for four years.25
Marion Barry, the disgraced mayor of the District of Columbia, was a guest on the _Sally Jesse Raphael_ show in 1991, presenting along with other sex addicts: ' "You get caught up in it", said the former mayor,..."The women. This disease is cunning, baffling, powerful. It destroys your judgment." ' The audience responds: 'The audience aaahed.' They intervene: 'What about taking responsibility for your own damn self?' The host glosses: 'Our guests today say they have all brought some measure of shame to themselves and their loved ones.' She warns, adding a frisson to the proceedings: 'Addicts can lie...They're cunning.'26 Those who did not watch daytime tabloid television could (in this instance) read about the show in _The Washington Post_.27
Sex addiction was an ideal topic for a genre that thrived through exploring topical social interest problems at a personal level and which combined audience participation, indeed performance, with guest expertise and facilitated such interaction – almost a mirror image of the conceptual success of sex addiction in wider American society and culture. It dealt with sexual excess, of course, another characteristic of the talk shows. And it was therapy. Jane Shattuc estimated in 1997 that about two-thirds of the talk shows were devoted to psychological matters. A strand of therapeutic discourse was promoted by a medium known for the power of its public therapy.28
The topic was still appearing in the later generation of more confrontational talk shows. _Maury_ presented a steady offering of sexual addiction themes based on a perceived threat to the family and in keeping with the show's penchant for marital infidelity and teenage sex: 'My Teen Daughter is Addicted to Sex' (1999); 'I Need the Truth – Is My 13-Year-Old Addicted to Sex?' (2004); 'Take the Test! Is My Teen Daughter a Sex Addict?' (2005); 'I'm Addicted to Sex...I Don't Think Our 2 Kids Are Yours!' (2006); 'Young Teen Girls Addicted to Sex and Violence!' (2008); 'My Wife's a Sex Addict...Am I Her Baby's Father?' (2010).29 Presumably the focus on female sex addicts increased the shock factor in what was often presented as a male-dominated issue.
_Ricki Lak_ e featured female sex addicts in 2004, an interesting programme because three of the four admitted to being sex addicts but were defiant about it: 'Yes, I am a sex addict...Hi Ricki, I love your show...I don't think I have a problem.' One woman with more than 700 claimed sexual partners responded that her only problem was that she did not 'get enough'. Another, aged twenty-three and with a total of over 150 male contacts, said 'Yes I am addicted to sex...I've done it with ten guys [in a day], but usually it's five!' Only the fourth admitted to being in any kind of quandary and needing help.30 Though the first three interviewed women remained unrepentant in a loudly subversive manner (probably to provoke the engagement and controversy required of the genre), the programme was structured so it finished with the addict who was willing to enter therapy.31 The other principal participants – an 'expert', Catherine Burton (a Texas family and marriage therapist), and a recovered sex addict and memoirist, Sue William Silverman – were there to reinforce the problematic nature of sex addiction, to emphasize that the recalcitrant three were in denial, to advocate therapy and to ensure a master theme of disapproval – reinforced by Ricki Lake's wrinkled nose as she commented 'Clearly she has a problem.' Furthermore, the sex engaged in is presented as addictive, a message that was never challenged: 'I love sex, it's like a drug to me'; 'I have to have it'; 'She likes sex all the time...She eats it, sleeps it, dreams it'; 'My friend Lynette is a very big sex addict. She says that sex is like coffee in the morning for her.'32 All the tropes of sex addiction were present: the ubiquity of the malady, even in women ('Yes, it's very common...it's not at all unusual'), acknowledging (or not acknowledging) a problem, shame ('You have a lot of shame'), seeking self-worth from men and then feeling bad and immediately requiring another man to provide that sense of identity again, and sexual melodrama ('A road to death').33
Phil McGraw's talk show _Dr. Phil_ has also included discussion of sex addiction. The 'Suburban Dramas' episode in 2011 featured McGraw's trademark polygraph test: 'Brett says he's addicted to sex, online pornography and talking dirty to other women...Brett insists he's never had a sexual relationship with anyone other than his fiancée. Mandy says she doesn't believe him and wants to know if he's lying.'34 The 'Secret Life of a Sex Addict' episode in 2013, which had both the critic David Ley and the advocate Robert Weiss as guests, actually came out against sex addiction as the prime explanation of the subjects' woes. Marcos had had more than 3,000 sexual partners (both male and female) in only seventeen years. His wife of nine years, Yvette ('I didn't know he was a sex addict'), was unfaithful too: 'I'm obsessed with hooking up with other men. I cannot maintain monogamy in a relationship with one guy. I have a wandering eye.'35 However, the experts concluded that sex addiction was the least of their problems. Dr Phil himself listed off a range of possibilities – narcissism, borderline personality disorder, anti-social personality – that might have contributed to what he termed a 'highly dysfunctional family'; 'Sex addiction might wind up on the list but it wouldn't be near the top.' Yet the banner headline was 'Secret Life of a Sex Addict'.36 The sidebars on Dr Phil's website for the shows included links to sex addiction tests and advice and support centres.
If sex addiction was 'real' in _Girlfriends_ and _Ricki Lake_ , it was positively surreal in the highly rated, adult animation _South Park_ 's sex addiction episode, 'Sexual Healing' (2010), which is merciless in exposing the concept's weaknesses. The nation embarks on a school-wide screening to determine how many elementary schoolchildren are suffering from the disease. They are shown a picture of a naked woman – 'Holy moly, what's that between the lady's legs? It's all bushy...I've never seen that part of a lady! Do they all got a hedge like that? Do they?' – and then asked what colour was the handkerchief that she was holding? 'Did you see the bush on that lady? What the heck was that?' Those who had not even noticed that there was a handkerchief – 'Fuck no, I wasn't looking at a handkerchief' – are declared to have tested positive for sex addiction and sent off for treatment; 'It was just so big and bushy sir. Why does it look like that?' The results of the survey are proclaimed with confidence: 'In fourth graders, five percent of male students were found to be sex addicts. By sixth grade the number goes up to thirty percent. At high schools, nearly ninety-one percent of male students answered, "What handkerchief?"...We're facing a sex addiction epidemic in our country.' The fourth-grader Kyle ('Well, I just found out I'm a sex addict. I'm so scared, I haven't even told my mom yet') is the only one to question the concept: 'I mean, maybe this isn't really even a disease.'37
When some of the films about sex addiction are examined more closely it soon becomes evident that sex addiction has become a convenient, one might say easy, term to describe what was once termed promiscuous sex. Paul Schrader's film _Auto Focus_ (2002) about Bob Crane, the star of the famous 1960s television series _Hogan's Heroes_ , a man who traded on his fame to have sex with (and film) hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women before his death in 1978, was immediately classified by an article in _The_ _New York Times_ as a film about sex addiction. Crane was a 'sex addict...His sex addiction overwhelmed his career' – even though the term was never used in a film set in a period before the invention of sex addiction.38 _Auto Focus_ is about sexual obsession, the banality of the culture of swinging, the opportunities and transience of celebrity, and the homoeroticism in heterosexual sex.39 It is a subtle film about sex and addiction that loses any analytical complexity once the two words are combined in that limiting designator 'sex addiction'.40
The same could be said of a more recent film, Steve McQueen's _Shame_ (2011), which appears to have prompted the earlier-mentioned article in _Newsweek_ – an interesting example of the circularity of popular culture – written, significantly, by the magazine's entertainment reporter.41 _Shame_ 's director Steve McQueen and co-screenwriter Abi Morgan have said that the initial idea for the project came from a conversation about sex addiction, that they talked to 'sex addicts' in their preparatory research, that the film's title came from a word frequently used by those addicts, and that it is about a man who used sex in the same manner that others used alcohol. Despite his recognition that it was a 'grey area', the film's main actor, Michael Fassbender, also consulted a 'sex addict' in preparation for his role. Clearly, the creative team thought that sex addiction was genuine – McQueen: 'sexual addiction is real' – and when interviewed invoked several of sex addiction's keywords: 'shame', 'compulsion', 'self-loathing...the shame that these people talk about' and 'lack of intimacy'; 'Brandon is a sex addict. He has problems with intimacy...That's classic sex-addict behavior.'42 The scene in _Shame_ where Brandon purges his pornography collection is a recurring sex addiction trope.43 The hinted (past or looming) incestuous relationship with his sister in the film was perhaps prompted by the sex addiction literature's suggestion of sexual abuse as a contributor to the malady, though it is not an aspect of the film that has been much discussed. In the printed version of his _Sight & Sound_ interview with Nick James, McQueen descended into exaggerated stereotypes that could have come (probably did come) straight from a sex addiction advice book when asked what the tipping point was between promiscuity and addiction: 'When you find that in order to get through a day, someone is on the internet for 20 hours a day or more looking at pornography or having to have a sexual activity at least ten times a day, it's incredible.'44 His reported discussion in _Newsweek_ was positively hyperbolic: 'It's not like alcoholism or drug addiction, where there's some built-in sympathy. It's almost like the AIDS epidemic in the early days. No one wants to deal with you...You're a fiend. That stigma is still attached.'45
It is intriguing that _Shame_ is far more nuanced than that. Brandon does not spend most of his day on the Internet and does not have ten-times-a-day sex. The terms 'sex addict' or 'sex addiction' never appear in either film or script. The word 'shame' is also absent from the film (apart from its title) and only occurs twice in the script in narrative descriptions: once when the protagonist Brandon (Fassbender) looks in the mirror 'full of shame' after his sister has discovered him masturbating (the mirror-looking does not occur in the film), and then after anonymous sex in a hotel room when 'HOTEL LOVER' pulls on a 'tiny thong' and Brandon 'looks away, fighting back the cold flutter of shame' (the tiny thong and cold flutter are also absent from the moving image rendition).46 It seems more a film about the contemporary world, the current era of on/scenity referred to earlier, where sex has become quotidian. This is captured perfectly in several sections of the film. One is in the lingering looking that begins and ends the narrative – framing the film – the mutual staring on the subway train that might have led to something more between Brandon and 'PRETTY SUBWAY GIRL'.47 Another sexually evocative moment occurs when Brandon (and the viewer) gaze upwards to a full-length apartment or hotel window with a naked woman facing outwards, her hands and body pressed against the glass, being fucked from behind. The silence of this watched encounter adds to its distancing.48 Elsewhere, the noise-scapes of sex (the groans, grunts, gasps, laboured breathing and whispers, the muffled computer porn) are as important as the Bach in the film's soundtrack. It is a masterly filmic portrait of a sexualized society.
_Shame_ is also about the Internet's facilitation of that easy sexualization. The film could almost have been called 'Porno'. McQueen juxtaposes Brandon's boss David's use of the Internet to chat to his son on Skype, retaining everyday family contact, with Brandon's employment of the same medium to access porn and to participate in online sex. Brandon's consumption of online porn is certainly central to several of the movie's scenes.
Your hard drive is filthy, all right. We got your computer back. I mean, it is, it is dirty, I'm talking like hoes, sluts, anal, double anal, penetration, inter racial facial, man, Cream pie. I don't even know what that is...It takes a really sick fuck to spend all day on that shit:
David's monologue is interrupted by his son, still on Skype, 'Daddy...Daddy'.49 Later, when Brandon's sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) opens his laptop she discovers a series of windows, a
blurred smorgasbord of porn sites, graphic and obscene, their colors reflecting across her face and body. An escalating collage of graphic images, obscene sexual messages and a provocative sexual conversation hanging mid sentence addressed to a live sex chatroom. The images haunting, brutal, from the weird to the sadomasochistic. The open windows, an endless stacking of obscene chatroom conversation, emails posted with graphic sexual photos and live webcam images of every combination of fucking disappearing into the screen in infinite form.50
That is in the script. This kaleidoscope of sexual imagery did not make it to the screen. But the live webcam scene survives as a panty-clad beauty beckons Sissy from Brandon's laptop: 'Hey, where's Brandon? Are you Brandon's girlfriend? Do you want to play?...Do you wanna play with my tits? I know Brandon would really like it...And I know exactly what Brandon likes.'51 In discussion McQueen stated that _Shame_ is about 'our relationships with sex and the Internet. It's about how our lives have been changed by the Internet, how we are losing interactions...We've been tainted, it's unavoidable.'52 One of the starting points for his interest in the film, he explained in a press conference for the British Film Institute (BFI) London Film Festival in 2011, was the contemporary 'accessibility of sexual content'.53
_Shame_ is also a film about casual sex in twenty-first-century New York, where sex is just sex, readily available, and without commitment (Brandon's longest relationship is four months). He engages in a series of escalating, paid and unpaid encounters involving nameless women, a man, and a threesome with two women. The close-ups of wedding rings convey the message that it is not just singles involved in this culture. David (James Badge Dale), who fails and then succeeds in such encounters, is, as Brandon reminds his sister Sissy, married: 'You know he's got a family, right? You know he's got a family?'54 (Of course uncommitted sex is especially available if you look like Michael Fassbender. One of the film's collusions with the very culture that it is allegedly critiquing is that all of those engaged in such sex, even when it is being paid for, are always so desirable: the script refers to 'PRETTY SUBWAY GIRL', 'PRETTY ASSISTANT', 'ATTRACTIVE WOMAN', 'CUTE NEIGHBOR', 'A stunning leggy COCKTAIL WAITRESS', 'HOT GIRLS'.55)
So _Shame_ could also have been called 'Promiscuity', though that would have had an outdated feel and might not have conveyed the intensity and compulsion that McQueen envisioned. But whatever the intentions of its makers, it seems more about alienation or ennui than addiction. Brandon's sadness is conveyed, hauntingly, in the window shot after he fails in what might have been committed sex with his colleague Marianne (Nicole Baharie), but the next moment he is engaged in vigorous sex against the same window with an unnamed woman.56 His suppressed anger, his self-destructive impulses, his sheer desolation, build in brilliant editing – standing in the subway train, in the darkened street, fingering a woman in a bar ('I want to taste you...slip my tongue inside you...just as you come'), tasting his fingers, being beaten by her boyfriend, engaging in gay sex, the threesome, woman kissing woman, prolonged fucking, brutish facial contortions to the point of exhaustion – as the film reaches its climax with Sissy's bloody anguish and Brandon on his knees in torment, in the rain, sobbing. But then the film ends as it had begun with the attractive woman on the subway, the longing looks, the wedding ring. Perhaps it will all begin again. Sukhdev Sandhu came closest in his review in _Sight & Sound_ when he described _Shame_ as depicting sex addiction as 'a species of anomie'.57
Yet much of the coverage of _Shame_ has persisted with that restricting 'sex addiction' billing: 'The acclaimed new film _Shame_ portrays the harrowing world of sex addicts' ( _The Guardian_ ); 'chilling story of a New York sex addict' ( _The Observer_ ); 'Sex Addiction and the City' ( _Newsweek_ ).58 Robert Weiss thought it 'a dead-on portrayal of active sex addiction' and worried that some of its scenes might 'trigger a sex addicted client's desire to act out'!59 The classification could even survive content that suggested that _Shame_ was about something else or more. Thus Mark Fisher in _Film Quarterly_ declared McQueen's creation 'a study of sex addiction' and wrote of 'sex addict Brandon' while he simultaneously referred to 'such an overwhelming sense of affectlessness that it could be about depression as much as sex addiction'.60
The incongruity of _Shame_ is that the subtlety of its exploration of what its creators have persisted in labelling as sex addiction exposes the limitations of other representations of this supposed complaint – including the shallowness of the concept itself. We do not need sex addiction to explain Brandon's world.
Sex addiction has certainly featured in some forgettable cinema. In Joseph Brutsman's truly awful _Diary of a Sex Addict_ (2001) we follow the exploits of sex addict Sammy Horn (yes, Horn), a restaurateur and chef in his fifties (one online reviewer referred to him unkindly as a pensioner), who recounts his exploits to his therapist (Nastassja Kinski) as he takes us through a seemingly never-ending, five-day parade of thrusting sex (Sammy does not believe in foreplay) with improbably beautiful, female sexual partners. Sammy, played by the woeful Michael De Barres, is a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde character – sexual addiction of the most basic kind – whose saccharine, family-devoted Dr Jekyll ('I love my wife', 'I love my young] son') is even worse than the sex-addicted Mr Hyde. An [IMDb.com reviewer, who described it as a B-grade sexploitation film attempting to 'masquerade as a study of sexual addiction', captured its nature perfectly. But with Rosanna Arquette and Kinski as stars, this softcore pornographic film/video/DVD, best classified as unintentional comedic drama, is still an example of the popular familiarization, if not legitimation, of the concept of sex addiction.61
_I Am a Sex Addict_ (2006) is more memorable (see Figure 6). Caveh Zahedi's whimsical, low-budget, 'fictionalized documentary' is about this Woody Allen-like independent filmmaker's long-running obsession with prostitutes. He is a sex addict with honesty, who insists on telling his girlfriends about his problem and musing about the ethics of prostitution: 'I had always considered myself a feminist'. It is never clear how seriously we are supposed to take his addictions – repeatedly asking street prostitutes 'Will you suck me?', grabbing the breasts of massage parlour receptionists and then fleeing, masturbating in the confessional – but the film narrative is framed by Zahedi's attendance at sex addiction meetings and ends with the claim that he is cured.62
Figure 6 _I Am a Sex Addict_ (2006: Caveh Zahedi).© IFC Films/Photofest.
_Thanks for Sharing_ , a film that was in production when we first began work on this project and out on DVD by the time our book was completed, is certainly a film about sex addiction – undigested, unquestioning sex addictionology straight from Patrick Carnes's _A Gentle Path Through the Twelve Steps_ and _Out of the Shadows_ , which appear, almost like clumsy product placements, in several scenes in this (for these writers) irritating romantic drama. Set in the context of a sex addiction support group, and starring some well-known names (Tim Robbins, Mark Ruffalo and the singer Pink play the addicts, and Gwyneth Paltrow and Joely Richardson are among their loved ones), the film rehearses all the themes of addictionology. Indeed it follows the format of Alcoholics Anonymous a little too closely with its meetings, sponsors, sponsees, fellowship, sobriety medallions (ambiguously, 'freedom from masturbation and sex outside of a committed relationship'), and frequent references to 'sharing' (hence the film's title), 'one day at a time', 'Friend of Bill' (recovering alcoholic), and invocation of 'a higher power'.63 The concept of the partner as co-addict also features, with Katie (Richardson) advising Phoebe (Paltrow) that as a partner she consider 'What are _my_ issues that _I_ have to deal with? After all, I picked an addict.'64 Alcohol and drug dependency intersect with sex addiction throughout the film to convey the nestling theme discussed elsewhere in this book. Mike (Robbins) is a recovering alcoholic and sex addict. Dede (Pink: Alecia Moore) is in a Narcotics Anonymous programme as well as attending the sex addiction group ('The only way I know how to relate to men is sex').65 Phoebe's ex-boyfriend was an alcoholic and she is a fitness fanatic with food issues. Neil (Josh Gad) is both a food and sex addict. It seems ironic that Edward Norton, who plays the self-help- and group-therapy-obsessed narrator in the movie version of Chuck Palahniuk's satirical _Fight Club_ (1999), was one of the executive producers of _Thanks for Sharing_.
There are hints of a counter-narrative. Neil lies to the group. Phoebe's double mastectomy and recovery from cancer are juxtaposed with Adam's (Ruffalo) rather obsessive five-year sobriety (televisions are removed from hotel rooms to eliminate any likelihood of sexual stimulation). The drug addiction of Mike's son Danny (Patrick Fugit) actually serves to contrast the seriousness of his habit – and ability to overcome it alone – with the triviality of the sexual dependency of the main protagonists and their inability to combat it without group help. The viewer may also wonder what the frotteurism and up-skirt voyeurism of Neil (and uncomfortable sexualized relationship with his mother) and the obvious childhood sexual abuse of Becky (Emily Meade), one of Adam's casual contacts, have in common with the promiscuity of Adam, Mike and Dede.
Then there is the archetypal tension between sex addiction's anti-sex message and the sexualization of elements of its message that will be discussed later in this book. Paltrow's objectification is blatant. A clip of her stripping was used to market the film – one journalistic puff-piece mused whether the clip would promote a fresh outbreak of sex addiction in New York – and her publicity interview on the talk show _Chelsea Lately_ managed to focus on her body ('what a vision...thank you for showing your body in this movie because you're naked a lot') while almost totally avoiding any discussion of sex addiction and with only fleeting reference to the actual film that she was ostensibly promoting (see Figure 7).66
Figure 7 _Chelsea Lately_ , 'Interview with Gwyneth Paltrow', 16 September 2013.
Yet the directorial message in _Thanks for Sharing_ is unmistakable: sex addiction is a genuine disease. Adam says 'I have to remind myself every day where this disease could take me.' 'That's the disease. It makes you do things that violate everything that you believe in.' The character Mike puts it more bluntly – 'This disease is a fucking bitch' – and makes it clear early in the film (counter to his son's message) that giving up alcohol was easy compared to shedding his addiction to casual sex. 'This thing is a whole different animal. It's like trying to quit crack while the pipe's attached to your body' (a simile that does not really bear deeper analysis). The seriousness of their malady, 'the darkness', is constantly impressed. Adam's lack of access to a laptop (odd, given his occupation as an environmental consultant: a blocked MacBook Air is specially brought in by an assistant so that he can Skype Phoebe while on a business trip!) is 'saving his life'. 'You think I like not having a television or a laptop? It fucking blows. But guess what? It's saving my life, so I do it.' Dede's counselling would supposedly save her from suicide: 'There's gotta be another way. There has to be, or I'm gonna fucking kill myself.'67 This sentiment echoes the addictionology language of sex addiction as not only a disease but a progressive and fatal one.68
The film's earnestness has convinced commentators who do not share the scepticism of the authors of this book. The movie columnist for the _Chicago Sun-Times_ wrote that the film made a 'convincing case' for sex addiction, 'makes you care about sex addicts'.69 The reviewer for _The Washington Post_ thought that the film and its script took seriously the idea that 'sex addiction is a real illness' and showed 'real respect for the power of these programs'.70 These were surely understatements given that Carnes himself might almost have written the screenplay. Weiss, the founder of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles, and Carnes-trained, highly recommended _Thanks for Sharing_ to 'therapists interested in what sexual recovery looks like'.71 The most nauseating instance of the film's endorsement of addictionology is in its closing moments when Billy Bragg's song _Tender Comrade_ (1988), a poignant, homoerotic homage to returned, working-class, British soldiers, is played to evoke battle-weary, male camaraderie in the wake of the fight against sex addiction – as if those struggling against sexual urges are in any sense comparable to those engaged in mortal combat.
Even when the references to sex addiction have been humorous or mocking they were still invoking the concept. Victor Mancini, the main character in Chuck Palahniuk's novel _Choke_ (2001), is a sex addict who has sex with the female addicts whom he sponsors – in toilets, in a janitor's closet – while meetings are in progress. He never advances beyond the fourth of the Twelve Steps, the listing of his sexual contacts, and he treats sexaholics' meetings as 'a terrific how-to seminar. Tips. Techniques. Strategies for getting laid you never dreamed of. Personal contacts.' 'Plus the sexaholic recovery books they sell here, it's every way you always wanted to get laid but didn't know how.' He hangs about in the recovery section of bookshops to pick up female sex addicts. It is a hilarious novel about casual sex ('her name's Amanda or Allison or Amy. Some name with a vowel in it') that positively revels in its subject matter, but with serious things to say about the addiction industry and American culture. And not just sex with women:
We don't need women. There are plenty of other things in the world to have sex with, just go to a sexaholics meeting and take notes. There's microwaved watermelons. There's the vibrating handles of lawn mowers right at crotch level. There's vacuum cleaners and beanbag chairs. Internet sites. All those old chat room sex hounds pretending to be sixteen-year-old girls. For serious, old FBI guys make the sexiest cyberbabes.72
Its message is the antithesis of everything that believers in the concept of sex addiction hold dear: 'The magic of sexual addiction is you don't ever feel hungry or tired or bored or lonely.'73 When the film from the novel appeared in 2008, its distributors (in the spirit of Palahniuk) promoted it with gifts of anal beads.74
Similarly, John Waters's outrageous comedy _A Dirty Shame_ (2004) (see Figure 8), in which a Baltimore suburb is taken over by sex addicts – 'Straight, gay or bi, there's a new sex act just waiting for you. Sex for everybody! Fuck your neighbors joyously...Let's go sexing' – could hardly be said to take the subject seriously.75 Sex addiction in this film is always the result of concussion, a rather quaint nod in the direction of nineteenth-century, physiological explanations of hypersexuality that modern believers in the malady are hardly likely to endorse. Nor are they likely to be amused by the flippant portrayal of their problem ('I'm a sex addict too. I'm a cunnilingus bottom, and I'm your mother...Let's go down to the Holiday House and fuck the whole bar. Okay, Mom. Let's go sexing!') and their meetings ('My name is Paige, I'm from Roxton and I am a sex addict. My drug of choice...frottage..."Excuse me", I'd say, while I'd grind my crotch into an unsuspecting passenger on a crowded airplane').76 When asked if he had attended Twelve-Step meetings in preparation for his film, Waters reportedly replied: 'I felt that would have been condescending...But if I were a sex addict, I would definitely go to sex addiction meetings, and for the same reason that they do in this movie – someone's going to slip.'77
Figure 8 Selma Blair in _A Dirty Shame_ (2004: John Waters). Free desktop wallpaper.
And yet as Patrick Carnes reportedly observed, 'The fact that pop culture is making jokes about sex addicts is a sign that awareness of the condition is percolating in mass consciousness.'78
One television series that seems deliberately to have avoided invoking the concept – despite media stories doing it for them – is Showtime's _Californication_ (Seasons 1–7, 2007–14). Season 6 began with the main character, womanizing writer Hank Moody (David Duchovny), sent to the wryly named rehab facility 'Happy Endings'. Despite his numerous sexual encounters and the way his sexual behaviour impacts negatively on his life, writing, friends and family, Hank is never described in the series as a sex addict: he is in rehab for his drinking. The absence of the label of sex addict is all the more striking because the actor Duchovny has reputedly been treated for sex addiction. _Californication_ is strident in allowing Hank (in line with most of the other characters) his sexual proclivities ('holes is holes') without judgement, though definitely with consequences for the life he thinks that he wants. The characters are framed as creatures of excess, instant gratification, opportunism and a debauched Hollywood lifestyle. Even his fellow rehab inmate, the character listed as 'Tweaker Chick' in the credits (Angela Trimbur), is not described as a sex addict in either the dialogue or the credits, despite her sexual exploits: she shoves Hank's hand down her pants at the end of a group therapy session and then has non-consensual sex with him while he is asleep. Sexually inappropriate and aggressive, 'Tweaker Chick' screams 'I want drugs' as she leaves Hank's room, raising the possibility that she, like Hank, is in rehab for substance abuse, with her sexual behaviour not under scrutiny.79 When Hank returns to rehab (to sneak drugs in) and sees her again, he good-naturedly says 'hello rapist' as she straddles him, gyrating and pleading 'Feed me some fuckin' inches dude.'80 The drugs that Hank brings into rehab fuel a sexually charged party. The message seems to be that, given the opportunity, anybody (in or out of rehab) will engage in polyamorous sexual encounters. This is a message about excess and access rather than addiction.
Some material should not be taken seriously. _Dr. Drew's Sex Rehab_ (2009), three weeks in the Pasadena Recovery Center under the care of Dr Drew Pinsky, is entertainment rather than treatment, its format, editing, casting and much else determined by the parameters of reality TV, the genre that combines documentary and soap opera, reality and unreality, where viewers look for glimpses of authenticity amidst all the acknowledged, staged fakery.81 Significantly, _Dr. Drew's Sex Rehab_ is a spinoff from _Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew_ (2008–12). The patients (cast) of porn stars and former porn stars, models and ex-models, a (minor) rock star and a pro-surfer were hardly randomly selected – the women had the same agent and the surfer, allegedly, was paid for product endorsement (which may explain the frequent clothing changes, his mismatching sneakers – 'Interesting shoes' – and the fact that he brought his surfboard with him to the treatment centre!), and were either self-declared non-addicts (the 3,000 women that the rock star slept with were a potential part of any performer's CV) or multiply addicted (sex being the least of their worries). Amber Smith was addicted to antidepressants and opiates. Kari Ann Peniche was a methamphetamine addict. Drummer Phil Varone had a cocaine dependency, as did Nicole Narain, a former Playboy Playmate. Several became almost professional celebrity addicts: Jennifer Ketcham, Peniche and Kendra Jade Rossi would also appear in _Sober House_ , Season 2 (2010), and Peniche (again) in _Celebrity Rehab_ , Season 3 (2010). Smith had already featured in Season 2 of _Celebrity Rehab_ (2008) and Season 1 of _Sober House_ (2009). One of those 'treated', Duncan Roy, a gay English film director who had some knowledge of production, wrote later of blatant playing to the camera, that he was concerned that some 'might not be on the show for the same reasons as I was. That they might not have any desire for sexual sobriety. That I might be part of a huge pantomime.'82 Rossi blogged that when she signed up for the show it was for the money and she did not know what sex addiction was.83 Varone recalled that his agent phoned and said
'OK, we have a supermodel, we have a porn star, we have a Playboy Playmate, we need a rock star.' They need this cast. Do you want to do it? And I said, 'Well to be on television I guess I will.' That's the decision. Those shows are scripted out a certain way.
He did not consider himself a sex addict; he just had access to a lot of groupies and took advantage of it.84 After the show he produced his own sex DVD, _The Secret Sex Stash_ , and commercially manufactured a dildo replica of his penis called the 'phildo': not much shame there.85
It is all staged. The _mise en scène_ is sexualized in ways totally incongruent with the declared aims of detox. The publicized three weeks of celibacy (including no masturbation), the very public confiscation of sex toys, the ban on digital contact with outside temptations (cell phones, laptops, tablets) only serve to heighten the flirting, sexual innuendo, flaunted cleavages, the very sexualized avoidance of sex by those who include porn stars whom the viewer may well have seen elsewhere engaged in very explicit activity – why else would the producers want such actors!86 Gareth Longstaff has argued that when the former reality TV celebrity Steven Daigle became a porn star, the visual techniques of reality TV merged with those of pornography: 'the mixture of intimacy, liveliness, extreme-close-up, amateur and hand-held camera work, and surveillance imagery associated with the visual rhetoric of both Reality TV and pornography were reworked and repositioned as dual markers of both reality and fantasy'.87 With the female porn stars in _Sex Rehab_ the movement is in the opposite direction, a fascinating example of the intertextual relationship between pornography and sex addiction that we will return to later in the book. Unsurprisingly too, given the presence of those porn stars, there are many emotional 'money shots', those moments of raw feeling – crying, rage – integral to the talk show and reality TV, named by Laura Grindstaff after pornography's famed ejaculatory money shots, visible signs of pleasure rather than grief.88
It is perhaps appropriate that reality TV, a media form that our colleagues Misha Kavka and Amy West have characterized as standing outside history to achieve emotional intensity and immediacy, should, in this case, have been promoting a concept (sex addiction) whose proponents, we are arguing, have been so lacking in historical awareness.89 But the point with this, and other such television, is that it was publicizing the concept. As a blog for the show put it: 'I think after watching this show, a lot of people are going to think, "Am I a sex addict?" '90
We have been focusing on the sometimes-dramatic examples of film and television to explain the dissemination of an idea. Yet the quiet insinuation of the concept is perhaps best illustrated by its acceptance by the humble library cataloguer. The Library of Congress established 'sex addiction' as a new subject category in 1989 (revised in 1997) alongside a long list of variants: 'Addiction, Lust'; 'Addiction, Sex'; 'Addictive sex'; 'Compulsive sex'; 'Erotomania (Hypersexuality)', 'Hypersexuality'; 'Lust addiction'; 'Obsession, Sexual'; 'Sexaholism'; 'Sexual Addiction'; 'Sexual compulsiveness'; 'Sexual obsession'.91 Libraries throughout the world are now able to use these influential Library of Congress subject headings in the cataloguing of their own holdings.
This infiltration may have been unproblematic for nonfiction. It may even be of some utility where sex addiction is a legitimate component of the subject matter of some fictional forms: McQueen's _Shame_ and Waters's _A Dirty Shame_ appear as 'Sex addiction – Drama' in the University of Melbourne Library Catalog. Murray Schisgal's _Sexaholics_ (1995), first performed at the 42nd Street Workshop Theatre in New York in 1997 and now part of ProQuest's Literature Online, is in fact about sexual addiction. The play's two acts are framed by a couple's unlikely off-stage attendance at an addicts' support group after an episode of energetic casual sex:
These people...They meet a couple of nights a week and they discuss their problems and they help each other, they help each other to stop ruining their lives...The idea is the same for all addicts. And it works. It works because we also have a sickness over which we have no control. For weeks I've been trying to get together the courage to go to a meeting. There's one tonight. If...If you'd go with me...92
John Franc's _Hooked: A Novel_ (2011), about a group of male friends visiting brothels, at least contains fleeting reference to the syndrome. But it is more concerning when the term is used to classify any work that contains multiple or non-monogamous sex. Novels as various as Patrick McGrath's _Asylum_ (1997) (obsession), Pier Paolo Pasolini's _Petrolio_ (1997) (perversity and fascism), Stephanie Merritt's _Gaveston_ (2002) (infatuation), Howard Jacobson's _Who's Sorry Now_ (2002) (infidelity) and Kathryn Henderson's _Envy: A Novel_ (2005) (grief and transgression) have all been catalogued as fiction about sex addiction when they are not about sex addiction at all and the words never appear between their covers other than, perhaps, in the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data after the title page.93
One of the more intriguing effects of this phenomenon has seen the reclassification of the reprints or newer editions of older classics under the term 'sex addiction' – Djuna Barnes's _Nightwood_ (1936), Paul Morand's _Hecate and Her Dogs_ (1954, 2009) and Vladimir Nabokov's _Lolita_ (1955, 1958) are jarring examples.94 Our own University of Auckland Library lists the 1995 edition of Philip Roth's controversial _Portnoy's Complaint_ (1969) under the subject heading 'Sex addiction – Fiction' despite the fact that sex addiction did not exist in 1969 and Roth does not use the term in the novel. Such retrospective classifications superimpose narratives different to those envisaged by their authors, essentially dehistoricizing these works.95
Any literary masterpiece about uncontrolled passion, sexual fixation or unconventional sex is in danger of being classified under the reductive term 'sex addiction'. This was the fate of Oscar Hijuelos's stunningly vibrant _The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love_ (1989). The sexual conquest and longing, the masculine posturing and vulnerability, only part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that was about so much else, was enough for an influential text on addictive disorders to condemn it as a case study of sex addiction; the novel's central character, the philandering musician Cesar Castillo, is a sex addict.96 Life is effectively squeezed out of the work.
Since Janice Irvine's initial analysis of the place of sex addiction in modern American sexual history, then, the phenomenon has become the default explanation for any kind of promiscuous or obsessive sexual interaction. Jesse Fink, who (we will see later) went on a 'three-year sex binge' with hundreds of women and who wrote about his activity, said that his memoir was promoted as sex addiction against his better judgement. The publisher characterized him as a sex addict but he did not see things in that way and thought the concept, in typical Australian style, 'a crock of shit'. He said that dating four or five women a week in this Internet age was not unusual and certainly not indicative of any addiction.97
When Erica Jong published _Fear of Flying_ in 1973 – with its famous zipless fucks – her female protagonist Isadora Wing (Jong) may have had 'Nymphomania of the brain' and have been 'a nymphomaniac (because I wanted to be fucked more than once a month)' but she was definitely not suffering from sexual addiction.98 In 1990, however, Wing, now the central character in Jong's _Any Woman's Blues_ , 'a fable for our times' according to its fictitious editor, is indeed 'a woman lost in excess and extremism – a sexoholic [sic], an alcoholic, and a food addict'.99 The Twelve Steps, AA meetings, frequent references to obsession and addiction are integral to her story:
Sex was what blotted out the world for me. Sex was my opium, my anodyne, my laudanum, my love. Sex was what I used to kill the pain of life – the pot and the wine were just my avenues to bed. Open your mouth and close your eyes. Open your legs and close your eyes. Open your heart and close your eyes...I lived for sex, for falling in love with love, for breaking (or at least collecting) hearts.100
Alcohol addiction and sexual addiction are intertwined in _Any Women's Blues_. 'The Program is like Mary Poppins's elixir: it becomes the specific medicine for whatever ails you. You ask for a cure for sex addiction? You got it.'101 Wing uses AA as a (not exactly successful) way to battle her sexual obsessions. 'I drew the line at Sexoholics Anonymous. For one mad moment, I thought of going to Sexoholics Anonymous to _meet_ men, but I couldn't quite bring myself to. The very notion made my mind giggle.'102 Irvine rightly referred to this work by a best-selling author as evidence for the popularization of the idea of sex addiction.103 Works such as Jong's both reflected and facilitated this cultural spread.
However, the story did not finish there, for in 2011, as part of the publicity accompanying the republication of her bestseller, Jong decided retrospectively that _Fear of Flying_ had been about sex addiction after all. Both the early Wing and her creator are sex addicts: 'That was my life. I had been a sex addict, a man addict.' Needless to say, in this age of consolidation of the concept, sex addiction was part of the billing. The piece in _The Huffington Post_ was called 'Erica Jong on Feminism, Sex Addiction and Why There Is No Such Thing as a Zipless F**k'.104
Sex addiction has become part of popular culture. That is why Junot Díaz's character could trot it out as one of his lame excuses in a novel in 2012 in the epigraph to this chapter.
## Notes
1 J. Díaz, _This Is How You Lose Her_ (New York, 2012), pp. 175–6. 2 A. Cooper and I. D. Marcus, 'Men Who Are Not In Control of Their Sexual Behavior', in S. B. Levine, D. B. Risen and S. E. Althof (eds.), _Handbook of Clinical Sexuality for Mental Health Professionals_ (New York, 2003), ch. 18, quotes at pp. 311, 316. 3 T. P. Sbraga and W. T. O'Donohue, _The Sex Addiction Workbook: Proven Strategies to Help You Regain Control of Your Life_ (Oakland, 2003), foreword. 4 M. Turner, 'Female Sexual Compulsivity: A New Syndrome', _Psychiatric Clinics of North America_ , 31:4 (2008), 713–27, quote at 713. 5 C. McCall, 'Should Parents Who are Sex Addicts Tell Their Children?', _Psychology Today_ , 1 June 2011:www.psychologytoday.com/blog/overcoming-child-abuse/201106/should-parents-who-are-sex-addicts-tell-their-children. 6 _The Guardian_ , 29 August 2008, 14 October 2008, 22 January 2010. 7 _Newsweek_ , 5 December 2011. 8 D. L. Ley, 'Was the Cleveland Kidnapper a Sex Addict?', _Psychology Today_ , 9 May 2013: <http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-stray/201305/was-the-cleveland-kidnapper-sex-addict>. Ley was critical of the claim. See also S. J. Clark, 'Ariel Castro Claims a "Sexual Addiction" ', Fox4kc.com, 1 August 2013: <http://fox4kc.com/2013/08/01/ariel-castro-letter-i-am-a-sexual-predator>. 9 A. R. Kates, 'Sex Addiction in Police Officers as a Result of Stress and Trauma': http://www.copshock.com/sex-addiction-in-police-officers–book-chapter.php. This is an online extract from his book _CopShock: Surviving Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)_ (2013). 10 J. Moorhead, 'Sex Addiction: The Truth About a Modern Phenomenon', _The Independent_ , 2 December 2012. 11 Using the ProQuest Historical Newspapers Advanced Search. _The New York Times_ is the only newspaper in this database with an unbroken, searchable run from 1970 to 2009. 12 F. Malti-Douglas, _Partisan Sex: Bodies, Politics, and the Law in the Clinton Era_ (New York, 2009), p. 162. 13 B. A. Williams and M. X. Delli Carpini, 'Unchained Reaction: The Collapse of Media Gatekeeping and the Clinton–Lewinsky Scandal', _Journalism_ , 1:1 (2000), 61–85, quote at 75. 14 J. Fiske, _Media Matters: Race and Gender in U.S. Politics: Revised Edition_ (Minneapolis, 1996), p. 7. 15 Williams and Delli Carpini, 'Unchained Reaction'. 16 Ibid., the subtitle of their article. 17 T. Travis, _The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey_ (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), p. 3. 18 J. Cloud, 'Sex Addiction: A Disease or a Convenient Excuse?', _Time_ , 28 February 2011: <http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2050027,00.html>. 19 'Sex Addiction: An Illness or an Excuse?', _Today_ , 18 February 2011: <http://www.today.com/video/today/41662640#41662640>. 20 C. Brainard, ' _Newsweek_ Fetishizes an "Epidemic" ', _Columbia Journalism Review_ , 15 December 2011: <http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/newsweek_fetishizes_an_epidemi.php?page=all>. 21 _Girlfriends_ , Season 1, Episode 13: 'They've Gotta Have It', 5 February 2001. 22 _Anger Management_ , Season 2, Episode 38: 'Charlie and the Sex Addict', 10 October 2013. 23 For a good history and analysis of the twentieth-century origins of the genre, see J. M. Shattuc, _The Talking Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women_ (New York, 1997), quote at p. 3. But our favourite study is J. Gamson, _Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity_ (Chicago, 1998). 24 R. E. Vatz, L. S. Weinberg and T. S. Szasz, 'Why Does Television Grovel at the Altar of Psychiatry?', _The Washington Post_ , 15 September 1985. 25 T. Kornheiser, 'For Your Sins and Mine, Let Me Say I'm Sorry', _The Washington Post_ , 24 February 1989. 26 M. Specter, 'Marion Barry Airing His Vices: On Sally Jessy Raphael, the Ex-Mayor Tells of Sex Addiction', _The Washington Post_ , 14 May 1991. 27 Ibid. 28 Shattuc, _Talking Cure_ , ch. 5, esp. pp. 111, 135. 29 See TV Guide.com, Maury Episodes: <http://www.tvguide.com/tvshows/maury/episodes/194938>. 30 _Ricki Lake_ : 'Exposed: Female Sex Addicts!', 3 March 2004. 31 For the impact of _Ricki Lake_ , see Shattuc, _Talking Cure_ , ch. 6; I. Hutchby, 'Confrontation as a Spectacle: The Argumentative Frame of the _Ricki Lake_ Show', in A. Tolson (ed.), _Television Talk Shows: Discourse, Performance, Spectacle_ (Mahwah, NJ, 2001), ch. 7. 32 _Ricki Lake_ : 'Exposed: Female Sex Addicts!', 3 March 2004. 33 Ibid. 34 _Dr. Phil_ : 'Suburban Dramas', 2 March 2011. See also Dr.Phil.com: <http://www.drphil.com/shows/show/1612>. 35 _Dr. Phil_ : 'Secret Life of a Sex Addict', 9 September 2013. See also <http://www.drphil.com/shows/show/2062>. 36 Ibid. 37 _South Park_ , Season 14, Episode 1: 'Sexual Healing', 17 March 2010. 38 L. Hirschberg, 'First Came the Sitcom. Then Came the Murder', _The New York Times_ , 29 September 2002. 39 It is true that Schrader explained Crane's obsessive quest for anonymous sex as an 'addictive firewall', like drugs or alcohol, and that it was 'a kind of odd addiction, because I don't think it's really about sex...it never seemed to me like it was a lot of fun to go through fucking strange people every single day'. See C. Fuchs, ' "A Series of Enabling Devices": An Interview with Paul Schrader, _Auto Focus_ ', _Morphizm_ , 22 October 2002. See also K. Jackson (ed.), _Schrader on Schrader_ (London, 2004), pp. 264–74. 40 More perceptive reviewers did not use the term. Linda Ruth Williams managed to convey the film's theme of 'visual sexual obsession' without once having to resort to the shorthand of 'sex addict' or 'sex addiction': L. R. Williams, 'Swing High, Swing Low', _Sight and Sound_ , 13:3 (2003), 32–3. 41 C. Lee, 'This Man is Addicted to Sex', _Newsweek_ , 5 December 2011. 42 See AFP, 'Sex Obsession in Venice with McQueen's "Shame" ', _The Independent_ , 5 September 2011: <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/sex-obsession-in-venice-with-mcqueens-shame-2349670.html>; A. O'Hehir, 'Interview: Steve McQueen Talks Naked Bodies and "Shame" ', Salon.com, 1 December 2011: <http://www.salon.com/2011/12/01/interview_steve_mcqueen_talks_naked_bodies_and_shame>; N. James, 'Sex and the City', _Sight & Sound_, 22:2 (2012), 34–8; and the British Film Institute and _Sight & Sound_ press conference and interviews (2011), all on: <http://explore.bfi.org.uk/4f4bb4e5126e3>. 43 _Shame_ (2011: Steve McQueen). 44 James, 'Sex and the City', 34. 45 C. Lee, 'Sex Addiction and the City', _Newsweek_ , 5 December 2011. 46 S. McQueen and A. Morgan, 'Shame' Script] (London, 2010), pp. 63, 70: [cbsla.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/shame_script.pdf; _Shame_ (2011: Steve McQueen). 47 _Shame_ (2011: Steve McQueen); McQueen and Morgan, 'Shame', pp. 5, 87. 48 _Shame_ (2011: Steve McQueen). The fact that McQueen repeats this imagery later in the film when Brandon fucks a woman from behind against a floor-to-ceiling window undermines the power of its first iteration: he was obviously attached to the image. 49 McQueen and Morgan, 'Shame', pp. 47–8; _Shame_ (2011: Steve McQueen). 50 McQueen and Morgan, 'Shame', p. 65. 51 Ibid., p. 66; _Shame_ (2011: Steve McQueen). 52 AFP, 'Sex Obsession in Venice'. 53 'Shame Press Conference', BFI London Film Festival, 2011: <http://explore.bfi.org.uk/4f4bb4e5126e3>. 54 McQueen and Morgan, 'Shame', p. 72; _Shame_ (2011: Steve McQueen). 55 McQueen and Morgan, 'Shame', pp. 1, 3, 9, 31, 79. 56 _Shame_ (2011: Steve McQueen). Or as the script puts it rather inelegantly: 'BRANDON banging the life out of HOTEL LOVER, doggy style, tits pressed up against the glass of the window': McQueen and Morgan, 'Shame', p. 70. 57 S. Sandhu, 'Shame', _Sight & Sound_, 22:2 (2012), 77. 58 L. Barnett, 'Shame: Sex Addicts Reveal All', _The Guardian_ , 10 January 2012: <http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/10/sex-addicts-talk>; P. French, 'Shame – Review', _The Observer_ , 15 January 2012: <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jan/15/shame-steve-mcqueen-fassbender-review>; Lee, 'Sex Addiction and the City'. 59 R. Weiss, 'Two New Sex Addiction Films: Are They Accurate?', _Counselor: The Magazine for Addiction Professionals_ , 8 October 2013: <http://blog.counselormagazine.com/2013/10/two-new-sex-addiction-films-are-they-accurate>. 60 Sandhu, 'Shame', 77. 61 _Diary of a Sex Addict_ (2001: Joseph Brutsman). The online reviewer FlickJunkie-2 concluded, 'This movie is the worst I have ever seen, a dubious distinction given the thousands of films I have viewed': <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253040>. 62 _I Am a Sex Addict_ (2006: Caveh Zahedi); Nathan Lee, 'The Fantasies and Failings of One Man', _The New York Times_ , 12 April 2006. 63 _Thanks for Sharing_ (2012: Stuart Blumberg). The film was made in 2012 but released in the US in 2013. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 R. Tucker, 'Dark Comedy Explores Sex Addiction in NYC', _New York Post_ , 14 September 2013: <http://nypost.com/2013/09/14/dark-comedy-explores-sex-addiction-in-nyc>; _Chelsea Lately_ , 'Interview with Gwyneth Paltrow', 16 September 2013. 67 _Thanks for Sharing_ (2012: Stuart Blumberg). 68 See, for example, A. W. Schaef, _Escape from Intimacy: Untangling the 'Love' Addictions: Sex, Romance, Relationships_ (New York, 1989). 69 R. Roper, ' "Thanks for Sharing" Makes You Care About Sex Addicts', Chicago Sun-Times.com, 19 September 2013: <http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/movies/22612401-421/thanks-for-sharing-makes-you-care-about-sex-addicts.html>. 70 M. O'Sullivan, ' "Thanks for Sharing" Movie Review', _The Washington Post_ , 20 September 2013: <http://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/thanks-for-sharing-movie-review/2013/09/18/99b514f6-1bd7-11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html>. 71 Weiss, 'Two New Sex Addiction Films'. 72 C. Palahniuk, _Choke: A Novel_ (New York, 2002), p. 205. 73 Ibid., pp. 16–17, 182, 213. 74 A. Salkin, 'No Sympathy for the Sex Addict', _The New York Times_ , 7 September 2008. 75 _A Dirty Shame_ (2004: John Waters). 76 Ibid. 77 B. French, 'Shame on You! A Conversation with _A Dirty Shame_ 's John Waters, Selma Blair, and Johnny Knoxville', _AMC Blogs_ , 23 September 2004: <http://blogs.amctv.com/movie-blog/2004/09/shame-on-you-a>. 78 Quoted in Salkin, 'No Sympathy for the Sex Addict'. 79 _Californication_ , Season 6, Episode 2: 'Quitters', 20 January 2013. 80 _Californication_ , Season 6, Episode 11: 'The Abby', 31 March 2013. 81 For reality TV, see the essays in S. Holmes and D. Jermyn (eds.), _Understanding Reality Television_ (London, 2004); M. Kavka, _Reality TV_ (Edinburgh, 2012); L. E. Edwards, _The Triumph of Reality TV: The Revolution in American Television_ (Santa Barbara, CA, 2013); B. R. Webber (ed.), _Reality Gendervision: Sexuality & Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television_ (Durham, NC, 2014). 82 D. Roy, 'Is Dr. Drew a Phony?', _Daily Beast_ , 17 December 2009: <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/12/17/i-am-a-sex-addict-and-i-play-one-on-tv.html>. 83 K. J. Rossi, 'Just a Girl... Sex Rehab', 13 December 2009: <http://kendrajaderossi.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/sex-rehab.html>. 84 E. McCombs, 'The Only Interview That Ever Made Me Blush', _xoJane_ , 24 January 2012: <http://www.xojane.com/sex/sex-rehab-phil-varone-sex-addict>. 85 W. Bauman, 'Exclusive Interview: Phil Varone Talks Sex Tapes, Politics and Rock n Roll', _Disarray Magazine_ , 23 July 2011: <http://www.disarraymagazine.com/2011/07/exclusive-interview-sex-tapes-politics.html>. 86 _Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew_ (2009). For an example of the porn crossover, with a click of the mouse one can view _Kendra Jade Rossi The Extreme Squirt_ Scene 1: <http://www.tube8.com/hardcore/kendra-jade-rossi-the-extreme-squirt-scene-1/1166781/>; or _Kendra Jade Fucked Up_ : <http://www.tube8.com/hardcore/kendra-jade-fucked-up/357272>. 87 G. Longstaff, 'From Reality to Fantasy: Celebrity, Reality TV and Pornography', _Celebrity Studies_ , 4:1 (2013), 71–80. 88 L. Grindstaff, _The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows_ (Chicago, 2002), esp. pp. 19–20, 115–16. 89 See M. Kavka and A. West, 'Temporalities of the Real: Conceptualising Time in Reality TV', in Holmes and Jermyn (eds.), _Understanding Reality Television_ , ch. 6. 90 R. Juzwiak, 'A Sex Rehab Primer With Jill Vermeire', _VH1+Shows_ , 30 October 2009: <http://blog.vh1.com/2009-10-30/a-sex-rehab-primer-with-jill-vermeire>. 91 <http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh89003011.html>. 92 M. Schisgal, _Sexaholics_ (New York, 1995), p. 24. 93 By the libraries at either the University of Auckland or the University of Melbourne, or in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. 94 In the respective catalogues of the Libraries of the University of Auckland and the University of Melbourne. 95 The problem is by no means limited to the library catalogue. In the introduction to _Mama's Boy_ (2012), author Roel van den Oever lists the sexual transgressions in _Portnoy's Complaint_ as 'masturbation and sex addiction': R. van den Oever, _Mama's Boy: Momism and Homophobia in Postwar American Culture_ (New York, 2012), p. 2. 96 V. A. Sadock, 'Sexual Addiction', in P. Ruiz and E. C. Strain (eds.), _Lowinson and Ruiz's Substance Abuse: A Comprehensive Textbook, Fifth Edition_ (Philadelphia, 2011), ch. 26, at p. 394. 97 _SBS Insight_ , Episode: 'Sex Addiction', 1 October 2013. 98 E. Jong, _Fear of Flying_ (New York, 2011), pp. 180, 213. First published in 1973. 99 E. Jong, _Any Woman's Blues_ (London, 1990), p. 3. 100 Ibid., p. 177. 101 Ibid., p. 99. 102 Ibid., p. 164. 103 J. M. Irvine, 'Reinventing Perversion: Sex Addiction and Cultural Anxieties', _Journal of the History of Sexuality_ , 5:3 (1995), 429–50, at 437. 104 D. Rickman, 'Erica Jong on Feminism, Sex Addiction and Why There is No Such Thing as a Zipless F**k', _The Huffington Post_ , 7 November 2011: <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/11/07/erica-jong-no-such-thing-as-zipless-fuck_n_1079222.html>.
# Chapter 5
Sexual Stories
I was a world-famous actor, single, in my early twenties, with money, too much free time, a big libido and a drinking problem. I don't think you need F. Scott Fitzgerald to make my story more clear.
Rob Lowe, 20141
In a press conference for _Shame_ Michael Fassbender observed that he, like most people, was introduced to the idea of sex addiction 'through celebrity stories'.2 Celebrity has certainly played a role in this familiarization. In 2011, for instance, the 'Celebrity Infidelity Examiner' for Examiner.com urged its claimed millions of online readers to attempt their own prognosis of Charlie Sheen's reported sexual activities:
Is Charlie Sheen... _really_ a sex addict, as many people are now beginning to suspect? Only a qualified medical professional can make an accurate diagnosis as to whether or not a person is addicted to sex. But anyone can look at a list of behaviors that are typical of sex addicts, and make an educated guess.3
An addiction workbook from the same year suggested that clients familiarize themselves with a case of a celebrity sex addict as a way of broaching the subject with those they envisaged as a support person.4 A. D. Burks's 2013 memoir of sex addiction got straight into celebrity name-dropping in his introduction when he asked the reader, 'TIGER WOODS, Patrick Dempsey, Kobe Bryant, George Michael, Ted Haggard, Eric Benet, and Jesse James. What do they all allegedly have in common?'5 The connection with celebrity also works for the spouses of sex addicts. Reese L. Yant's (a pseudonym – supposed to read as 'resilient') memoir of marriage to a sex addict, published in 2012, began with a prologue entitled 'What Sandra Bullock, Tea Leone, Elin Nordegren, and I have in Common'.6
Michael Douglas, David Duchovny, Russell Brand, Rob Lowe and of course Tiger Woods are the usual suspects when it comes to celebrity sex addicts (see Figure 9). In Matt Stone and Trey Parker's take on sex addiction in _South Park_ the celebrities in the 'Karne [Carnes?] Institute for Sexual Addiction' are Tiger Woods, Ben Roethlisberger (Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback: 'Don't screw girls in the public bathrooms?'), Bill Clinton ('Putting cigars in girls' vaginas'), Charlie Sheen ('Watching internet porn all day, every day'), David Duchovny ('Mr Duchovny, please stop jerking off!'), David Letterman ('having sex with employees') and Michael Douglas.7
Figure 9 'I Booked Myself into a Sex Addict Rehab Clinic.' Tom Scott cartoon, 2010. Reproduced by permission of Tom Scott.
But we could extend the list exponentially, and it will certainly be longer by the time this book goes to press. David Ley's disbelieving inventory includes South Africa's president Jacob Zuma, France's International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the former governor of New York Eliot Spitzer.8 All were accused by the media of being sex addicts. But we could add many others, in whose cases, sometimes without the slenderest of evidence, let alone any attempt at clinical justification, sexual activity of various kinds and intensity is lazily classified as sex addiction: the Boston Red Socks baseball star Wade Boggs in 1989, the 1990s mayor of the District of Columbia Marion Barry, the Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi, US Congressman Christopher Lee, the _Happy Days_ actor Scott Baio, the gay TV host and wedding planner David Tutera, the US Congressman Anthony Weiner and the boxer Mike Tyson.9 Arsenal and Germany's celebrity footballer Mesut Özil was a sex addict because he had dinner with a former Miss Venezuela.10 As we write, Abel Ferrara's film _Welcome to New York_ (2014), starring Gérard Depardieu as an obvious Strauss-Kahn stand-in, is described as a 'sex addiction film' and Depardieu as portraying a 'sex addict'.11
Take Tyson's memoirs, billed by the _New York Post_ as 'From Champ to Drug and Sex Addict'.12 There is a lot of sex in the book, mainly of the kind discussed later where success brings sexual access.
Once I started, I couldn't stop. I got too self-indulgent. I'd have ten women hanging out in my hotel room in Vegas. When I had to go down for the press conference, I'd bring one down and leave the rest in the room for when I was finished. Sometimes I'd get naked and put the championship belt on and have sex with a girl. Whenever there was a willing partner, I wanted to do it...After a while I put together a Rolodex of girls in different cities. I had my Vegas girls, my L.A. girls, my Florida girls, my Detroit girls. Oh, man, why would I want to do that?
I just went totally off the track...training hard and partying just as hard as I was training – drinking, fucking, and fighting with these women all night.13
Yet reputed sex addiction actually plays only a minor part in Tyson's story: his main dependencies were alcohol and drugs (cocaine principally). It was his anger-management counsellor Marilyn Murray who first suggested treatment for sex addiction given the boxer's sexual promiscuity and general attitude to women. Tyson attended the exclusive Wonderland rehabilitation facility in Los Angeles, which facilitated contact with a sex addiction therapist at Venice Beach who took him to thrice-weekly Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA) meetings there.14 In retrospect Tyson said that he had never considered himself to be a sex addict – 'Being the champ, I thought that having sex with all those women was just a perk' – but claimed benefit from the group therapy: 'I was getting a lot of life skills from those meetings.'15 His memoir carries the traces of his therapy and certainly uses the imagery of addiction:
Having all those girlfriends while I was married was like a drug in itself. And if I needed some more, I'd just walk down the street and women would throw themselves at me. I was a slave addicted to the chaos of celebrity. I wished I could stop it but I couldn't.16
'Pussy was like a drug to me. When I was trying to get pussy, there was no one more desperate than me on the face of the planet.'17 'I felt like I was in a hole and the more people I fucked the more despair I felt.'18 'I was using sex to get intimacy.'19 'My whole life I was looking for love from my mother.'20 But there are grounds for reader scepticism about the champion's commitment: 'One of the ways to break a sexual addiction, at least for me, was to be broke. If I didn't have any money, that shit wasn't fun anymore.'21
So it is curious that the evidential base for much reporting is very dubious and that some of the alleged addicts seem to have been in rehabilitation for alcohol or drugs rather than sex. This is in fact the case for two of the earliest alleged instances of celebrity sex addiction. Both Michael Douglas and Rob Lowe were admitted to the Sierra Tucson rehabilitation facility, which offered therapy for alcohol and sex addiction, although both have claimed that they were getting treatment just for alcohol abuse.22 Lowe claimed in his autobiography that despite being admitted to rehab for drinking issues the press, the _National Inquirer_ in particular, reported that he was a sex addict. Well known for his sexual (mis)adventures when younger, Lowe never once medicalized his past or referred to himself as having sex addiction – as this chapter's epigraph suggests. The press reports annoyed him 'because the sex addicts in the center have _much_ more interesting stories and treatments than my group of drinkers did'.23 Douglas may also have suffered at the hands of the press but was less forthright in defending himself – something that only fuelled the making of the myth. An article in _The Times_ in October 1992 claimed that Douglas's then-wife Diandra discovered him in bed with another woman and 'sent him to a sexaholic clinic'. The article went on to make the bold claim that 'In these past few days Michael Douglas may have done for sex addiction what Princess Diana did for bulimia months ago.' Neither went on record about suffering from their respective disorders. 'But the actor's deafening silence after tabloid newspapers reported that he had checked into a clinic for sexaholics and substance abusers has drawn attention to a previously taboo topic.' This same article noted that Lowe was 'another celebrity grateful to therapy for pulling him out of a cycle of drink and sex'.24
The 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton – what has become known in shorthand as the Clinton/Lewinsky affair – may have not been primarily about sex but it seemed to be, given the amount of private sexual detail that emerged in the public sphere: in print, on the Internet, on TV and radio. It was certainly a gift to academics: Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan's _Our Monica, Ourselves_ (2001) has chapters called 'The First Penis Impeached', 'The President's Penis' and 'Loose Lips'.25 _The Starr Report Disrobed_ (2000), by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, is a witty, brilliant dissection of the _Starr Report_ , the evidence produced against Clinton.26 The fact that the sexual activities of a president could become so central to US politics and be of such obsessive concern to the mass media speaks to the sexualization of modern Western society that forms the context to the subject matter of this book.27 Thus the literal political pornography of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, where the president's penis and semen (on Lewinsky's blue, Gap dress) were discussed publicly, when we heard about phone sex, oral sex in the White House bathroom and while the president was on the telephone, presidential masturbation and what happened to the president's cigar, and when deleted private emails of a sexual content and recorded phone conversations were recovered and used as evidence, collated in the published _Starr Report_ (named after the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr).28 Linda Williams has observed that 'watching politics in the late nineties' was almost like 'watching pornography in the early seventies'.29 As if to merge metaphor and materiality, porn movies appeared in 1998 on the Clinton/Lewinsky theme, including _Scenes from the Oral Office_ and _Deep Throat V: The Quest: Slick Willy Rides Again_ , with one scene where an intern is placed in a huge cocktail glass filled with jelly beans.30 Malti-Douglas has amusingly discussed ripples at the everyday level of consumer culture with the supermarket product 'Monica's Down On Your Knees Hot Sauce'.31
However, the interesting thing about all this academic musing, this intelligent comment and cultural critique, is that the issue of sex addiction was almost never raised. Clinton, despite the list of his indiscretions, was not described as a sex addict. The only mention in _Our Monica, Ourselves_ , and it was in passing, was in an analysis of Clinton represented as a 'white trash' president and in terms of a wider inability to control himself – a mere two pages.32 Sex addiction, Clinton's or anyone else's, it should be noted, is not referred to in the _Starr Report_.
The same cannot be said of more popular discourse. Here Clinton is indeed one of the celebrity names associated with this claimed sexual malady. Nigel Hamilton's biography _Bill Clinton: An American Journey: Great Expectations_ (2003) simply assumes the president's sexual addiction.33 The influential _Newsweek_ investigative journalist Michael Isikoff reported that he had been told by an alleged occasional sexual contact of Clinton that he had confessed his addiction to her in bed in a hotel room in 1988. She said that she was a sex addict at the time, attending a sex addicts' anonymous group, and raised the subject with him: 'Did you ever think _you_ were a sex addict?' He replied: 'I know I am – and I've tried to overcome it...But it's so hard. Women are everywhere, and for some reason they seem to want me.'34 The legal analyst and political commentator Jeffrey Toobin has claimed that long before the Lewinsky affair Isikoff had become convinced that Clinton was a 'sex addict...that virtually all of his problems stemmed from this vital flaw'.35 Later, in 2007, when former president Gerald Ford's off-the-record musings were published, the press seized on the Fords' conviction that Clinton was 'sick – he's got an addiction', 'I am convinced that Clinton has a sexual addiction.'36 Given Betty's (and therefore Gerald's) experiences with addiction, the Fords' observations were given more weight than they would have been if they had been proclaiming on many other subjects, and the issue of Clinton's sex addiction was revived again.37
There is evidence, then, that the theme of Clinton's sex addiction formed a strand of what Jeremy Varon has termed the media spectacle of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair.38 The therapists seized upon the moment. While not actually declaring him an addict, it is significant that Patrick J. Carnes and Kenneth M. Adams's _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ (2002), an edited primer of sex addiction treatment, cited this archetypal example of compartmentalizing and concealment. 'It would not be appropriate to make the determination that Clinton's behaviors indicate the presence of addiction', wrote Carnes and his co-author Marie Wilson; 'however, we are using this chain of events to illustrate an almost textbook example of one individual's complex process of denial and gradual disclosure'.39 This was a telling disclaimer. The power resides in the 'however' (why mention him in the first place?) that allows them to use Clinton as prototypical, although, as we will see of other celebrity cases studies, there is little to suggest that he was anything more than a powerful man whose status and position afforded him sexual access to a range of women. Somewhat less circumspectly and several years later, Susan Cheever noted in her own sex addiction memoir that Carnes – whom she interviewed for the book – 'testified for Paula Jones and thinks that Bill Clinton's sex addiction moved public acknowledgement of sex addiction forward more than a decade'.40
There was no hesitation in Jerome D. Levin's _The Clinton Syndrome: The President and the Self-Destructive Nature of Sexual Addiction_ (1998), a study by a psychotherapeutic expert in alcoholism and substance abuse.
Clinton's background as a child of addiction predisposed him biologically and socially to an addiction of his own. I will demonstrate that his sexual proclivities over a lifetime were expansive and developed the strength and persistence of a habit. Finally, I will illustrate that there were specific stresses in the president's life shortly before his alleged involvement with Monica Lewinsky that made him highly vulnerable to acting out once again his sexually addictive behavior.41
Clinton's sexual activity served as 'a paradigm of sexually addictive behavior'.42 Levin contended that Clinton's (publicly reported) sexual history fulfilled his seven criteria of indicative sex addiction: (1) compulsion, (2) drive, (3) lack of control, (4) persistence, (5) damage, (6) societal disapproval and (7) acceleration.43 The syndrome of sex addiction becomes the Clinton syndrome.
Levin's study was based not on clinical consultation of the subject of his diagnosis – though he did draw on a practice file of anonymous troubled patients that comprised a large part of the book – but rather on biographies and newspaper and magazine reports (we loop back to the previous chapter on cultural representation). Nor did it strictly conform to his seven-point diagnosis. Clinton's addiction was presented as a strange combination of genetics and environment, what Levin termed 'bio-psycho-social determinants', with his alcohol- and gambling-dependent parents passing on their 'neurochemistry' to their sons (resulting in sex addiction for Bill and drug addiction for his brother), and his relentless pursuit of women a quest to 'reconnect with his mother'.44 Then his actions merely confirmed Levin's diagnosis. How else could one explain the reckless sexual antics? 'No man in his right mind would risk the presidency and everything he had worked so hard for to engage in a meaningless sexual encounter – unless he was caught up in a sexual addiction.'45 It was not a high point in the history of US psychotherapeutic theory.
Rick Springfield's memoir, published in 2010, detailed a life full of sexual liaisons, starting early in his teens and continuing on during his marriage to the woman he never stopped referring to as his soul mate and the true love of his life (to whom he is still married). From the very beginning of what was a long (although not uninterrupted) career in pop/rock music Springfield had 'as much groupie sex as my road-worn penis could handle'. 'I have been as promiscuous as women have allowed me to be in my life. And I thank the worn-and-torn skin of my weary dick that they want it as much as I do.'46 Sex was part of his definition of success. At one point he said, 'I am as driven sexually as I am career-driven' and that 'what it's really about' is 'being in a career I'm passionate about...and having sex with lots of strangers'.47 But at no point in this memoir of a life and career of ups and downs did Springfield call himself a sex addict or seek therapy for sex addiction. He occasionally used the language of addictionology in referring to his 'habit' of casual sex or pondering the fact 'It's a hard drug to quit cold turkey, this sex thing' – but his larger perspective and interpretative framework produced another narrative.48
Springfield's was not only a memoir about sex but, perhaps most importantly, it was a memoir about mental illness and depression. He referred repeatedly to the/my Darkness – his depression – and revealed that he attempted suicide as a teenager because of it. Sex became a way of alleviating his fear of failure and deep-seated self-esteem issues. But Springfield did not attempt to absolve himself of blame or responsibility for his sexual behaviour (when he was cheating on a girlfriend, for example) because of this depression. He was insightful enough to know and tell us that this came – if you wanted it – with celebrity. 'Looking back, sometimes I'm amazed at my disconnect. But possibly my behavior can be excused, for a short while at least, based on the "kid in a candy store" defense.'49 Springfield's memoir detailed his various attempts at therapy – 'so I can try to work out a solution to my disloyal behavior' – but these did not take him down the sex addiction route either.50 In a more strident clarification he stated that 'The sexual issue had also become a habit just because I'd been doing it for so long. I never felt better from it, or higher, or less depressed, I just did it because it was "what I did." '51 But when Springfield ended his memoir (he was in his early sixties) by saying 'The habit of a sexual path is as powerful as any habit. And I picked up a hell of a habit', it was apparent that his choice of words could open up the (re)interpretation of his story to those with vested interests.52 The Colorado Sexual Recovery Centre's website headlined with 'Rick Springfield Opens Up about Sex Addiction' and _The Huffington Post_ wrote similarly with a story on his 'Decades-Long Battle with Depression and Sex Addiction'.53 Interestingly, Springfield told one reporter that although it was not an over-exaggeration to describe sex addiction as part of his life – it was clear that this reporter and others were doing just that – 'I don't use that word in the book because it's not to me, it's just my sexual issue...I wasn't addicted to sex...it was a habit that I fell into as a young musician.'54
In contrast, Russell Brand was indeed treated for sex addiction in the KeyStone Center in Philadelphia in 2005. Fame – Springfield's 'kid in a candy store' – became, in Brand's words, 'a Wonka ticket to a lovely sex factory'.55 But despite an admission or diagnosis of sex addiction in Brand's case, it is unclear whether this treatment was a bid for career publicity or part of his comedy act. One diary entry, written during his stay there, stated that he had to write 'a victim's list – a litany of the women I've wronged as a result of my sexual addiction. I feel like Saddam Hussein trying to pick out individual Kurds.'56 In fact Brand made the career value of the rehab experience very clear by claiming that he wrote his daily diary 'in the sort of style which suggests I knew that a couple of years later I'd be reading it out in front of a live audience (which I did when I did a stand-up show called "Better Now") and a couple of years after that transcribing it into my autobiography'.57 The outcome was that when Brand embarked on the book-signing tour for the memoir that contained details of his sex addiction, he seized on it as an opportunity for further sexual excess:
I am not proud of the morality employed during this indulgent time but one has to marvel at the efficiency. This operation travelled all over the world and effortlessly assimilated into any culture it encountered, New York, Sydney, Hull – it was all the same: wristbands issued, rooms filled with women in their dozens, day after day...it was a one-man, multi-woman sex epidemic.58
Brand's memoirs are an interesting mix of admissions of self-destruction via drugs and sex, and irreverent satire about the notion of addiction to the latter. Although he would admit to a degree of self-diagnosis of sex addiction, his main problem was with drug abuse, the sexual excess usually part and parcel of that. Like Springfield, he also had a history of depression and self-harm.59 His management convinced him to enter rehab in the first place as they saw his career (or, rather, earning capacity) threatened, so one takes his signing of a celibacy contract and its admissions of powerlessness over sexual behaviour with a grain of salt; especially when he later tells us that 'To this day, I feel a fierce warmth for women that have the same disregard for the social conventions of sexual protocol as I do.'60 Nonetheless, the linkage between celebrity and sex addiction (however spurious) has been an important means of publicizing the concept. So too have the memoirs of non-celebrity sex addicts.
There has been a steady increase in the publication of non-celebrity memoirs. Sex addiction is not just for celebrities – handy though that has been for publicity – and not just for those who can afford fancy treatment facilities. These sex addiction memoirs have ranged from the self-published (sometimes illiterate) ramblings of first-time authors to the well-written accounts of accomplished (or at least previously published) novelists and journalists.61 The memoirs represent the rearguard of the sex addiction movement and are part of what Trysh Travis has called 'the territory of recovery-infused popular culture'.62 Anyone can buy a memoir or use a workbook and spread the word. And given the estimate that at least 10 per cent of Americans are sex addicts and the role of their codependent spouses (where they have them) in 'enabling' the 'disease', then the potential market is huge. The dominance of Twelve-Step programmes in the addiction industry has worked in favour of a proliferation of people willing to tell their stories: Step 12 involves an obligation that 'Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other sex addicts and to practice these principles in our lives.'63 Training to become a therapist or writing a memoir can be seen as fulfilling part of this duty.
The non-celebrity chronicles are more than just personal accounts made public in the spirit of altruism; they are harnessed to another machine – the therapy industry. While they might start as individual confessions with redemption as the goal, they actually function (as do the vignettes in more official texts) as unofficial, self-help guides to others, 'cautionary tales of sexual peril' in the service of 'healthy sexuality', and evangelical voices of sex addiction discourse.64 Clearly written after experiencing Twelve-Step programmes for sex addiction, these books have adopted the language of addictionology, associating sex with the pursuit of the next 'high' or 'fix', 'that love-heroin sex-saturated hit'.65 'The amazing thing is how any addict ever stops using before he dies. The substance I used was human beings'; Michael Ryan's memoir is unambiguous, his framework is clear, 'I took out a yellow pad and wrote down what they call in twelve-step programs for sex addiction "bottom-line behavior" – behavior driven by shame and producing shame.'66 'Thanks to a twelve-step program for love junkies, I have stayed clear of obsessive harmful relationships for more than two years', wrote Rachel Resnick at the start of an account of those very relationships.67 Kelly Boykin claimed sex as her drug, 'just as meth is to an addict'.68 Jake Porter made a similar assertion: as 'marijuana is the gateway to narcotics...porn is the gateway to sex addiction...After I started watching X-rated videos, looking at an issue of _Playboy_ was like a heroin junkie smoking a joint.'69 L. J. Schwartz compared his sex addiction with alcoholism: 'I would have traded my disease for theirs. They only had to stop drinking. I had the "keeper", the ultimate disease.'70 (Tim Robbins's character espouses the same sentiment in the film _Thanks for Sharing_ , which we discussed in the previous chapter, and it is a sentiment directly from the sex addiction literature.) As Helen Keane has argued, this strategy of analogizing sex addiction with alcoholism and drug addiction represented a bold claim for its existence as a biological disorder, but the language of the memoirs, like the therapists' texts, 'demonstrates a move back to a metaphorical level of meaning'.71
As well as employing the language of addictionology many of the memoirs encourage an interactive and intertextual dimension in the service of therapy. Sue William Silverman's memoir morphed continuously with the addiction workbooks she was given in therapy; we (the reader) attend Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings with her, and she includes a copy of a questionnaire aimed to determine whether the 'user' is a sex addict.72 The referential mode continued with _The Sex Addiction Workbook_ (2003) and other therapeutic texts promoting Silverman's work.73 After terminating her marriage to a sex addict, Emma Dawson gained degrees in social work and published her memoir _My Secret Life with a Sex Addict_ (2001), which doubled as a therapeutic text, with exercises at the end of each chapter and textbook discussions peppered throughout.74 Yant, also the wife of a sex addict, used her memoir to perform a wider purpose – to help identify the 'co-addict'. 'Do you sometimes look at other families, imagine that they are "normal", and wish your relationship could be happy like theirs?', 'Do you withdraw emotionally, have your mind on other things during sex, or feel empty afterwards?', she asked. These leading questions were then coupled with material taken from her research into addiction, referencing websites, their questionnaires and other intertextual interludes.75 Peter Pelullo recounted and paraphrased his visits to specialists and therapists, and quoted directly from brochures on addiction and child abuse.76
The memoirs might be windows into the subjectivities of sex addicts but they have provided anything but clarity in defining sex addiction as a concept. Cheever's memoir doubled as a research text. She interviewed specialists in the field, and clearly hoped to deliver insight into sex addiction alongside her own personal revelations. Yet she did not really seem to be a sex addict and nor did she offer any meaningful definition of the 'disorder'. Cheever embraced the addictionologist's tendency to detect addicts everywhere: 'Every day there are stories about sex and love addiction in the newspaper, but they are rarely reported that way.'77 Her famous father, the writer John Cheever, was, of course, retrospectively (and posthumously) classified as a sex addict.78
The sheer variety of sexual behaviours deemed problematic in the memoirs represents the conceptual vagaries and diagnostic inclusivity inherent in the idea of sex addiction, as well as its growing influence on the public imagination. They have ranged from tales of adolescent 'promiscuity', a previously undersexed serviceman's anxiety over his use of prostitutes, authors with high sex drives and relationship breakdowns, right through to the more extreme and unsettling memoirs of childhood sexual abuse that, it was claimed, led to later years spent in compulsive sexual behaviour.79 Kelly Boykin was molested by her father from the age of three and found herself pondering whether she was a sex addict given her pronounced enjoyment of casual sex in adulthood. Although she decided she was a sex addict ' _because_ of the abuse', she also asked, less certainly, 'I'm a full-grown adult. Shouldn't I have the freedom to make those choices without feeling like I'm losing a battle? Maybe I'm just not clear in my definition of sex addict versus consensual sex between willing partners.'80
Interestingly, of the more than thirty accounts covered here, some cannot strictly be called sex addiction memoirs because their authors include no such admission or employment of the label. Their sexual behaviour has been deemed of interest by those behind the workings of search engines or book classification/retail websites for those seeking 'sex addiction memoirs' because it involved explicit and usually casual acts or personal anxieties (both sexual and non-sexual), or because their authors had other addictions (and lots of sex!).81 Krissy Kneen's erotic memoir covered her bisexuality, obsessive sexual thoughts, casual sexual encounters, crushes, love of Internet porn and frequent masturbation. It was a largely positive account of her sexual self, not a diatribe against disorder or problems with self-control. When her friend called her a sex addict – the only time in the entire work that this was mentioned – she was somewhat at a loss: 'I feel myself unpicked; and when I am seamless there is nothing left of me but sex. I have been pathologized.'82 But Kneen's insight into this process has been the exception. 'In the threatening world constituted by sex addiction texts', Keane has argued, 'sexual experimentation and exploration outside monogamous coupledom is perilous, even lethal, and a search for sexual excitement can only lead to heartbreak, shame, and sickness'.83
Unlike many claimed medical disorders, sex addiction has self-diagnosis as an important strand. Many sex addicts have been either self-defined or labelled as such by offended partners or loved ones. Ricki Lake's feature on female sex addicts began each section with the worried complaint of a friend or family member ('My daughter's a sex addict and I am very afraid for her life'). That was the format: first the concerned loved one, then the alleged sex addict.84 In his memoir Ryan Capitol recommended reading books by Patrick Carnes 'for any of those people who are having the feelings of a significant other who is controlling in bed, or if that same person spends more time alone than with others'.85
Does your partner spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about sex? Has your relationship been damaged by his sexual activities? Are there times when his sexual urges, thoughts or images seem to control him? If so, he – or she – may not be merely an untrustworthy cad but an addict in need of psychiatric help.
That was the opening of an article in Britain's newspaper _The Guardian_ in 2003, which ended with links to sex addiction treatment organizations and therapists.86
Even a superficial glance at the various published case studies of claimed sex addiction indicates that amateur diagnosis has been a significant factor in this blurred area between medicine and popular culture. When the journalist Laura Barnett asked recovering 'sex addicts' about the film _Shame_ there was little hesitation in their diagnoses. 'The film never states directly that it's about _sex_ addiction, but it very clearly is', said Richard, aged 56, who had attended SAA for five years. 'The film's title is incredibly accurate. I've struggled with sex addiction for many years; I finally sought help last year, and now I have a huge sense of shame about the things I've done', stated Stephen, aged 61. Sarah, aged 38, another member of SAA, thought that there were several sex addicts in the film. Brandon's sister Sissy was 'pretty much a classic sex addict'. 'Then there are the women Brandon sleeps with: I'm not saying they're all sex addicts, but none of them is displaying healthy sexual behaviour.'87
Many of the examples given by the clinical psychologist Ley in his critique of sex addiction refer to relatives – husbands, wives, a mother – who first raised the possibility that their loved one's perceived, problematic sexual practices were those of a sex addict.88 Hence Tom's wife Christie's response to his homosexual cruising at adult bookstores: 'That's addiction, right? He's addicted to this, to going to these creepy places and having sex.'89 Thus Jason's second wife's proclamation that he 'was a sex addict', and Cheryl's husband Phil's anxiety 'that her infidelity was sign of sex addiction'.90
As noted in Chapter 3, sex addiction has included partners as well as addicts and has thus generated another literature of guides for co-addicts, some of which have been published by Carnes's Gentle Path Press.91 The commercial potential of sex addiction has increased with its therapeutic extension to include the partners (and families) of sex addicts. There are no innocent bystanders in the sex addiction business, rather codependents, enablers, or victims of post-traumatic stress. The logic is that 'two sick people' find each other – the sex addict and the co-addict – and that they need separate therapy for their own diseases. Then, because there is no cure for their disease, 'the best he or she can hope for is remission. Remission, as with cancer, is achieved when there are no longer any relapses.'92 Dawson's memoir _My Life with a Sex Addict_ 'provide[s] special focus on the plight of the partner of the sexual addict' and helps readers ascertain whether they too may be 'collaborating in an emotionally abusive relationship with a sex addict'.93 Such enabling or 'collaboration' includes 'high stress in the home', 'denying there is anything wrong', 'increasing financial problems', 'alibis, excuses, and justification to others' and 'unusual dreams'.94 Yant also 'learned' at couples' counselling sessions (following her husband's admission of sex addiction) 'that I was responding as a classic co-sex addict'.95
Although therapists Barbara Steffens and Marsha Means have critiqued the notion of the co-addict and called for a 'paradigm shift' in the labelling of the addict's partner, they did not question the seriousness of sex addiction and have endorsed both the efficacy of the Twelve-Step programme and the usual therapy options. For them, the suffering of the spouses of addicts was best treated as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).96 This was what Maurita Corcoran was diagnosed with. She found it difficult to deal with her anger after discovering her husband had cheated on her during the entirety of their fourteen-year marriage and – at the insistence of her husband (!!) and therapist – began a serious journey of 'spiritual and emotional recovery'. This saw her attending AA meetings for spouses (there were no SA meetings in her area or even in existence that she was aware of) two or three times a week for the first three years of her recovery, attending at least two expensive in-treatment programmes, and joining eight retreats.97 When she attended The Meadows treatment facility for a five-week, in-patient programme she found herself subjected to drug and blood tests, and was admitted to their 'acute care' division.98 Whether as co-addiction or PTSD, what these approaches have in common is their insistence on the reality of the sexual disorder being experienced. Whether suffering from co-addiction or stress, partners find themselves requiring psychological and physical help. And whatever the model, the sex addiction therapy industry is there to administer that help.
Historians may be sceptical, but a perceived condition, once located by those who believe in its aetiology and the possibility of its cure, can then be treated by experts who also believe in its existence. As Stephen B. Levine has expressed it, 'Whatever the concerns about the validity of the concept of sexual addiction, the diagnosis is well rooted in the public's mind and has seeming clarity for individuals and institutions that provide treatment.' The concept, therefore, was 'useful'.99 A more critical response to the phenomenon might be to think in terms of what Robert Aronowitz has termed 'feedback loops between consumers and producers'. Once a type of behaviour was assessed as a medical problem in a consumer society, it could unleash highly profitable 'consumer-oriented health restoring responses'. 'These responses', wrote Aronowitz, 'have their own economy shaped by the perceived needs of the addicted as well as the actions of the promoters of different programs, health care professionals, and third party payers'.100 Aronowitz was referring to the more general framing of addiction as a health problem, and had in mind video-poker addiction, but sex addiction has drawn on sexual consumerism as well as medical consumerism – a potent combination.
Keane (with Michel Foucault in mind) has commented perceptively on the inner contradictions of sex addiction. It is a discourse that speaks sex while condemning so many aspects of that sex. 'Rather than repressing sexual expression...sex addiction encourages individuals to develop a habit of obsessive attentiveness to their sexual desires.'101 'Part of my journey to healing was through journaling', wrote Boykin in her memoir _Confessions of a Sex Addict_ ; 'Because I had already labeled myself a sex addict, I initially wrote about the sex act, itself. I guess I thought it was "cool" to write about all the sex I was having.'102 Yet, as Keane has argued, the concern has been with surface appearances and shallow meanings – there was no attempt to engage with the deeper connotations of sexual desire and interaction. Boykin attempted to deconstruct the sex addict identity she had taken for herself: 'I realized that the labels we put on ourselves are actually self-fulfilling prophecies and only serve to perpetuate the negative thoughts we all carry around. I've been calling myself a sex addict because I say I'm addicted to sex.'103 But she failed to question classic addictionology: 'In actuality, I'm addicted to the euphoric responses I get _during_ sex. It's not the act alone, it's the release of endorphins that fuels me. I like the "happy rush" I get. That's the "drug" I'm addicted to.'104 In Keane's words, 'Sexual behavior is reduced to a cipher.'105
However, there is another side to the 'obsessive attentiveness' to sexual detail that Keane noted. The non-celebrity memoirs offer something quite at odds with their central premise of eliciting sympathy and offering hope and redemption for those suffering the disorder of sex addiction: pornographic prose almost as explicit as anything on the market.106 These sexual stories dwell on the sexual exploits that led their authors to seek therapy in the first place. Ryan's elegant _Secret Life_ contains descriptions of what he wanted to do to a friend's 15-year-old daughter, disturbing details of his molestation at the age of five, his longing for his sister's friend Sharon, his secret touching of a classmate Sheila, sex in the toilet with Sally, and persistent paperboy fantasies.107 Boykin, also a victim of childhood sexual abuse, repeatedly described the beauty of a lover's penis, revealed to the reader (and an undisclosed number of other 'readers' via her online diary) when she was 'horny as hell' – 'I have to fight the urge to fuck almost anyone with a dick' – and then thanked those readers 'who sent me offers...much appreciated'.108 Resnick's less than elegant _Love Junkie_ – 'when the second Magnum condom breaks' – recounted numerous sexual fantasies, rough sex during menstruation, urolagnia and group sex.109 Even her first sex addiction meeting was sexualized; she became fixated on one of the men in the programme and had sex with a woman whom she met in a 'support group for love junkies' – which occasioned further descriptions of lesbian sex.110 (Susan Cheever said such behaviour was known as 'thirteenth-stepping': experienced addicts taking advantage of newcomers to take them beyond the Twelve Steps.111) Silverman's _Love Sick_ lured the reader through adulterous hotel-room encounters, sex with the unnamed driver of a red Corvette, and her continuing sexual obsession with an ancillary staff member at the addiction clinic.112 The sex addict's memoir relives the sexual history that led them to the very therapy and redemption that the memoir itself is supposed to serve. Jesse Fink said that his memoir was a 'cautionary tale of how many men use online-dating sites as vagina catalogues'.113 Fink, a published journalist and 'undiagnosed sex addict', told a sad tale of love lost and the search to find it again, but like the memoirists cited earlier filled his account with graphic sexual descriptions.114 He lost count of the number of women he had sex with: 'It all went by so fast', it was 'a zoetrope of female body parts'.115
Although many (but not all) of the memoirs have started from some sort of trauma or abuse, their tendency to explicit retellings of sexual encounters crosses into pornographic territory, or perhaps more accurately, shows us the degree to which sex and pornography have become mainstreamed in Western culture. These sexual representations are also part of what Travis has aptly called the 'promiscuous print culture' that has propelled 'recovery' into becoming a mainstream commodity.116
Yet the irony of sex addiction's place in the world of commercial sex seems lost on the purveyors of the various sex addiction programmes. 'Spending your money on sex supports the sex industry...The sex industry may be the largest money empire in the world. Your contributions are making it even richer and more powerful', opined the authors of _The Sex Addiction Workbook_ (2003); 'You are making prostitutes and strippers out of people who could and would do something else for a living if they had a reasonable choice. You are paying people to risk their health so you can get some sexual kicks.'117 They do not mention their role in the empire. Addiction rehabilitation can cost from $7,500 to $120,000 a month depending on the quality of the amenities.118 Celebrity is a conscious marketing tool for 'High Profile and Celebrity Rehab Centers': Cirque Lodge in Utah (Kirsten Dunst and Lindsay Lohan), Passages in Malibu (David Hasselhoff and Stephen Baldwin), Crossroads in Antigua (Colin Farrell and Britney Spears).
When management circumstances are deterring you or someone close to you from getting care for a problem with substance abuse or behavioral addiction, executive rehabilitation treatments will be invaluable. By pairing excellent drug abuse and behavioral addiction treatments with the freedom of occasional computer and mobile access, a businessman or woman can receive assistance while keeping relatively 'plugged in'.
Frequently, modern substance abuse and behavioral addiction centers provide the excellent amenities one would only expect to find in exquisite hotels, with your enjoyment and well-being being the biggest goals. From fine linens and gym facilities to private rooms and 5-star chef-prepared meals, you can get the top-rated drug abuse and behavioral addiction treatment for yourself or someone close to you while enjoying the surroundings. If you need a hand in searching for the best-rated luxury treatment for celebrities and other high-profile types, dial our no-charge helpline as soon as you're able.119
Tiger Woods is said to have spent £40,000 on his six-week sex addiction treatment, and it can cost several thousand dollars just to be assessed and 'evaluated' at Pine Grove in Mississippi, where he was treated.120 Wonderland, the Hollywood drug and alcohol addiction treatment centre for celebrities that also arranges therapy for sexual addiction, charged $48,000 and $58,000 per month respectively for shared and single rooms in 2008 when the boxer Tyson was a client.121 Ley has demonstrated the large amounts of money involved in sex addiction treatment, seminars, workshops and various self-help resources.122
Sex addiction, then, is the sexual codependent of the sexualized society that its supposed sufferers so vociferously denounce. It is no coincidence that in the early days of the Sexual Addiction Self Test potential testees had to run a web-page gauntlet between links to pornography sites. As one sex addictionologist put it rather primly, 'one can only imagine the results of an Internet search when the keywords cybersex _and addiction_ are entered...[m]any of the hits were contrary to promoting recovery'.123 Sex and shame have such an enduring relationship that it was easy to popularize the concept of sex addiction. As a concept characterized by certain moral definitions of 'normal' sexual behaviour, there are the emotional concomitants of guilt and shame for those who transgress those confines. And we want to hear and read about sex, especially its excesses and 'disorders': redemption for some and titillation for others. Like the paradox of pornography – where condemnation is to represent repeatedly the subject of denunciation – treating these 'problems' is to participate in the vilified 'pornographication' of society, referred to earlier, of which sexual addiction is an integral part.124 The financial incentives of both the therapy industry and the wider sexualization of Western culture have fed into and continue to feed the growth of sex addiction as a construct. Billions of dollars are spent on the representation of sex and emphasis on sex as pleasurable to human experience, and this is refracted in the millions spent on creating and treating the disorders allegedly wrought by this experience. The psychotherapist Marty Klein, a long-term critic of the concept of sex addiction, has referred to the voyeurism surrounding the lives of alleged celebrity sex addicts and the confessions of 'recovering sex addicts' as 'Our Addiction to Tiger Woods' "Sex Addiction".'125 We all like sexual stories.
## Notes
1 R. Lowe, _Love Life_ (Sydney, 2014), Ebook, loc. 1173. 2 'Shame Press Conference', BFI London Film Festival, 2011: <http://explore.bfi.org.uk/4f4bb4e5126e3>. 3 R. Houston, 'Is Charlie Sheen a Sex Addict like Tiger Woods and Jesse James? Check This List', Examiner.com, 8 March 2011: <http://www.examiner.com/article/is-charlie-sheen-a-sex-addict-like-tiger-woods-and-jesse-james-check-this-list>. Emphasis in original. 4 W. M. Edwards, D. Delmonico and E. Griffin, _Cybersex Unplugged: Finding Sexual Health in an Electronic World_ (Lexington, KY, 2011), p. 26. 5 A. D. Burks, _Sex & Surrender: An Addict's Journey_ (Houston, TX, 2013), Ebook, loc. 85. Emphasis in original. 6 R. L. Yant, _Pants on Fire: Leaving My Marriage to a Sex Addict and the Journey Back to Me_ (Milwaukee, WI, 2012), Ebook, loc. 50. 7 _South Park_ , Season 14, Episode 1: 'Sexual Healing', 17 March 2010. 8 D. J. Ley, _The Myth of Sex Addiction_ (Lanham, MD, 2012), pp. 113, 143, 181. 9 S. Rea, 'Some Names for Sawyer's "60 Minutes" Spot', Philly.com _The Philadelphia Inquirer_ ], 4 February 1989: <http://articles.philly.com/1989-02-04/news/26152284_1_mark-mcewen-diane-sawyer-wade-boggs>; M. Specter, 'Marion Barry Airing His Vices: On Sally Jessy Raphael, the Ex-Mayor Tells of Sex Addiction', _The Washington Post_ , 14 May 1991; J. Follain, 'Berlusconi Urged to Attend Clinic for Sex Addiction', _The Sunday Times_ , 23 August 2009: <http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/article182750.ece>; D. Moore and B. Manville, 'Addictions & Answers: Is Ex-Congressman Christopher Lee a Sex Addict?', _New York Daily News_ , 24 February 2011: [http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/addictions-answers-ex-congressman-christopher-lee-sex-addict-article-1.134239; no author, 'Former Sex Addict Scott Baio Plans Tell-All Book', Starpulse.com, 9 February 2012: <http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2012/02/09/former_sex_addict_scott_baio_plans_tel>; C. Sieczkowski, 'TV Host Sex Addiction?', _The Huffington Post_ , 2 May 2013: <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/tv-host-sex-addiction-david-tutera_n_3201935.html>; S. Clark, 'Anthony Weiner May Suffer from Sex Addiction & Needs Professional Help', Hollywood Life.com, 24 July 2013: <http://hollywoodlife.com/2013/07/24/anthony-weiner-may-suffer-from-sex-addiction-needs-professional-help>; M. Callahan, 'From Champ to Drug and Sex Addict: Tyson Tells All', _New York Post_ , 27 October 2013: <http://nypost.com/2013/10/27/mike-tyson-reveals-drug-and-sex-addictions-in-new-memoir>. 10 Azeem, 'Shocking: Perez Accuses Ozil of Being a Sex Addict and Obsessed With Women', Mixture Sport.com, 9 September 2013: <http://www.mixturesport.com/shocking-perez-accuses-ozil-of-being-a-sex-addict-and-obsessed-with-women>; no author, 'Aida Yespica (ex Miss Venezuela) Says She Never Had Sex with Arsenal's Mesut Özil', 101 Great Goals.com, 11 September 2013: <http://www.101greatgoals.com/blog/aida-yespica-ex-miss-venezuela-says-she-never-had-sex-with-arsenals-mesut-ozil-sportmediaset>. 11 X. Brooks, 'Cannes 2014 Review: Welcome to New York – Depardieu's Grunting Triumph Exposes More Than Just Himself', _The Guardian_ , 18 May 2014: <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/18/welcome-to-new-york-review-gerard-depardieu-abel-ferrera-cannes>; Reuters, 'Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Sue Over Gérard Depardieu Sex Addiction Film', _The Guardian_ , 19 May 2014: <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/19/dominique-strauss-kahn-sues-sex-addiction-film-gerard-depardieu>. 12 Callahan, 'From Champ to Drug and Sex Addict'. 13 M. Tyson with L. Sloman, _Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography_ (London, 2013), Ebook, locs. 2037–42. 14 For Wonderland, see A. Fortini, 'Letter from West Hollywood: Special Treatment: The Rise of Luxury Rehab', _The New Yorker_ , 1 December 2008. 15 Tyson with Sloman, _Undisputed Truth_ , loc. 6977. 16 Ibid., locs. 5281–4. 17 Ibid., loc. 7000. 18 Ibid., loc. 7013. 19 Ibid., loc. 7024. 20 Ibid., loc. 7028. 21 Ibid., loc. 7045. 22 For reference to Douglas's claims that these reports were inaccurate and that he sought help for his drinking, see J. Serjeant, 'David Duchovny's Sex Disorder Likened to Alcoholism', _Reuters_ , 29 August 2008: <http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/08/29/us-duchovny-idUSN2835847820080829>. 23 R. Lowe, _Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography_ (New York, 2011), p. 254. 24 S. Ellicott, 'Addicts or Adulterers; Sexaholic', _The Times_ , 4 October 1992. 25 L. Berlant and L. Duggan (eds.), _Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest_ (New York, 2001). See also the essay by M. St. John, 'How to Do Things with the _Starr Report_ : Pornography, Performance, and the President's Penis', in L. Williams (ed.), _Porn Studies_ (Durham, NC, 2004), pp. 27–49. 26 F. Malti-Douglas, _The Starr Report Disrobed_ (New York, 2000). 27 See Malti-Douglas's wider discussion of the merging of sex and politics in the Clinton period: F. Malti-Douglas, _Partisan Sex: Bodies, Politics, and the Law in the Clinton Era_ (New York, 2009). 28 P. Kuntz (ed.), _The Starr Report: The Evidence_ (New York, 1998). There are also various online versions. 29 L. Williams, 'Epilogue', in her _Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the 'Frenzy of the Visible'_ (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999), pp. 280–315, quote at p. 280. 30 St. John, 'How to Do Things with the _Starr Report_ ', p. 38; S. Weil Davis, 'The Door Ajar: The Erotics of Hypocrisy in the White House Scandal', in Berlant and Duggan (eds.), _Our Monica, Ourselves_ , ch. 5, esp. pp. 90–4. 31 Malti-Douglas, _Partisan Sex_ , pp. 110, 120–3. 32 M. McElya, 'Trashing the Presidency: Race, Class, and the Clinton/Lewinsky Affair', in Berlant and Duggan (eds.), _Our Monica, Ourselves_ , ch. 9, esp. pp. 165–6. 33 N. Hamilton, _Bill Clinton: An American Journey: Great Expectations_ (New York, 2003), pp. 435, 437, 451. 34 M. Isikoff, _Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story_ (New York, 2000), p. 242. 35 J. Toobin, _A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President_ (New York, 1999), p. 33. 36 T. M. DeFrank, _Write It When I'm Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford_ (New York, 2007), pp. 148, 149. 37 Of many examples, see E. Henry, 'Book: Ford Feared Cheney Was GOP Liability, Called Clinton Sex Addict', CNN Politics.com, 29 October 2007: <http://edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/10/29/ford.book>. 38 J. Varon, 'It Was the Spectacle Stupid: The Clinton-Lewinsky-Starr Affair and the Politics of the Gaze', in P. Apostolidis and J. A. Williams (eds.), _Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals_ (Durham, NC, 2004), pp. 232–58. 39 P. J. Carnes and M. Wilson, 'The Sexual Addiction Assessment Process', in P. J. Carnes and K. M. Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ (New York, 2002), ch. 1, quote at p. 8. 40 S. Cheever, _Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction_ (New York, 2008), p. 66. 41 J. D. Levin, _The Clinton Syndrome: The President and the Self-Destructive Nature of Sexual Addiction_ (Rocklin, CA, 1998), p. 5. 42 Ibid., p. 6. 43 Ibid., ch. 2. 44 Ibid., pp. 54, 64, 89, 90, 101. Quotes at pp. 64, 101. 45 Ibid., p. 100. 46 R. Springfield, _Late, Late at Night: A Memoir_ (New York, 2010), Ebook, locs. 224, 402. 47 Ibid., locs. 2716, 3120. The ellipses are in the original. 48 Ibid., loc. 2426. 49 Ibid., locs. 3072–6. 50 Ibid., loc. 3237. 51 Ibid., loc. 4186. 52 Ibid., loc. 5064. 53 See <http://www.cosexualrecovery.com/rick-springfield-opens-up-about-sex-addiction?goback=.gna_3855239.gde_3855239_member_216337684> (posted 16 November 2012); <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/rick-springfield-depressed_n_1962421.html> (posted 12 May 2013). See also <http://www.sodahead.com/entertainment/rick-springfield-talks-about-his-sex-addiction-and-depression-do-you-think-sex-addiction-is-a-real/question-3247435> (posted 16 October 2012). 54 K. Watson, 'Rick Springfield Opens Up About Sex Addiction and Depression', SheKnows.com, 19 October 2010: <http://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/819431/Rick-Springfield-opens-up-about-sex-addiction-and-depression>. 55 R. Brand, _My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up_ (New York, 2009), p. 9. 56 Ibid., p. 344. 57 Ibid., p. 313. 58 R. Brand, _My Booky Wook 2: This Time it's Personal_ (London, 2011), p. 274. 59 Brand, _My Booky Wook_ , p. 328. 60 Ibid., pp. 6, 9. 61 For an example of those of lesser quality, see W. Artis III, _Memoirs of an Artist: An Unorthodox Guide into the Mind of a Sex Addict_ (Kearney, NE, 2012); S. Binion, _The Corporate Rise, Fall, and Rise again of a Sex Addict, Cocaine Addict, Alcoholic, and Successful Business Man_ (Victoria, BC, 2012); Burks, _Sex & Surrender_; J. Porter, _Storm Tossed: How a U.S. Serviceman Won the Battle of Sex Addiction_ (Greeley, CO, 2006). Examples of the better-penned memoirs include Cheever, _Desire_ ; J. Fink, _Laid Bare: One Man's True Story of Sex, Love and Other Disorders_ (Sydney, 2012); K. Kneen, _Affection: An Erotic Memoir_ (Berkeley, CA, 2010); M. Ryan, _Secret Life: An Autobiography_ (New York, 1995); S. W. Silverman, _Love Sick: One Woman's Journey Through Sexual Addiction_ (New York, 2001). 62 T. Travis, _The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey_ (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), p. 4. 63 Sex Addicts Anonymous, _Sex Addicts Anonymous_ (Houston, TX, 2012), 3rd edn, Ebook, loc. 437. 64 H. Keane, 'Taxonomies of Desire: Sex Addiction and the Ethics of Intimacy', _International Journal of Critical Psychology_ , 1:3 (2001), 9–28, quote at 12. 65 See Ryan, _Secret Life_ ; K. Cohen, _Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity_ (New York, 2008); and, for quotes, Silverman, _Love Sick_ , p. 42; R. Resnick, _Love Junkie: A Memoir_ (New York, 2008), p. 117. 66 Ryan, _Secret Life_ , pp. 5, 7. 67 Resnick, _Love Junkie_ , p. 22. 68 K. D. Boykin, _Confessions of a Sex Addict_ (no place, 2011), Ebook, loc. 868. 69 Porter, _Storm Tossed_ , locs. 3069–73. 70 L. J. Schwartz, _Out of Bondage: Memoirs of a Sex Addict_ (Pittsburgh, PA, 2009), Ebook, p. 80. 71 Keane, 'Taxonomies of Desire', 15. 72 Silverman, _Love Sick_ , pp. 33–4, 36–7, 136–43, 159–61, 247–54. 73 T. P. Sbraga and W. T. O'Donohue, _The Sex Addiction Workbook: Proven Strategies to Help You Regain Control of Your Life_ (Oakland, 2003), p. 140; M. C. Feree, _No Stones: Women Redeemed from Sexual Addiction_ (Downers Grove, IL, 2013), p. 201. 74 E. Dawson, _My Secret Life with a Sex Addict: From Discovery to Recovery_ (Parker, CO, 2001). 75 Yant, _Pants on Fire_ , locs. 397, 424, 388, 392–424. 76 P. S. Pelullo, _Betrayal and the Beast: A True Story of One Man's Journey Through Childhood Sexual Abuse, Sexual Addiction, and Recovery_ (Plymouth Meeting, PA, 2012), Ebook, locs. 2178–201, 2356, 2360, 3003. 77 Cheever, _Desire_ , p. 153. For references to Carnes see pp. 19, 57–8, 66, 72, 111, 129, 135. For her meeting and discussion with Martin Kafka see pp. 113–17. She also quotes from Silverman's _Love Sick_ (pp. 54, 76, 131) and Ryan's _Secret Life_ (pp. 11, 51, 153). 78 Cheever, _Desire_ , p. 156. 79 See for example, for adolescent promiscuity, Cohen, _Loose Girl_ , and J. Garcia, _Somewhere In Between: A TRU Journey Through Sex, Drugs, Alcohol & Everything in Between_ (New York, 2012); for use of prostitutes, Porter, _Storm Tossed_ ; for relationship breakdowns, Fink, _Laid Bare_ , Resnick, _Love Junkie_ , and B. Waldschmidt, _Dealing Flesh: A Good Girl's Journey Through Sex Addiction and How She Became an Authentic Woman_ (no place, 2012); and, for childhood sexual abuse, Schwartz, _Out of Bondage_. 80 Boykin, _Confessions of a Sex Addict_ , loc. 1033. Emphasis in original. 81 Claire Halliday's book on modern sexual culture is interspersed with her own personal experiences, but is no doubt part of this 'canon' of sex addiction memoirs because she starts her book by attending a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting (as research). See C. Halliday, _Do You Want Sex with That?_ (Melbourne, 2009). Krissy Kneen talks of the 'the narcotic effect of the idea of sex' but does not problematize it. She is a sexual person: 'I am made of sex. I feed on the thought of it.' See Kneen, _Affection_ , p. 11. For the last point on other addictions see C. Christian, _Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction_ (Dallas TX, 2012). Christian, an American actress best known for her role on _Babylon 5_ , details her struggle with alcoholism. Sex is part of a long list of 'triggers' for her: see p. 219. 82 Kneen, _Affection_ , p. 11. 83 Keane, 'Taxonomies of Desire', 12. 84 _Ricki Lake_ : 'Exposed: Female Sex Addicts!', 3 March 2004. 85 R. Capitol, _Bigger Than Me: An Untold Story of Sex and Love Addiction_ (Bloomington, IN, 2010), Ebook, p. 2. 86 L. Atkins, 'He's Gotta Have It', _The Guardian_ , 16 September 2003: <http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2003/sep/16/healthandwellbeing.health>. 87 L. Barnett, 'Shame: Sex Addicts Reveal All', _The Guardian_ , 10 January 2012: <http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/10/sex-addicts-talk>. 88 Ley, _Myth of Sex Addiction_ , pp. 21, 87, 114, 119, 135, 164. 89 Ibid., p. 21. 90 Ibid., pp. 119, 135. 91 M. Wilson, _Hope After Betrayal: Healing When Sex Addiction Invades Your Marriage_ (Grand Rapids, MI, 2007); S. Carnes (ed.), _Mending a Shattered Heart: A Guide For Partners of Sex Addicts_ (Carefree, AZ, 2011); B. Steffens and M. Means, _Your Sexually Addicted Spouse: How Partners Can Cope and Heal_ (Far Hills, NJ, 2010); M. Corcoran, _A House Interrupted: A Wife's Story of Recovering from Her Husband's Sex Addiction_ (Carefree, AZ, 2011). 92 For the co-sex addict idea, see Carnes (ed.), _Mending a Shattered Heart_. The quotes are taken from a book more critical of this notion of codependency: Steffens and Means, _Your Sexually Addicted Spouse_ , pp. 24–5. 93 Dawson, _My Secret Life with a Sex Addict_ , loc. 1443. 94 Ibid., locs. 1451–4. 95 Yant, _Pants on Fire_ , loc. 380. 96 Steffens and Means, _Your Sexually Addicted Spouse_ , pp. 41–2. 97 Corcoran, _A House Interrupted_. See p. 144 for her diagnosis, p. 38 for AA meetings, pp. 52 and 141 for in-patient treatment, and p. 193 for her eight retreats. 98 Ibid., pp. 141–3. 99 S. B. Levine, 'What Is Sexual Addiction?', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 36:3 (2010), 261–75, quote at 263. 100 R. Aronowitz, 'Framing Disease: An Underappreciated Mechanism for the Social Patterning of Health', _Social Science & Medicine_, 67:1 (2008), 1–9, quote at 6. 101 Keane, 'Taxonomies of Desire', 12. 102 Boykin, _Confessions of a Sex Addict_ , locs. 45–9. 103 Ibid., locs. 811–15. 104 Ibid., loc. 815. Emphasis in original. 105 Keane, 'Taxonomies of Desire', 18. 106 The memoirs should not be confused with the occasional piece of crude erotic fiction employing a sex addiction setting and scenario. For example, Pynk, _Sexaholics_ (New York, 2010), is ostensibly about 'women struggling with sex addiction' (p. xi) but there is much sex and precious little evidence of any struggle. 107 Ryan, _Secret Life_ , pp. 8, 16–18, 203, 218–19, 265, 323. 108 Boykin, _Confessions of a Sex Addict_ , locs. 87–93, 101, 1640, 1751–8. 109 Resnick, _Love Junkie_ , pp. 42, 83, 87, 89–90, 94–5, 102–3, 107, 113, 117. 110 Ibid., ch. 8. 111 Cheever, _Desire_ , p. 22. 112 Silverman, _Love Sick_ , pp. 15, 67–8, 171–4, 182–3, 214–15, 219–20. 113 Fink, _Laid Bare_ , loc. 56. 114 Ibid., loc. 1677. 115 Ibid., loc. 642. 116 Travis, _Language of the Heart_ , p. 12. 117 Sbraga and O'Donohue, _The Sex Addiction Workbook_ , p. 132. 118 'Frequently Asked Questions about Addiction Rehabilitation': <http://www.rehabs.com/about/frequently-asked-questions-about-addiction-rehabilitation>. 119 'High Profile and Celebrity Rehab Centers': <http://www.rehabs.com/about/high-profile-and-celebrity-rehab>. 120 J. Henley, 'Are You Addicted to Sex?', _The Guardian_ , 22 January 2010; http://www.pinegrovetreatment.com/evaluation-programhtml. 121 Fortini, 'Letter from West Hollywood'. 122 Ley, _Myth of Sex Addiction_ , pp. 53–5. 123 D. L. Delmonico, 'Sex on the Superhighway: Understanding and Treating Cybersex Addiction', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 15, quote at p. 245. 124 B. McNair, _Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire_ (New York, 2002), p. 12. 125 M. Klein, 'Our Addiction to Tiger Woods' "Sex Addiction" ', _Psychology Today_ , 20 February 2010: <http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sexual-intelligence/201002/our-addiction-tiger-woods-sex-addiction>.
# Chapter 6
Diagnostic Disorder
In thirty-one years as a sex therapist, marriage counselor, and psychotherapist, I've never seen sex addiction. I've heard about virtually every sexual variation, obsession, fantasy, trauma, and involvement with sex workers, but I've never seen sex addiction.
Marty Klein, 20121
At early as 1985 a group of prescient academics, including the famous Thomas Szasz, author of _The Myth of Mental Illness_ (1960) and _The Manufacture of Madness_ (1970), questioned television's uncritical embrace of addictionology. Their targets were the media forms discussed earlier in this book: 'Any television viewer who makes a habit of watching morning news shows, talk shows, and news-magazine shows is bound to think we are a country suffering an epidemic of psychiatric "illnesses".' The communications scholar, professor of legal studies and professor of psychiatry continued, 'This year viewers of such shows have witnessed a seemingly endless parade of psychiatric experts informing us about "compulsive gambling", "eating disorders", "anxiety disease" and even jogging, working, shopping and sex "compulsions" and "addictions". And so it goes, on and on.'2 Though they might have been surprised how long it would go on and on, they had located the very symbiosis between the popular and the academic that is the subject of this book. Richard Vatz, Lee Weinberg and Szasz were critiquing television presenters' lack of critique, the manner in which they never questioned the claims of the supposed 'experts' who provided them with their visual and sound bites. Their specific targets included the anchors Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters, and Phil Donahue's special on sex addiction in his programme _Donahue_ where the emerging expert Patrick Carnes remained unchallenged with his claims for the new 'illness'. As they wrote of the talk show host, 'Phil Donahue has endeared himself to the American public with his style of cutting through to the heart of controversial issues, but his hard-nosed skepticism stops at the door of psychiatric disorders.'3
There is certainly no perceptible gap between popular perceptions of sex addiction and more learned discourse, for the concept has proven influential in both spheres. Szasz and his colleagues were concerned that scholarly debate was not reflected in televisual discourse and that the latter never interrogated the former. But what is actually more remarkable is the success and acceptance of 'sex addiction' at the academic level, where, we will argue, the concept has been received almost as unquestioningly as it has been in the television of Szasz's complaint.
The academic impact is clear. A 2010 survey in the _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, using the database PsycINFO, located over 700 research and clinical articles on sex addiction and its variants, compared to just over 300 in a literature search a decade earlier.4 A search of the same database in early 2014, arranged by the authors of this book, brought the total to nearly 2,000 records.5 This is a cumulative record. If the same database is used to plot chronologically rather than by accumulation the upward trajectory is compelling. The number of academic publications using the terms has risen yearly from just 2 in 1960 to nearly 140 in 2013 (see Figure 10).
Figure 10 PsycINFO terms for sex addiction publications, 1960–2013.
Yet what is fascinating about this literature is how reluctant investigators have been to question the veracity of the actual syndrome when their own investigations beg for such a challenge. Two clinical psychologists who applied a widely used mental health test to a group of patients seeking help for hypersexual behaviour found neither evidence of 'addictive tendencies' nor that they were particularly obsessive or compulsive. However, their conclusions were that 'hypersexual patients are a diverse group of individuals'.6 Hypersexuality survived its lack of addictiveness, obsession or compulsiveness! As we will see, a New Zealand survey questioned the frequency of compulsive sexual behaviour but never considered its status as a concept: the article's keywords include 'sexual addiction' and 'hypersexuality'.7
There has been no shortage of tools of assessment of sexual compulsivity, and we have touched on some already. The _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_ study by Joshua Hook and his team reviewed nearly twenty such measurements, both self-reporting and clinical assessing: Cognitive and Behavioral Outcomes of Sexual Behavior Scale; Compulsive Sexual Behavior Consequences Scale; Compulsive Sexual Behavior Inventory; Diagnostic Interview for Sexual Compulsivity; Garos Sexual Behavior Index; Internet Screening Test; Perceived Sexual Control Scale; Sex Addicts Anonymous Questionnaire; Sexual Addiction Scale; Sexual Addiction Screening Test (including versions for women and gay men); Sexual Compulsivity Scale; Sexual Dependency Inventory; Sexual Outlet Inventory; Sexual Symptom Assessment Scale; and the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale – Compulsive Sexual Behavior.8 We could add the Arizona Sexual Experience Scale, the Sexual Risk Behavior Scale, the Hypersexual Behavior Inventory, the Opportunity, Attachment, and Trauma Model for Sex Addiction, and the Hypersexual Disorder Screening Inventory.9 More recently, Carnes and his colleagues have included (the perhaps aptly named) PATHOS, a simplified version of the Sexual Addiction Screening Test (SAST) and SAST Revised (SAST-R), which has raised the scary possibility of identifying a potential sex addict in less than a minute.10 A revised assessment of tests by some of those involved in the original Hook study brought the tally of measurements of hypersexual sex to a total of 32, some of which (4) were clinical interviews but most self-reports or assessments in the form of tests or scales. This added the Cyberporn Compulsivity Scale, Cyber-Pornography Use Inventory, Hypersexual Behavior Consequences Scale, Hypersexual Disorder Diagnostic Clinical Interview, Hypersexual Disorder Questionnaire, Internet Addiction Test – Sex, Minnesota Impulse Control Inventory Questionnaire – Sexual Behavior Module, Multidimensional Sexuality Questionnaire, Pornography Consumption Effects Scale, Primary Appraisal Measure – Compulsive Sexual Behavior, and the Sexual Sensation Seeking Scale.11 And if we include calculations against other psychiatric tests in efforts to check the viability of the original measurement, the picture becomes even more complicated, with the Beck Depression Inventory, Trait Anxiety Scale, Obsessive–Compulsive Scale, Borderline Personality Scale, Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R), Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview, NEO Personality Inventory-Revised, Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, Maladaptive Cognitions About Sex Scale (MCAS), Shame Inventory (SI), Self-Rumination Scale (SRS), and the Self-Compassion Scale-Short Form (SCS).12
But how effective are these tests? It is significant that nearly 20 per cent of a sample of self-identified German sex addicts who were administered SAST-R did not qualify as sex addicts, and that among the addicts who did not report any distress at their condition (25 per cent) almost 60 per cent nonetheless met the required test score for sexual addiction. It seems an unreliable instrument for measuring an uncertain illness.13
The various apparatuses form an impressive medico-scientific façade. Nevertheless, the impression given, shared by those _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_ reviewers, was of a field where a great deal of time has been devoted to measuring an assumed problem without bothering to interrogate the nature, or even the existence, of that perceived disorder. The comprehensive assessment of the various measurements of hypersexual disorder by Stephanie Womack, Hook and others was critical of their overreliance on the subjective character of the self-assessments: 'They relied on the participant to define "excessive" hypersexual thoughts, urges, and behaviors, and therefore may not accurately reflect the level of hypersexual behavior.'14 The researchers noted the variety of definitions, the 'sometimes idiosyncratic' conceptualizations and the 'formative stage' of research on what was claimed as a syndrome.15 They never questioned the viability of the disorder itself.
It is an unexamined maxim of sex addiction folklore that addictions live in groups. Susan Cheever's muddled memoir of sex addiction drew constantly on alcohol addiction (she was an alcoholic too) but also referred to 'the way different addictions pair with and nestle inside each other', citing money, eating and shopping disorders, as well as addiction to sex, drugs and alcohol.16 'I'm an alcoholic, an addict', Jennifer Ketcham began her talk at the Pasadena Recovery Center in 2012; 'I am into anything you put in front of me, whether it's human, whether it's substance.'17 L. J. Schwartz summed himself up at the end of his memoir of sex addiction: 'I'm an ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder] adult, I have bipolar disorder, and to top it off, I'm BPD [Borderline Personality Disorder].' 'Not to take anything away from my SAA [Sex Addicts Anonymous] program. The plain, true fact is I am a sex addict.'18 The theme is there in the popular guidebooks too. _Cybersex Unplugged_ (2011), a newer workbook for cybersex addicts, moved from sexual compulsivity to other dependencies – chemical, eating, gambling, spending and working.19 Jerome Levin, a New York psychotherapist whose practice went from treating substance abuse to treating sexual addiction, has referred, perhaps unsurprisingly, to 'a condition called _polyaddiction_ or _cross-addiction_ ' (his emphasis), proclaiming confidently – though without evidence or specificity – that 'Of all the known people considered to be sex addicts, about 42 percent are cross-addicted to drugs and alcohol and many others are cross-addicted to food, spending, work, or gambling.'20 A critic of the concept of sex addiction, David Ley, has summarized the situation: 'The sex addictionologists are right in a sense. We do live in an "addictive culture". The addiction lies in our society's desire to label problematic behaviors as addictive and compulsive.'21
Such linkages have been claimed at a less populist level as well. Early research on sex addiction detected comorbidity – hardly surprising given a culture that finds disorder everywhere. A 1990s Iowa study of thirty-six people (mostly male) who self-identified as sexually compulsive but who were not actually in treatment for their condition found that over 80 per cent of them tested for another psychiatric disorder: mood, anxiety, substance use, eating or childhood conduct disorder.22 Nurses have long been told that other addictions may provide a clue to hidden hypersexuality. An article in _Nurse Practitioner_ told primary health providers to remain alert: 'A personal history of compulsive behavior, alcohol or substance abuse, overeating or gambling are significant since co-existing addictions are common.'23 It is over ten years since American psychiatric nurses were advised to assess substance abusers for sex addiction when presenting for treatment because 'sexual addiction often coexists with substance addiction'.24 But a 2011 article in the journal _Evaluation & the Health Professions_ explicitly linked sex addiction with tobacco, alcohol, illicit drugs, eating, gambling, Internet, love, exercise, work and shopping addictions. (Unsurprisingly, the authors reported that nearly half of the US adult population was likely to suffer from 'maladaptive signs of an addictive disorder over a 12-month period'.)25 The 'Curbside Consultation' feature in the _American Family Physician_ updated its physician readers in 2012 on very similar lines about sex addiction's concurrent disorders.26
The comorbidity of mental disorders has become axiomatic in sexual addiction therapy. Eric Griffin-Shelley's early guide stressed both multiple addictions and the likelihood that sufferers of the syndrome would be likely also to experience PTSD (a disorder that we saw had been added to the DSM in 1980).27 Far more recently, Martin Kafka's chapter on hypersexuality in a major sexual therapy text established that 'most individuals with these disorders have multiple lifetime comorbid disorders' and then provided case studies demonstrating this clustering:
Ted's primary DSM-5 psychiatric diagnoses included: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), predominantly inattentive type; cannabis use disorder; persistent depressive disorder: late onset, with pure dysthymic syndrome, moderate; fetishistic disorder, nonliving object [an attraction to female lingerie]; other specified disruptive, impulse control, and conduct disorder[:] hypersexual disorder; pornography and masturbation.28
This is certainly an example of the turn to mental disorder referred to earlier.
The ever-flexible Carnes has found both a name and a syndrome for these multiple addictions: Addiction Interaction Disorder.29 Carnes and his co-authors (or rather their staff) assessed over 1,600 patients in residential programmes, presumably at Pine Grove and/or The Meadows, and found multiple addictions (the terms used are theirs): alcoholism, substance abuse, caffeine addiction, compulsive working, high risk behaviour/danger, compulsive spending, nicotine addiction, compulsive violence/raging, addictive athleticism (exercise addiction presumably), compulsive hoarding/saving, compulsive cleaning, compulsive gambling, bulimia/anorexia.30 Many of these were compound addictions, as the breakdown of numbers in each category was far more than the sample total. The conclusion of the study, self-referenced in a later summary of the syndrome, was
Multiple addictions are common. Among a sample of 1,603 sex addicts, 69% of heterosexual women, and 80% of homosexual men have a lifetime prevalence of other addictive and abusive behaviors, ranging from minor to serious. In addition, 40% of heterosexual men, 40% of heterosexual women, and 60% of homosexual men engage in sexual acting out while simultaneously [not always literally, surely] involved in other addictive or abusive behaviors such as substance abuse, gambling, or eating disorders.31
Leaving aside the fact that these 1,604 (not 1,603) were treated for sexual disorder – sexual anorexia and sexual addiction – and were therefore not all 'sex addicts', the reliance on patient self-presenting and the miscellaneous and inclusive nature of the claimed 'addictions' raises considerable doubt about the viability of these claims for interlinkage. A doubter might also ask whether such widespread behaviour should be defined as normal rather than 'a problem', though it certainly holds out the promise of many, many clients. The pairing of sexual addiction and sexual anorexia as 'manifestations of the same problem', with claims of parallels to bulimia, stretch any conceptual meaning to breaking point – especially since the figures clearly imply that patients included sexual anorexics, sex addicts, and those suffering from both addiction and anorexia as well as all those other compulsions.32 Carnes and his co-authors have referred to a 'confusion and blurring of issues' during the emergence of any new scientific paradigm.33 We can certainly agree with that.
So we are already at _diagnostic vagueness_ , another of the characteristics of the concept of sex addiction that irked Janice Irvine all those years ago (see our Introduction). We might expect this from the early statements establishing the new disorder. Carnes's _The Sexual Addiction_ (1983), a foundational text, certainly slipped from the innocently promiscuous to the violently sexual offending in his concept of 'levels of addiction'. Thus his 'Level One' addictions included masturbation, marital sexual disjunction, heterosexual cruising, 'Centerfolds, Pornography, and Strip Shows', sex with prostitutes and, quote, 'Homosexuality'. His 'Level Two' consisted of exhibitionism, voyeurism, voyeur-exhibitionism and 'Indecent Calls and Liberties' ('Liberties' meaning unsolicited touching). Finally, 'Level Three' comprised child molesting, incest, and 'Rape and Violence' (why 'and Violence' is unclear). Carnes admitted that his levels were arbitrary but held they served to demonstrate the range of 'sexually compulsive behavior'; he reminded the reader that he could have included bestiality, sadomasochism and fetishism, which of course he did with that very mention.34 The point is that there was no logical progression or linkage between these levels beyond Carnes's structuring. They had nothing in common – not even sex (viz. 'Rape and Violence'). Their very association, the use of the word 'level', connected heterosexual promiscuity with rape and child molestation and claimed the gravity of a supposed, shared addiction.
Anne Wilson Schaef, who drew heavily on Carnes, upped the ante still further, adding a fourth level of addiction and invoking, with varying degrees of gravity, 'New Age sexual freedom', autoerotic asphyxia, oral rape of infants, child prostitution rings and stolen children.35 As Helen Keane has observed, 'A striking aspect of sex addiction is the diverse array of behaviours which are read as symptoms of the one disease.'36
That confusion of categories (though none quite as severe as that of Schaef) is common in the handbooks of sex addiction. Griffin-Shelley's description of the malady included reference to a fantasizing tennis instructor, a cross-dressing seminarian, anyone practising BDSM ('a somewhat extreme example of the objectification of people that sex and love addicts practice'), incest, paedophilia, a teenager who had had sex with the family maid, a masturbating nun, and the Boston Strangler.37 Ralph and Marcus Earle treated perpetrators and victims of incest and child abuse alongside heterosexual wives and church ministers who indulged in multiple casual sex. Though classified under the master category 'sex addiction', what conceptually could they have had in common? Arguably, many of the patients of these family psychologists would have been better off being treated for sexual abuse rather than sex addiction, whether as addicts, co-addicts, victims or victimizers.38
The designation 'sex addiction' has become even more inclusive post Carnes's early work. 'What may surprise novice clinicians', an update on the evaluation and treatment of sex addiction observed in the _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_ in 2014, 'is that sex addiction patients are generally not good at sex...Therefore, in addition to addiction treatment, they need sex and conjoint therapy. Premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, anorgasmia, and sexual anorexia (extended periods when the addict has no sexual activity) are common.'39 We have seen that addiction and anorexia are now routinely paired. Schaef included 'Celibacy as Sexual Addiction'.40 Sexual compulsivity, _Cybersex Unplugged_ explained, can occur 'in the absence of sexual behavior'.41 One London psychotherapist has reputedly claimed that it was possible to be a monogamous sex addict: 'I've had a case of a man who was sex addicted to his wife. It was a problem because it was depersonalising – he turned her into an object rather than treating her as his wife.'42
There are many examples of diagnostic imprecision. We can see it at work in a psychiatric refresher piece in the journal _Directions in Psychiatry_ in 2007 that drifted into paedophilia, incest, exhibitionism and studies of sex offenders in its discussion of the definitions and epidemiology of sexual addiction, yet with a conceptual indistinctness that by no means inhibited its suggestions for treatment.43
Another vivid instance occurs in the interview of Paula Hall, author of _Understanding and Treating Sex Addiction_ (2012), that concludes with a list of her warning signs of those at risk of sex addiction. Feeling isolated as a teenager, hidden family issues, lack of adequate role models, controlling parents, treating sex as something shameful, and early exposure to sexuality; these are factors that could apply to just about anyone in any young population.44 Statements such as 'it's known that early alcohol use changes the chemistry of the brain in ways that make alcoholism more likely, and it's possible that something similar could happen to a brain that is exposed to sexual images and behavior before it is ready to react to them' are too intellectually questionable even to warrant comment.45 Similarly the reported claim by a sex addict that he had his addiction under control because he visited sex workers (the focus of his problem) but no longer had sex with them: 'I act it out by going to some dodgy place – but when I'm offered a hand job or whatever, I leave without going through with it...I get the sense of shame, but I don't participate in the sex act.' By what convoluted logic is this 'under control'?46
As we will see, sex addiction's search for acceptance has continued. But it has to be said that some of the published studies seem unlikely to advance this quest for professional endorsement. For example, the participants in two studies of the roles of shame and guilt in hypersexuality were users of Candeo, an online treatment programme for pornography use and masturbation, and 40–50 per cent of these users were Mormons: hardly a representative cross-section of society.47 The research conclusion of one of these studies that there is a 'significant' relationship between 'shame-proneness and hypersexuality' and that 'shame reduction and resolution is essential in remediating patterns of hypersexuality' does not indicate a very high level of analytical sophistication.48 We are perplexed how the recruitment of gay and bisexual New York males with perceived compulsive sexual behaviour avoided 'self-labelling' by asking them 'Is your sex life spinning out of control? Is sex interfering with your life? Are sexual thoughts getting in the way?' How was that any different to posting 'Are You a Sex Addict?'49 How, really, is knowledge advanced by the research finding that the triggers for sexual compulsivity in gay men include sex clubs, bars, gym steam rooms, attractive males, crystal meth, cocaine and pornography?50 How viable is research into the role of the female partner in the reinforcement of male heterosexual sex addiction that surveys the male addicts rather than their female 'co-addicts', the actual subject of the project? Whether the co-addict nurtured or punished her partner's hypersexuality is seen purely through the perception of the addict.51
There are also the trademark problems of measurement. Why is the indicator of compulsivity set at 11 hours (or more) per week of reported online sexual activity?52 Then there is the issue of the actual available data – findings at variance with the significance accorded to the perceived problem. A survey made available on the MSNBC website in 1998 actually showed how uncommon the problem of compulsivity was, even using the sexual addiction scales of measurement. Only 5 per cent of the nearly 10,000 people surveyed were defined as sexually compulsive; a mere 1 per cent were cybersex compulsive (that is, scoring high on the sexual compulsivity scale and spending more than 11 hours per week on Internet sex). And yet the overall import of the study was to stress the problem of online sexual compulsivity.53 If 26 per cent of those receiving treatment for sexually transmitted infections in a Milwaukee health clinic stated that their desire to have sex disrupted their daily life, is that a high or a low percentage? The authors of that study saw it as an indication of sexual compulsivity.54 Does the fact that 29 per cent of them felt that their sexual feelings were stronger than they were indicate a link between sexually transmitted infections and sexual addiction (compulsivity)?55 And if the sexual compulsives are separated from the non-sexual compulsives in the sample, does the finding that 40 per cent of the former engaged in casual sex with one-time partners compared to the latter's 30 per cent really indicate a significant difference in sexual practice?56 Another study of sexual compulsivity among New York gay men, lesbians and bisexual men and women claimed significance in the finding that 46 per cent of sexually compulsive men were likely to use alcohol and 39 per cent drugs with sex, compared to 39 and 32 per cent respectively for those deemed non-sexually compulsive.57 Are the differences really indicative of a significant association between alcohol, drug use and sexually addictive behaviour? Are the sexually compulsive 'significantly more likely than the non-sexually compulsive to report engaging in the use of alcohol...and drug use with sex', which was what the authors of the study claimed?58
It is remarkable how concepts are clung to in the face of diagnostic dissolution. 'Research into CSB [compulsive sexual behaviour] is hindered by the lack of a generally accepted definition and reliable and valid assessment tools', wrote the authors of a paper in _Psychiatric Clinics of North America_. 'Despite these limitations, evidence indicates that CSB is relatively common in the general adult population, causes substantial personal distress, and is a source of significant psychosocial disability.'59 A 2013 article discussing the link between compulsive sexual behaviour and HIV concluded:
It is likely that the syndrome of CSB has a variety of different and overlapping underlying mechanisms and etiologies. That is why the term _impulsive/compulsive sexual behavior (ICSB)_ might be better suited to describe this syndrome...At this point and because of its descriptive nature, this term leaves open the possibility of multiple pathological pathways and treatments...some individuals may have more problems with impulsive control, others anxiety-reduction mechanisms, others affect regulation, and still others may have more sensation-seeking dysregulation. A number of people suffering from CSB may have a number of overlapping mechanisms driving their behavior.60
How is this even remotely useful in understanding HIV and unprotected sex in at-risk communities? What possible logical, diagnostic coherence does ICSB have? What does the statement even mean beyond the tautological?
For all the vast literature referred to earlier, there seems little evidence either of theoretical refinement or of advances in the collection of the results of empirical research – what one scholarly article termed 'many conceptions, minimal data'.61 A UK academic who surveyed the work on cybersex in 2001, though sympathetic to the concept of Internet sex addiction, conceded both that the empirical evidence for its existence was weak and that the 'field is still in conceptual crisis'.62 Other academic surveys, similarly unquestioning of the actual existence of their subject, have also noted conceptual flaws. Hence Hook and others: 'the field is hampered by weak theory that identifies precisely what sexual addiction is, what its worst symptoms and consequences are, and how to make accurate diagnoses and prognoses'.63 The Iowa study mentioned earlier concluded that 'Compulsive sexual behavior may be a clinically useful concept, but it describes a heterogeneous group of individuals with substantial psychiatric comorbidity and diverse behavioral problems.'64 Ariel Kor and his co-authors noted definitional inconsistencies, dearth of large-scale studies and significant 'gaps' in information, including scant attention to neurobiology.65 Even Rory Reid, whose University of California, Los Angeles, research group has conducted a DSM-5 field trial for hypersexual disorder, has been hesitant on what he has called the 'bigger question...whether the cluster of symptoms we associate with hypersexuality rise to the level of what is necessary to constitute a distinct psychiatric disorder', reporting problems with assessment, lack of knowledge about his subject's prevalence and social composition, absence of serious interrogation of the effectiveness of claimed therapies, and limited progress on the topic in the field of neurobiology – in short, the various limitations of the research in his field.66
Less kindly, Lennard Davis, clearly a sceptic, has referred to 'weak theories' and 'impressionistic and confused' diagnoses.67 Charles Moser has written of 'quasi-scientific muddled thinking'.68 David Ley has amusingly called it Valley Girl Science.69 More seriously, Ley and two research colleagues have subjected 'pornography addiction' claims to an extensive literature review and have argued for the intellectual impoverishment of the concept (our words, not theirs). 'The theory and research behind "pornography addiction" ', they write, 'is hindered by poor experimental designs, limited methodological rigor, and lack of model specification'.70
There are exceptions that it is tempting to say prove the rule. John Bancroft and Zoran Vukadinovic's review of 'out-of-control' sexual behaviour involved theoretical interrogation of the concepts 'sexual addiction' and 'compulsive sexual behaviour' as well as interviews of a small group (thirty-one) of self-defined sex addicts, plotted against a larger control group.71 They were realistic about the limitations of their sample and outlined hypotheses refuted as well as those confirmed. But they raised the interesting possibility that those with out-of-control sexual behaviour who suffered from either anxiety or depression experienced heightened sexual interest (in contrast to the received opinion that such mood states diminished sexual desire, as indeed they did for the non-sexually compulsive). They posited the reasons for such increases, though we do not need to discuss them here. More significantly, however, Bancroft and Vukadinovic were critical of the 'fashionable concepts' of sex addiction and sexual compulsivity. They did question their subjects' conceptual viability. 'At this time [2004], both concepts are of uncertain scientific value.'72 Was it merely behaviour plotted on the outer limits of normal behaviour rather than a condition inherently problematic? Was the variety of behaviours coming under its definitional orbit so vast, the range of determinants and patterns so diverse, that simple categorization was impossible?
While acknowledging the importance to both the individual and society of patterns of sexual behavior that are out of control and have problematic consequences, we think it likely that such patterns are varied in both their etiological determinants and how they are best treated. For that reason, we consider it to be premature to attempt some overriding definition relevant to clinical management until we have a better understanding of the various patterns and their likely determinants. The concepts of compulsivity and addiction may prove to have explanatory value in some cases, but are not helpful when used as general terms for this class of behavior problem. Until we have a better understanding of the subtypes, we prefer the general descriptive term out of control to describe sexual behavior that is unregulated for a variety of possible reasons.73
Predictably, the limitations of diagnosis have carried over into more practical therapy. The therapist Tracy Todd referred to a failure to consider the 'contextual complexities' of individual complaints in a rush to easy labelling, what he called the 'premature ejaculation of the sex-addict diagnosis'.74 Hook and Reid, no hypersexual sceptics, reviewed the field of therapy and have produced a damning report of inferior methodology, inconsistent measurements, varied inclusion criteria, and failure to apply the most basic standards of good research involving randomized control trials and independent verification. (Much of their article consisted of explaining best practice.) They concluded that although some of the reported treatment outcomes were 'promising, it is unclear to what extent the treatments were helpful compared to alternative interventions (or in some cases, no intervention at all)'.75 In truth, although these researchers did not actually say so, there is little or no convincing scientific evidence that any of the treatments have been effective.
There must have been, and will remain, huge variation in local therapies. One study of sex addiction in women rather unhelpfully advised those treating them to take into account an overlap with borderline personality disorder: 'the three groups of sexually addictive/compulsives, sexually addictive/compulsive borderlines, and nonsexually addictive/compulsive borderlines who sexually act out'.76 Another advocated a 'good cop, bad cop' approach in therapy: 'Well, I think Bob is about the most hopeless case I have seen...Oh, I don't think it's all that bad.'77 What do we make of the therapists who proclaimed that sex addiction was a 'spiritual longing to be connected with God', even if their focus was on sexually addicted pastors?78 Where do we place the art therapy gone amiss when it triggered a patient's foot fetish and he left therapy in search of young women sunning their shoeless feet, or the exhibitionist who sketched a picture of an erect penis and the repeated words 'watch me, watch me' and 'I want to jack off in front of you'?79 Would not one question the viability of any attempt to treat the homeless for sex addiction, given the gravity of all their other (real) problems?80 Case studies in the journal _Nurse Practitioner_ in 1990, included to advise healthcare workers at the ground level, had suggested 'overtly sexual response during a genital exam (moaning, arching of hips)' and sexual answers to non-sexual questions as hints of 'a compulsive sexual disorder'. Practitioners were advised to look for indirect signs of potential sexual addiction, not just in the addict themselves but in family members: depression, headaches, gastrointestinal problems might be signs of codependency. One wonders whether the 'alert primary care provider' might, in these cases, have been somewhat too attentive.81
On the other hand – highlighting the sort of cases that might not have been challenged under a different, less critical therapist – Tracy Todd started with the assumption that the real problem actually lay elsewhere with those who presented as sex addicts. His reported notes consisted of cases of 'supposed sexual addiction' and those whom he convinced that they were not really sex addicts.82
We actually know very little about the specificity of psychoanalytic treatment of sex addiction. The account by two Alberta therapists of their application of 'eastern spiritual wisdom' to a slowly recovering sex addict – 'As we sat in our chairs, he continued to feel himself clinging and contracting upon himself over the black abyss, as if he could be smashed by its murky bottom' – provides a tantalizing glimpse of the potential range of possibilities, in that particular case the Almaas Diamond Approach of self-realization.83
The detail and frankness of Lawrence Hatterer's early work, discussed elsewhere in this book, are in marked contrast to the brevity and opacity of many other case illustrations (where they exist). Exceptions, however, are the patient studies on sex addiction in the 1995 Workshop Series of the American Psychoanalytic Association that included significant discussion of a woman engaged in multiple extramarital relationships, and three men, one in obsessive pursuit of large penises, another in a perpetual quest for prostitutes with big breasts, and a third who was addicted to X-rated videos.84 The studies are especially interesting for their self-reflexive analysis of the potentials of transference, presumably heightened by the sexually compulsive nature of the complaint, an issue that later addictionologists were aware of but have not explored in any great detail.85 The female patient became convinced that her analyst, a woman, 'had sexual feelings towards her' and relayed her sexual fantasies about her therapist: 'One of these fantasies involved her sucking on my breasts and watching my face as it would become enraptured.'86 Her therapist, Anna Ornstein, detected that the addictive nature of the woman's sexual activities became mirrored in an obsession with her psychoanalyst. Similarly one of Wayne Myers's male patients had dreams about him; 'In these, I was frequently seen as a potential sexual partner.' Others were dependent on him: 'I don't want to lose you.'87 Also notable is the therapist's admission that years of treatment 'only effected modest changes'. The three men still engaged in their respective pursuit of large penises and breasts and X-rated tapes. The 'intensity and frequency' of their actions had 'markedly diminished' but the behaviour itself persisted.88
It is hard to see how 'hypersexuality' has any descriptive value for the variety of sexual 'problems' assessed. The case vignettes from a Toronto study (2013), provided to illustrate the range of hypersexuality referrals at a large city hospital's sexual behaviours clinic, included men who were attracted to the transgendered (she-males); those who spent undue time masturbating to pornography ('several hours per day'), termed 'avoidant masturbation' by the clinicians; gay men who similarly indulged in 'low-investment sexual behaviors' such as visiting bath houses, using online contact sites, and 'engaging in sexual activity with very many partners' (in other words, being promiscuously gay); the 'Chronic Adulterers' whose affairs were often a reflection of marital breakdown; those who self-presented as sex addicts but whose sexual behaviour was actually quite normal (the clinicians called them, appropriately, those afflicted with 'Sexual Guilt'); those, dubbed 'The Designated Patient', whose referral was instigated not so much by their own self-reproach as by the sexual conservatism of a family member; and finally – it is a long list – patients whose disorder was probably something other than hypersexuality. Though James Cantor and his colleagues provided the data to argue that this diversity demonstrated that presenting for hypersexuality 'may represent entirely unrelated phenomena', it also indicates the range of behaviour even contemplated as addictive, compulsive or hypersexual. This study suggests too – given the number of sex addicts who were not really sex addicts – that many of those who presented or self-presented, for whatever reason, would have been classified as hypersexual by less vigilant clinicians, but also that classifications must vary from therapist to therapist (the Toronto inclusion of attraction to the transgendered and multiple gay sex as disorders seems idiosyncratic).89
Treatment has proceeded despite Bancroft and Vukadinovic's warnings about clinical management. A New Zealand sex therapist began her report by actually citing their argument as 'not particularly helpful' to clinicians and advocating a practice-generated model rather than theory determining therapy.90 She was aware of the fuzziness of the disorder but treated it nonetheless. However, it is difficult to conceive how her case study of the sex addict Bob, a committed Christian, masturbator and practitioner of sex with animals, who had been sexually abused as a child – with 'forced manual and oral stimulation and anal rape with various combinations of his father, older brother, this brother's friends and sheep' – was in any way archetypal of the prehistory of most of those suffering from 'out of control sexual behavior' (OOCSB).91
Amidst all this scientific imprecision sits sexual addiction's quest for inclusion in the DSM. One of the more recent developments in sexual addiction's short history is the way in which its various forms – sexual addiction, sexual desire dysregulation, sexual impulsivity, sexual compulsivity and paraphilia-related disorder – have morphed into a new sexual malady, 'Hypersexual Disorder', still (in 2014) seeking recognition, given that it was unsuccessful in DSM-5 (2013).92 There is a sense in which hypersexuality has replaced (old fashioned) sex addiction: an article in the journal _Sexual and Relationship Therapy_ simply incorporated nymphomania, satyriasis and sexual addiction into the prehistory of the master category 'hypersexuality'.93
So it could be argued that hypersexual disorder's proposed diagnostic criteria are merely those of sexual addiction with a more refined gloss and/or greater statistical panoply. Beneath the standardized weighting, structure correlations, subscales and scores of the _Sexual and Relationship Therapy_ piece on hypersexuality lurk its not so modish keywords: sex addiction, sexual compulsivity and psychopathology.94
All the elements of Martin Kafka's proposal for the inclusion of 'hypersexual disorder' in DSM-5 would have been in keeping with the earliest discourses of sexual addiction: the arbitrary designation of a period of at least six months of 'recurrent and intense sexual fantasies, sexual urges, or sexual behavior' and the associated (and equally arbitrary) meeting of three or more of the five criteria involving time lost in pursuit of sexual gratification (later modified to four or more), repetitive sexual engagement, loss of sexual control, disregard for others, and use of sex for relief from the stresses and anxieties of everyday life. So too would the diagnostic specification of a wide range of perfectly normal activities rendered abnormal by their intensity and frequency: masturbation, use of pornography, casual sex ('Sexual behavior with consenting adults'), cybersex, telephone sex, resort to strip clubs and (that catch-all) 'Other'.95 All are reminiscent of the nosology of sex addiction. It is not surprising that the editor-in-chief of the journal _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_ admitted that he continually referred to sexual addiction when he should have said hypersexual disorder.96 As for quantification, the hypersexual disorder literature resorts to a Kinsey-like counting of orgasms: 'From these clinically defined data, hypersexual desire in adult males was defined as a persistent TSO [total sexual outlet] of 7 or more orgasms/week for at least 6 consecutive months after the age of 15 years [later revised to 18 years].'97
The critiques of hypersexuality disorder as a disorder were the same as those of sexual addiction. Why is time spent on sexual matters necessarily unproductive or less important than on other activities? What is wrong with using sex to cope with the stresses of everyday life? When does a high level of sexual activity move from the normal range to pathology? Research from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, involving an online survey of more than 11,000 Canadian and US respondents, found that 'dysregulated sex' (sexual addiction and its variants) may merely have indicated the distress associated with 'elevated sexual desire'.98 As Jason Winters, one of the research team, warned of hypersexual disorder's move for DSM accreditation, 'Dysregulated sexuality may simply be a marker of high sexual desire'.99 What is excessive anyway? Forty-four per cent of Winters's male respondents and 22 per cent of his female participants reported the seven or more orgasms a week that would render them hypersexual by Kafka's criteria.100 One is reminded of an early warning by two Australian psychologists: 'The real danger in labeling hypersexuality is that we do not know what constitutes excessive sexual behavior, and yet we are applying a label which may have pathological symptoms inappropriately associated with it.'101 What of the claimed distress, harm and impairment that are the result of the sexual activity?102 As Moser posed it,
The question is: Whose distress? Is it the individual's distress? Is it the distress of the spouse, who is dragging the 'patient' to a psychiatrist...Is it the distress from living without the type or quality of sex actually desired? Is it the distress at not being able to live up to societal expectations?103
How essential is distress anyway? It is intriguing that the aforementioned study of self-proclaimed German sex addicts (biased in favour of Internet users) found that 25 per cent did not feel distressed by their hypersexual activity. And although the researchers did not draw attention to it, their figures for 'functional impairment' were very low. Reworking their figures, of the total sample of 349 self-identified sex addicts 81 per cent did _not_ feel impacted occupationally, 83 per cent with regards to their family life, 74 per cent socially, 84 per cent financially and 87 per cent in terms of their health. The only category of functional impairment of any significance reported by this group was relationship with their partners, with 56 per cent reporting an impact and 44 per cent not. These were remarkably non-distressed and non-impaired sex addicts.104
Was there a genuine risk that diagnosis of hypersexuality could mask the patient's real disorder (after all, addictionologists stress the clustering of disorders)? Might treatment for sexual dysfunction not be the most appropriate solution? In fact, might the therapist be treating the effects of another disorder in the name of hypersexual disorder or sexual addiction and therefore never treat the problem itself? An early study of members of SAA in Michigan in the 1990s found that almost 80 per cent of those attending these sex addiction self-help groups said that they had been psychiatrically diagnosed for another mental illness, depression being the most common.105 Moser has argued that the addictionologists' stress on multiple addictions and clustering actually works against their own thesis. If hypersexual disorder is a viable diagnosis, it should exist on its own rather than as part of a constellation of other psychiatric complaints. 'Is it a disorder or a symptom of another disorder?'106 As we have mentioned elsewhere, we may not be discussing a disorder at all, at any level; the number of 'sex addicts' who claim to have experienced some form of sexual abuse raises the possibility that that trauma should be treated rather than any form of compulsive sexual behaviour.
And what about the shifting measurements: three or more versus four or more criteria; age 15 as opposed to age 18; seven orgasms a week against a five-per-week gauge? What is so magical about that 6 months' duration as a defining term?107
Sex addiction's quest for legitimation has been persistent. Its bid for ultimate recognition – that of the American Psychiatric Association and its DSM – has proven elusive, apart from a brief moment in DSM-III-R in 1987 in what has transpired to be a historical aberration. Even then, it was literally a mention rather than accreditation, example two in three examples of 'Other Sexual Disorders: 302.90: Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified': 'distress about a pattern of repeated sexual conquests or other forms of nonparaphilic sexual addiction, involving a succession of people who exist only as things to be used'.108 Sexual addiction is not in that _Manual_ 's index.
It has been more successful with _Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry_, the standard primer for training psychiatrists in medical schools throughout the US and influential in the discipline internationally. Sexual addiction was not in the fourth (1985) and fifth (1989) editions of _Kaplan & Sadock_, which favoured the older terms 'erotomania', 'nymphomania' and 'satyriasis', though they did briefly discuss 'hypersexuality' as an uncommon problem associated with disease (rarely), drug use and hormone therapy. (There was no suggestion that it was a significant problem.) However, sex addiction did appear in the sixth (1995) edition in its own section, 'Sex Addiction', under the broader heading 'Sexual dysfunction and sexual disorder not otherwise specified' (in deference to DSM categories).109 It was discussed too in the seventh (1999) edition, with minor changes to the earlier version, including a different cited case study and use of the heading 'Compulsive Sexual Behavior' rather than 'Sex Addiction':
The concept of compulsive sexual behavior, or sex addiction, developed over the past two decades to describe persons who compulsively seek out sexual experiences and whose behavior becomes impaired if they cannot gratify their sexual impulses. The concept of sex addiction derived from the model of addiction to such drugs as heroin, or addiction to behavioral patterns, such as gambling...DSM-IV does not use the terms _sex addiction_ or _compulsive sexual behavior_ , nor is this disorder universally recognized or accepted. Nevertheless, the person whose entire life revolves around sex-seeking behavior and activities, who spends an excessive amount of time in such behavior, and who often tries to stop such behavior but cannot do so is well known to clinicians. Such persons show repeated and increasingly frequent attempts to have a sexual experience, and deprivation evokes symptoms of distress.110
Virginia Sadock, the author of the piece and one of the co-editors of the _Textbook_ , discussed diagnosis (lack of control, persistent desire, ineffectual guilt and deterioration of social functioning), behavioural patterns ('promiscuous and uncontrolled' sexual behaviour), comorbidity (she claimed an up-to-80-per cent correlation between sex addiction and 'substance-use disorders') and management (the Twelve-Step programmes, psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy, including the rarely used Depo-Provera). She provided a table of signs of sexual addiction taken from Carnes's _Don't Call It Love_ (1991) and a brief case study of a chronic masturbator who was treated by 'insight-orientated psychotherapy, group work with other sex addicts, couple therapy, and the use of a specific serotonin reuptake inhibitor, both to treat his depression and for its side effect of decreasing libido'.111 In other words, sexual addiction had moved from absence in an influential text to acknowledgement as a sexual disorder treatable by psychiatry. Its presence thereafter seemed secure (whatever the verdict of the DSM). The eighth (2005) edition had a whole section, 'Sexual Addiction', by Patrick Carnes himself.112 The ninth (2009) edition retains a section on sexual addiction, this time by Aviel Goodman, which begins – contra this book's theme – by stating that it is 'not a modern invention or a product of 20th-century culture'.113
Neither hypersexual disorder nor sexual addiction has made the terminology of the WHO ICD-10, the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases. Its 2014 iteration, ICD-10-CM, includes the categories Excessive Sexual Drive and (rather quaintly) Nymphomania, and Satyriasis under the classification F52.8, 'Other sexual dysfunction not due to a substance or known physiological condition'.114 It is possible too that those treating sex addiction could classify it under F52.9, 'Unspecified sexual dysfunction not due to a substance or known physiological condition': Sexual Dysfunction Not Otherwise Specified. But this is hardly taxonomic endorsement.
'Hypersexuality disorder is the strangest of constructs', blogged Professor Allen Frances, the head of the task force for the previous _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders_ (DSM-IV) in the 1990s, but by 2010 a fierce and energetic critic of DSM-5:
The Work Group explicitly states that it is not meant to be equated with 'Sexual Addiction' (which apparently, and fortunately, was rejected by the DSM5 group working on the 'addictions') – but then goes on to base its proposed definition exclusively on items that are borrowed directly from those used to define substance dependence. The fundamental problem with 'hypersexuality' is that it represents a half baked, poorly conceptualized medicalization of the expected variability in sexual behavior. The authors have not thought through how difficult it is to distinguish between ordinary recreational sexual misbehavior (which is very common) and sexual compulsion (which is very rare)...Sexual misbehavior should be considered 'sexual addiction' only when it is compulsive, no longer pleasure-driven, and continues despite great costs that obviously outweigh any gain.115
Though sexual disorders were not his area of specific academic expertise, Frances was able to summarize the dangers of this sexual classification.
The authors are trying to provide a diagnosis for the small group whose sexual behaviors are compulsive – but their label would quickly expand to provide a psychiatric excuse for the very large group whose misbehaviors are pleasure-driven, recreational, and impulsive. The offloading of personal responsibility in this way has already captured the public and media fancy and would spread like wildfire. Making an official mental disorder category of 'hypersexuality' would also have serious unintended forensic consequences in the evaluations of sexually violent predators (SVP).116
Hypersexuality was sexual addiction in a new guise. It was poorly researched as a category – he referred in the same piece to 'a veneer of research support'.117 It had blurred boundaries: how really did one distinguish promiscuity from disorder? It had potentially unhelpful popular/media appeal. And, most compellingly for Frances, given his experience of DSM-IV, once awarded the imprimatur of the American Psychiatric Association the diagnosis would have unpredictable as well as predictable consequences. A resultant rise in diagnosed sex addicts, treatment centres and medication was entirely expectable: Frances, the former chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University, wrote elsewhere of a road to 'massive over-diagnosis and harmful medication'.118 But the history of psychiatry had shown that there were always unimagined repercussions, and he was especially concerned by possible legal manipulation of psychiatric categories. His reference to SVPs in the quote just given was to those who, under the sexually violent predator commitment laws active in many US states, had been detained indefinitely when classified as suffering from a mental disorder.119 This use of the notoriously vague DSM category 'Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified' to commit rapists – a diagnosis that DSM-IV-TR employed to indicate 'diagnostic uncertainty', a 'waste basket diagnosis' – was no trivial matter.120 As one commentator put it, 'While such license may have its place in clinical settings where the major consequence of its use is the ability of the clinician to bill third-party payers, in the forensic context, the unbridled use of NOS categories may have critical consequences for case outcome.'121 The American Psychiatric Association, the overseer of the DSMs, was opposed to the commitment laws, which they saw as threatening the integrity of psychiatry.122 Imagine the ramifications, then, if the law could actually employ a recognized, unambiguous, legitimate, psychiatric category.123 Hence Frances's concern about the inclusion of hypersexuality (sexual addiction) in DSM-5.
More generally, Frances was alarmed at the prospect of a surge of mental disorder through the introduction of new categories and the lowering of diagnostic thresholds.
DSM5 would create tens of millions of newly misidentified false positive 'patients', thus greatly exacerbating the problems caused already by an overly inclusive DSM4. There would be massive overtreatment with medications that are unnecessary, expensive, and often quite harmful. DSM5 appears to be promoting what we have most feared – the inclusion of many normal variants under the rubric of mental illness, with the result that the core concept of 'mental disorder' is greatly undermined.124
Hypersexual disorder was part of this threatened diagnostic inflation.
A thoughtful article in _Clinical Social Work Journal_ by Jerome C. Wakefield, the co-author of _Loss of Sadness_ (2007), was similarly, devastatingly critical of the syndrome's inclusion in DSM-5.125 There was no credible evidence that there was any disorder. The proposed new category 'merely provides a label that presupposes there is a dysfunction, thus assuming what has to be proved'.126
Ultimately, hypersexuality did not make the final cut for DSM-5. If it had, we could postulate, the ramifications would have been immense. When its inclusion seemed possible, the psychiatrist Charles Samenow anticipated a list of benefits: diagnostic legitimacy, 'increased education and advocacy', greater prominence in health training, insurance reimbursement for treatment and an influx of 'research dollars'.127 Critics, on the other hand, as we have seen, were concerned about the repercussions of acceptance. 'Individuals and treatment centers touting their expertise in the treatment of "sexual addiction" have been sprouting up without standardized diagnostic criteria, studies of effectiveness, and often without acknowledging that their treatment program is experimental', Moser wrote in opposition to the proposed new diagnosis; 'Adopting this proposal would validate these ethically questionable activities.'128
We have argued in this book that journalists, researchers and therapists have persisted in the use of the term without really interrogating its viability. Imagine if it had been authenticated by an influential manual that itself has been criticized in the past for creating reified disorders – an 'unintended epistemic prison' – and enabling research projects 'that almost never questioned the diagnostic categories despite their lack of validation' – and this by a former head of the National Institute of Mental Health and, at the time that he wrote the criticisms (2010), chair of the WHO International Advisory Group on the Revision of ICD-10, Chapter V, and member of the DSM-5 Task Force.129 Take into account the impact of sex addiction charted in this book – without an official classification and acceptance in the manual used by clinicians, medical insurers and pharmaceutical marketers. Allow for the aggressive tactics of the drug companies. Assume the insurance coverage for medication and therapy unlocked by DSM endorsement. And then imagine sex addiction's counterfactual magnification with the legitimation of DSM-5. It would not have been a healthy combination.
It is certainly an anomalous state of affairs. Self-diagnosed sex addicts seek treatment from a range of agencies and programmes for what John Giugliano, a practising psychotherapist, has termed 'a disorder that has neither a name nor an established diagnosis'.130 Hence this Philadelphia practitioner could write in the same article of both the difficulties of diagnosis _and_ the treatment options available for this unclear and controversial disorder – that he himself treats.131 Its excision from DSM-IV did not prevent therapists from treating perceived sex addiction under code 302.9 'Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified': 'Distress about a pattern of repeated sexual relationships involving a succession of lovers who are experienced by the individual only as things to be used'.132 Writing under the DSM-IV regime, Jennifer Schneider explained that the syndrome might also have been classified as a paraphilia or ('less commonly') an impulse control disorder. Her list of thirteen disorders that could involve excessive sexual behaviour – for example, Bipolar Affective Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder – was included so that therapists could distinguish sexual addiction as their primary diagnosis, yet it actually demonstrated the potential for diagnostic flexibility.133 As she and her co-author had expressed it in an earlier article to the receptive readers of the journal _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, their goal was to 'demonstrate to mental health professionals that addictive sexual behaviors are indeed subsumed in various categories of the DSM-IV'.134
It is logical, then, that clinicians will also negotiate their way through the hypersexual-disorder-less DSM-5. The UK psychotherapist Paula Hall wrote 'we may never find a definition or diagnostic model acceptable for [the] diagnostic and statistical manual...But does that really matter?' She continued, 'we, in the sex therapy community, will remain open minded and focus our attention on the needs of clients'.135 In response to its exclusion from DSM-5, Alexandra Katehakis, a Los Angeles practitioner and winner of a Carnes Award, as mentioned earlier, pointed out that therapists could persist in treating the problem as the addiction that they believed existed, despite the DSM-5 verdict, or they could fit their patient's symptoms into an accepted category that they knew was not a perfect match: 'a depressive disorder, an anxiety disorder, a relational problem, or a personality disorder'.136 Martin Kafka, who had been so involved in the bid for hypersexuality disorder's acceptance and is certainly familiar with the DSM's complexities, has suggested that it now fits DSM-5's 312.89: 'Other Specified Disruptive, Impulse-Control, and Conduct Disorder', followed by the specified reason, 'hypersexual disorder'.137 A DSM sceptic, Gary Greenberg, has mocked its diagnostic flexibility: 'I only use a handful of the codes and by now I know them by heart. At the top of my favorites list is 309.28...Adjustment Disorder with Mixed Anxiety and Depressed Mood.'138 The DSM, he wrote, is 'a superb playbook'.139
The reader should note that the self-help groups have pressed on regardless of DSM decisions. When the fifty-three self-identified sex addicts who were members of the Michigan meetings of SAA were asked in the 1990s about their psychiatric diagnoses, only three (6 per cent) said that they 'had been diagnosed with a sexual disorder classified in the DSM-IV'.140
While there is little doubting the impact of the discourse, the strange situation of sex addiction's clinical and popular impact without the imprimatur of the American Psychiatric Association has meant a continuing search for legitimacy, an uncertainty in psychological classification. It may only be a matter of time (though the authors of this book hope not), as DSM-5 has included Gambling Disorder as its only Non-Substance-Related Disorder under the wider category 'Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders' and listed Internet Gaming Disorder among its conditions warranting further study.141 The Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health (SASH), which grew directly out of what we have been calling the sex addiction industry as the professional organization of sex addiction therapists, has taken some encouragement from the new category 'Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders', which it wishfully shortened to 'Addiction and Related Disorders', stating in its own journal _Sexual Addictions & Compulsivity_, 'This change recognizes emerging research that supports behavioral/process addictions as being similar to substance use disorders in terms of common neurobiological mechanisms in the brain.'142
The door, then, seems both open and shut. It is ajar in the sense that DSM-5 has established the concept of behavioural addiction – the ever-alert Frances warned 'Watch out for careless overdiagnosis of internet and sex addiction and the development of lucrative treatment programs to exploit these new markets.'143 (The American Society of Addiction Medicine, the professional association of physicians treating addictions, has included process addictions in its 2011 definition of addictions.144) Yet the door is blocked in the explicit refusal to recognize hypersexuality. The preamble to DSM-5's 'Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders' refers specifically to its exclusion of 'groups of repetitive behaviors, which some term _behavioral addictions_ , with such subcategories as "sex addiction", "exercise addiction", or "shopping addiction" ', explaining that 'at this time there is insufficient peer-reviewed evidence to establish the diagnostic criteria and course descriptions needed to identify these behaviors as mental disorders'.145 But why include hoarding and skin-picking as new disorders and not hypersexuality?146 Are their research bases and diagnostic criteria really so vastly superior? At the present (2014) the concept of sex addiction, as Lennard Davis has put it, continues to inhabit 'some interstitial space between science and culture'.147
Another problematic area in the history of sex addiction is the use of psychopharmacy, a subject insufficiently explored in accounts of the malady and its treatment. Pharmaceutical solutions were not mentioned in Carnes's classic sex addiction text _Out of the Shadows_ (1983), which, with its theme of a direct parallel between sexual and alcohol addictions, focused on the Twelve-Steps programme of therapy.148 Depo-Provera, lithium and Prozac were cited in his later book _Don't Call It Love_ (1991), though fleetingly and inconclusively, as a way to combat withdrawal – surprising given the author's hyperbolic invocation of the aches, shakes, itches, chills and sweats of narcotic detoxification: as he quoted a multiple addict, 'I have now experienced withdrawal from four addictions, including cocaine. By far the worst withdrawal was from my sexual addiction.'149 The subject of medication was treated tentatively. 'Speculation exists about whether medication can alleviate severe withdrawal symptoms...Because there is not yet consensus in the field, decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.'150 The multimodality approach favoured by the father-and-son psychologists Ralph and Marcus Earle in their 1995 casebook included intensive therapy, sand-play and creative art, but seemingly no use of any pharmaceutical solution.151
However, given that drugs have long been used to control sex offenders and the fact that many addictionologists saw such offending as merely a point on the spectrum of sexual addiction, it was predictable that drug therapy would be recommended for more mundane behaviour.152 We know that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were administered to compulsive gamblers in the 1990s.153 Moreover, the blurring of boundaries between diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and compulsive sexual behaviour meant that supposed sex addicts were treated with the serotonin reuptake blockers that were regularly administered to those suffering from OCD.154 It was also likely, given the side effects of many medications in this pharmaceutical age, including the libido-affecting properties of antidepressant drugs, that patients might self-medicate and doctors experiment.155 Prozac enthusiast and Providence psychiatrist Peter Kramer noticed in the early 1990s that a side effect for those on the antidepressant was trouble achieving orgasm. One of his patients, who claimed the drug made him 'feel better than well', also said that it inhibited his interest in pornography: 'on medication he felt less driven, freed of an addiction'.156 One of the contributors to a 1995 monograph on addictive behaviour in the Workshop Series of the American Psychoanalytic Association was clearly using antidepressant medication as well as psychoanalysis in his treatment of sexual compulsion and sexually addictive behaviour.157 John Sealy, a Californian psychiatrist who reported on the treatment of over 300 sex addicts in an in-patient unit during the 1990s, was also using SSRIs, including Prozac.158
Drug treatment of sexual addiction in this earlier period was marked by hit-and-miss investigation, anecdotal evidence and small-scale, non-scientific studies. Writing in 2000 for the 'next millennium', Ariel Rösler and Eliezer Witztum claimed 'an urgent need for good methodological research and carefully designed, prospective double-blind controlled studies with a large number of subjects, in order to establish whether or not SSRI medications play a beneficial role in the treatment of paraphilias'.159 Yet this need has not really inhibited the rise of pharmacological solutions for the purported malady. Indeed later discussions of sex addiction therapy have invariably included drug treatment. Successive entries on sex addiction in more recent editions of _Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry_ have devoted increasing space to pharmacological cures: a brief mention in Carnes's chapter in 2005, a whole section by Goodman in 2009.160 A 2007 update on the syndrome in the journal _Directions in Psychiatry_ , by psychiatrists for psychiatrists, outlined the employment of a range of psychopharmacological solutions – with sometimes terrifying side effects.161 The French authors of another summary for the _American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse_ in 2010 observed (like Rösler and Witztum) that they knew of 'no published large double-blind clinical trials' of the pharmacological treatment of excessive sexual behaviour, yet nonetheless outlined drug treatment, including dosages of the heavy-duty medications cyproterone acetate (CPA), a steroid, and medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA), a progesterone derivative – both characterized elsewhere as having 'a substantial number of severe side effects'.162 As recently as 2014, Carnes thought that 'Pharmacologic treatment can be helpful.' He and his co-authors referred to the use of medications commonly employed for bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, chemical addiction, compulsive gambling and Internet addiction disorder. They also noted that 'Sex addiction patients may require prosexual drugs to enhance sexual function', given the classification of erectile dysfunction and impaired sexual desire as part of the sexual addiction nosology discussed earlier.163 It must have been a delicate balancing act for such clinicians.
Martin Kafka's chapter on nonparaphilic hypersexuality in the sex therapy text _Principles and Practices of Sex Therapy_ (2007) endorsed what he termed 'encouraging' indications of the effectiveness of psychopharmacology.164 He outlined his own deployment of serotonin reuptake inhibitors (Prozac, Luvox, Paxil, Celexa, Zoloft, Lexapro) and dual-action serotonin/norepinephrine medication (Effexor-XR and Cymbalta), all used to diminish sexual activity and desire (he wrote of reducing his patients' total sexual outlets per week from 5–25 times to 1–3). However, he also used psychostimulants (Ritalin, Dexedrine, Adderall, Bupropion), which had sexually activating effects, to adjust the sexual behaviour of individual cases.165 The impression given is of both careful experimentation and diagnostic uncertainty. Kafka referred to the paucity of published data ('scant' was the word used), indecision about the optimum duration of such treatment (a year or indefinitely?) and vagueness concerning the combinations and quantities of medication, and warned of the dangers of terminating medication. He also seemed inconsistent as to whether medication should proceed in tandem with psychological counselling or only when such therapy had failed, although in his own practice (treating over 250 males) he clearly favoured the latter.166
It is likely that the testing – careful or not – will continue. Doctors at the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic in Los Angeles administered topiramate, an anticonvulsant, to a man who spent compulsively on sexual activities and who came to them 'requesting help with his "addiction to sex" '.167 Two Rochester psychiatrists reported treatment of Internet sex addiction with a combination of sertraline, used for OCD and depression, and naltrexone, a morphine-receptor antagonist approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of alcoholism.168 French clinicians writing in the US-based _Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology_ claimed to have treated the sexual addiction of a 37-year-old woman with cyproterone acetate – though how successful it really was is debatable, given the cocktail of other drugs administered for panic disorder and depression, the suicide attempt during treatment, and the episodic and dubious nature of the alleged addiction ('protracted promiscuity' at swingers' clubs).169
So the use of drugs, given contestable diagnoses and the likelihood (as we see it) that the ailment is fictional, makes for some worrying scenarios. One of the most disquieting, demonstrating the dangers of the disease mongering discussed at the beginning of this book, is the reported case of a South Carolina woman treated in a community health centre in the 1990s, first for Major Depressive Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder, then for unspecified depression, Mixed Personality Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder-Adult Type (ADD-A) and, the subject of the report, sex addiction. Her addiction was rather unreliably described: 'She engaged in sex with five men daily and two to three at a time as well as cybersex with anonymous partners and used various sexual accessories on a regular basis.' While even to non-clinicians it seems clear from the reported case summary that the patient had been sexually abused throughout her life (raped by a grandfather and by a husband) and should have been treated for that abuse, she was administered a combination of venlafaxine (an antidepressant SSRI), sodium valproate (for bipolar disorder seizures), risperidone (an anti-psychotic used for schizophrenia), paroxetine (another antidepressant) and methylphenidate (for her ADD-A: Ritalin is a methylphenidate). Though it was claimed the woman reported a diminution in her sexual cravings, it is unclear whether the reported 'control' of her addiction would have met addictionology criteria: she still engaged in cybersex.170 The same clinician had earlier reported that Prozac had curtailed the homosexual drive of a male patient, but this psychiatrist's trademark cocktail of other drugs administered to the patient – Ritalin, Wellbutrin, Risperdal, lithium – as well as the subject's desire to curtail his homosexual activities, muddied the diagnostic waters somewhat.171
Mike Tyson's autobiography listed the medication that he was given during his addiction treatment, a long inventory that included (in alphabetical order) Abilify, Cymbalta, Depakote, Neurontin, Wellbutrin XL and Zyprexa.172 Though he was no pharmacologist, and would wean himself off these drugs idiosyncratically with his 'own regimen' of Chinese herbs and cocaine, he recalled the practical effects of such multiple treatment: 'The doctors from Wonderland had me on so many meds I was totally lethargic.'173 'One was a mood stabilizer. Two were antidepressants. Two were mood regulators for bipolar disorder. And one was used to treat epilepsy, something I never had.'174 Little surprise that he was listless. Abilify was indeed used to treat bipolar disorder or manic depression as well as schizophrenia and autism, Cymbalta for depression and anxiety, and Depakote for seizures and manic depression. Neurontin was the anti-epileptic drug for his nonexistent epilepsy. Wellbutrin was yet another antidepressant. And Zyprexa was used, like Abilify, for schizophrenia and manic depression.
In truth, there has been little improvement on the methodological weaknesses detected in the previous millennium. Reef Karim's 2009 presentation to the California Society of Addiction Medicine noted both the absence of specifically approved medicines for sexual compulsivity and a paucity of research data, but then went on – in a paper called 'Cutting Edge Pharmacology for Sex Addiction' – to discuss the use of a range of pharmacological treatments for that very problem.175 A 2013 review of the literature by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and George Washington University wrote damningly of 'significant methodological limitations' and 'generally compromised methodologies' in the research on pharmacology and hypersexual disorder, including an imprecision in the identification of the tested condition (disorders overlap), skewed representation in subjects, lack of randomization and control, inconsistency of dosage, failure to take into account concurrent other treatments, lack of consistency in measurement, absence of longer-term follow-up, and incomplete consideration of side effects. Ironically, they reported, the one double-blind, placebo trial approaching any statistical and methodological validity actually demonstrated little difference in the effects of the tested drug and its control.176 A consistent problem in these studies has been the self-selective nature of the participants. (Most of Carnes's work has been based on those presenting to him as sex addicts.) The gay and bisexual men who were part of the double-blind placebo trial, as the researchers themselves noted, had an 'obvious bias toward wanting to reduce problematic sexual behaviors, and anticipating doing so could have influenced both treatment groups' (those taking the SSRI citalopram, the tested drug, and those not).177
The pharmaceutical companies have not embraced the disorder as they have what are claimed to be other mental illnesses: the contrast with the mass marketing of antidepressants is palpable. Perhaps this is because sex addiction does not have the sheer numbers required to engage the interest of the large drug companies and does have a clientele that, due to their socio-economic or age profile, are less likely to fall into the orbit of Medicaid or Medicare, and because of a lack of DSM recognition do not unambiguously qualify for health insurance cover anyway. The drug companies are more likely to be marketing treatments for erectile dysfunction (including enhanced sexual performance) in the form of Viagra than they are treatments for sexual addiction.178
If the drug companies were to become more focused on the treatment of sex addiction or hypersexuality, the outcome could be frightening. The short 'Am I a Sex Addict?' questionnaires in the quick-screening format – easily adaptable to self-testing – mimic the pharmaceutical company Pfizer's sponsored Prime-MD (Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders), designed to detect what were then considered the common mental disorders – psychosomatic, depressive, anxiety, alcohol and eating – and marketed to physicians in the 1990s.179 Prime-MD's drug-company links were unambiguous. Critics have described it as 'the Alaskan Pipeline for the pharmaceuticals, a method of gaining direct access to an immense new market'.180 Its later iterations, the GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) and PHQ (Patient Health Questionnaire) Screeners, are similar points-based, rapid diagnoses comparable to various sex addiction tests. They (GAD and PHQ) are currently (2014) available at www.pfizer.com.181
Historically speaking, the role of psychopharmacology in the treatment of hypersexual disorder/sex addiction is in its early stages. Yet Edward Shorter's characterization of the wider world of psychiatric drug use as the 'Wild West' certainly seems applicable to this more focused field – and to sex addiction's diagnostic and treatment regimes more generally.182 It is a disordered disorder.
## Notes
1 M. Klein, 'You're Addicted to What?', TheHumanist.com, 28 June 2012: <http://thehumanist.com/magazine/july-august-2012/features/youre-addicted-to-what>. 2 R. E. Vatz, L. S. Weinberg and T. S. Szasz, 'Why Does Television Grovel at the Altar of Psychiatry?, _The Washington Post_ , 15 September 1985. 3 Ibid. 4 J. N. Hook and others, 'Measuring Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity: A Critical Review of Instruments', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 36:3 (2010), 227–60. 5 PsycINFO search on 27 March 2014. We are grateful to Philip Abela of the University of Auckland Library for carrying out this search. The total was 1,938 results for sex* addict*, sex* compuls*, sex* impuls*, compulsive sexual behav*, hypersexual disorder*, hypersexual*. 6 R. C. Reid and B. N. Carpenter, 'Exploring the Relationships of Psychopathology in Hypersexual Patients Using the MMPI-2', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 35:4 (2009), 294–310. 7 K. Skegg, S. Nada-Raja, N. Dickson and C. Paul, 'Perceived "Out of Control" Sexual Behaviour in a Cohort of Young Adults from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 39:4 (2010), 968–78. 8 Hook and others, 'Measuring Sexual Addiction'. 9 M. L. Wainberg and others, 'A Double-Blind Study of Citalopram Versus Placebo in the Treatment of Compulsive Sexual Behaviors in Gay and Bisexual Men', _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ , 67:12 (2006), 1968–73; K. R. McBride, M. Reece and S. A. Sanders, 'Predicting Negative Outcomes of Sexuality Using the Compulsive Behavior Inventory', _International Journal of Sexual Health_ , 19:4 (2008), 51–62; R. C. Reid, B. N. Carpenter and T. Q. Lloyd, 'Assessing Psychological Symptom Patterns of Patients Seeking Help for Hypersexual Behavior', _Sexual and Relationship Therapy_ , 24:1 (2009), 47–63; P. Hall, 'A New Classification Model for Sex Addiction', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 20:4 (2013), 279–91; J. T. Parsons and others, 'A Psychometric Investigation of the Hypersexual Disorder Screening Inventory Among Highly Sexually Active Gay and Bisexual Men: An Item Response Theory Analysis', _Journal of Sexual Medicine_ , 10:12 (2013), 3088–101. 10 P. J. Carnes and others, 'PATHOS: A Brief Screening Application for Assessing Sexual Addiction', _Journal of Addiction Medicine_ , 6:1 (2012), 29–34. 11 S. D. Womack and others, 'Measuring Hypersexual Behavior', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 20:1–2 (2013), 65–78. 12 S. C. Kalichman and D. Rompa, 'The Sexual Compulsivity Scale: Further Development and Use With HIV-Positive Persons', _Journal of Personality Assessment_ , 76:3 (2001), 379–95; Reid, Carpenter and Lloyd, 'Assessing Psychological Symptom Patterns of Patients'; R. C. Reid, J. E. Bramen, A. Anderson and M. S. Cohen, 'Mindfulness, Emotional Dysregulation, Impulsivity, and Stress Proneness Among Hypersexual Patients', _Journal of Clinical Psychology_ , 70:4 (2014), 313–21; J. E. Pachankis and others, 'The Role of Maladaptive Cognitions in Hypersexuality Among Highly Sexually Active Gay and Bisexual Men', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 43:4 (2014), 669–83; R. C. Reid, J. Temko, J. F. Moghaddam and T. F. Fong, 'Shame, Rumination, and Self-Compassion in Men Assessed for Hypersexual Disorder', _Journal of Psychiatric Practice_ , 20:4 (2014), 260–8. 13 M. Spenhoff, T. H. C. Kruger, U. Hartman and J. Kobs, 'Hypersexual Behavior in an Online Sample of Males: Associations with Personal Distress and Functional Impairment', _Journal of Sexual Medicine_ , 10:12 (2013), 2996–3005, esp. 3003. 14 Womack and others, 'Measuring Hypersexual Behavior', 74. 15 Ibid., 67, 73. 16 S. Cheever, _Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction_ (New York, 2008), pp. 122–4. 17 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-DzAewSJzk>. 18 L. J. Schwartz, _Out of Bondage: Memoirs of a Sex Addict_ (Pittsburgh, PA, 2009), Ebook, p. 180. 19 W. M. Edwards, D. Delmonico and E. Griffin, _Cybersex Unplugged: Finding Sexual Health in an Electronic World_ (Lexington, KY, 2011), pp. 65–71. 20 J. D. Levin, _The Clinton Syndrome: The President and the Self-Destructive Nature of Sexual Addiction_ (Rocklin, CA, 1998), p. 160. 21 D. J. Ley, _The Myth of Sex Addiction_ (Lanham, MD, 2012), p. 128. 22 D. W. Black, L. L. D. Kehrberg, D. L. Flumerfelt and S. S. Schlosser, 'Characteristics of 36 Subjects Reporting Compulsive Sexual Behavior', _American Journal of Psychiatry_ , 154:2 (1997), 243–9. 23 S. D. Schaffer and M. L. Zimmerman, 'The Sexual Addict: A Challenge For the Primary Care Provider', _Nurse Practitioner_ , 15:6 (1990), 25–33, quote at 28. 24 C. Coleman-Kennedy and A. Pendley, 'Assessment and Diagnosis of Sexual Addiction', _Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association_ , 8:5 (2002), 143–51, quote at 143. 25 S. Sussman, N. Lisha and M. Griffiths, 'Prevalence of the Addictions: A Problem of the Majority or Minority?', _Evaluation & the Health Professions_, 34:1 (2011), 3–56, quote at 3. 26 G. N. Dawson and D. E. Warren, 'Curbside Consultation: Evaluating and Treating Sex Addiction', _American Family Physician_ , 86:1 (2012), 74–6. 27 E. Griffin-Shelley, _Sex and Love: Addiction, Treatment, and Recovery_ (Westport, CT, 1997), pp. 76–86, 90, 197–203. 28 M. P. Kafka, 'Nonparaphilic Hypersexuality Disorders', in Y. M. Binik and K. S. K. Hall (eds.), _Principles and Practices of Sex Therapy, Fifth Edition_ (New York, 2014), ch. 13, quotes at pp. 287, 299. 29 P. J. Carnes, R. E. Murray and L. Charpentier, 'Bargains With Chaos: Sex Addicts and Addiction Interaction Disorder', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 12:2–3 (2005), 79–120. 30 Ibid. 31 K. P. Rosenberg, P. Carnes and S. O'Connor, 'Evaluation and Treatment of Sex Addiction', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 40:2 (2014), 77–91, quote at 82. 32 Carnes, Murray and Charpentier, 'Bargains With Chaos', 3, 4. 33 Ibid., 9. 34 P. Carnes, _The Sexual Addiction_ (Minneapolis, 1984), ch. 2. First published in 1983. 35 A. W. Schaef, _Escape from Intimacy_ (New York, 1989), pp. 30–3, 42. 36 H. Keane, 'Taxonomies of Desire: Sex Addiction and the Ethics of Intimacy', _International Journal of Critical Psychology_ , 1:3 (2001), 9–28, quote at 11. 37 Griffin-Shelley, _Sex and Love_ , ch. 2, quote at p. 25. 38 R. H. Earle and M. R. Earle, with K. Osborn, _Sex Addiction: Case Studies and Management_ (New York, 1995). 39 Rosenberg, Carnes and O'Connor, 'Evaluation and Treatment of Sex Addiction', 85. 40 Schaef, _Escape from Intimacy_ , p. 22. 41 Edwards, Delmonico and Griffin, _Cybersex Unplugged_ , p. 4. 42 J. Laurance, 'Sex Addiction: The Facts from the Fruity Fiction', _The Independent_ , 30 April 2008. 43 O. Vesga-Lopez, A. Schmidt and C. Blanco, 'Update on Sexual Addictions', _Directions in Psychiatry_ , 27:12 (2007), 143–57. 44 J. Moorhead, 'Sex Addiction: The Truth About a Modern Phenomenon', _The Independent_ , 2 December 2012. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 S. A. Hardy, J. Ruchty, T. D. Hull and R. Hyde, 'A Preliminary Study of an Online Psychoeducational Program for Hypersexuality', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 17:4 (2010), 247–69; R. Gilliland, M. South, B. N. Carpenter and S. A. Hardy, 'The Roles of Shame and Guilt in Hypersexual Behavior', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 18:1 (2011), 12–29. 48 Gilliland, South, Carpenter and Hardy, 'The Roles of Shame and Guilt', 12, 15. 49 J. Morgenstern and others, 'Non-Paraphilic Compulsive Sexual Behavior and Psychiatric Co-Morbidities in Gay and Bisexual Men', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 18:3 (2011), 114–34, quote at 117–18. 50 J. T. Parsons and others, 'Accounting for the Social Triggers of Sexual Compulsivity', _Journal of Addictive Diseases_ , 26:3 (2007), 5–16. 51 P. J. Wright, 'Communicative Dynamics and Recovery from Sexual Addiction: An Inconsistent Nurturing as Control Theory Analysis', _Communication Quarterly_ , 59:4 (2011), 395–414. 52 A. Cooper, D. L. Delmonico and R. Burg, 'Cybersex Users, Abusers, and Compulsives: New Findings and Implications', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 7:1–2 (2000), 5–29, at 8. 53 Ibid. 54 S. C. Kalichman and D. Cain, 'The Relationship Between Indicators of Sexual Compulsivity and High Risk Sexual Practices Among Men and Women Receiving Services from a Sexually Transmitted Infection Clinic', _Journal of Sex Research_ , 41:3 (2004), 235–41, at 237. 55 Ibid., 238. 56 Ibid., 239. 57 B. C. Kelly and others, 'Sexual Compulsivity and Sexual Behaviors Among Gay and Bisexual Men and Lesbian and Bisexual Women', _Journal of Sex Research_ , 46:4 (2009), 301–8, at 306. 58 Ibid., 305. 59 J. M. Kuzma and D. M. Black, 'Epidemiology, Prevalence, and Natural History of Compulsive Sexual Behavior', _Psychiatric Clinics of North America_ , 31:4 (2008), 603–11, quote at 609. 60 M. H. Miner and E. Coleman, 'Compulsive Sexual Behavior and its Relationship to Risky Sexual Behavior', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 20:1–2 (2013), 127–38, quote at 134. Emphasis in original. 61 S. N. Gold and C. L. Heffner, 'Sexual Addiction: Many Conceptions, Minimal Data', _Clinical Psychology Review_ , 18:3 (1998), 367–81. 62 M. Griffiths, 'Sex on the Internet: Observations and Implications for Internet Sex Addiction', _Journal of Sex Research_ , 38:4 (2001), 333–42, quote at 339. 63 Hook and others, 'Measuring Sexual Addiction', 256. 64 Black and others, 'Characteristics of 36 Subjects', 243. 65 A. Kor, Y. A. Fogel, R. C. Reid and M. N. Potenza, 'Should Hypersexual Disorder be Classified as an Addiction?', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 20:1–2 (2013), 27–47, quote at 40. 66 R. C. Reid, 'Personal Perspectives on Hypersexual Disorder', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 20:1–2 (2013), 4–18, quote at 6. 67 L. J. Davis, _Obsession: A History_ (Chicago, 2008), p. 185. 68 C. Moser, 'Hypersexual Disorder: Just More Muddled Thinking', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 40:2 (2011), 227–9, quote at 229. 69 Ley, _Myth of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 3. 70 D. Ley, N. Prause and P. Finn, 'The Emperor Has No Clothes: A Review of the "Pornography Addiction" Model', _Current Sexual Health Reports_ , 6:2 (2014), 94–105, quote at 94. 71 J. Bancroft and Z. Vukadinovic, 'Sexual Addiction, Sexual Compulsivity, Sexual Impulsivity, or What? Toward a Theoretical Model', _Journal of Sex Research_ , 41:3 (2004), 225–34. 72 Ibid., 225. 73 Ibid., 233. Bancroft reiterated this opinion in 2008: J. Bancroft, 'Sexual Behavior that is "Out of Control": A Theoretical Approach', _Psychiatric Clinics of North America_ , 31:4 (2008), 593–601. 74 T. Todd, 'Premature Ejaculation of "Sexual Addiction" Diagnoses', in S. Green and D. Flemons (eds.), _Quickies: The Handbook of Brief Sex Therapy_ (New York, 2004), ch. 5, quote at p. 69. 75 J. N. Hook and others, 'Methodological Review of Treatments for Nonparaphilic Hypersexual Behavior', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 40:4 (2014), 294–308, quote at 303. 76 S. Rickards and M. A. Laaser, 'Sexual Acting Out in Borderline Women: Impulsive Self-Destructiveness or Sexual Addiction/Compulsivity?', in P. J. Carnes and K. M. Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ (New York, 2002), ch. 17, quote at p. 272. Originally published in 1999. 77 M. C. Fulton, 'Breaking Through Defenses', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 3, quotes at p. 41. Originally published in 1999. 78 See M. R. Laaser and K. M. Adams, 'Pastors and Sex Addiction', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 18, quote at p. 294. Originally published in 1997. 79 M. Wilson, 'Art Therapy: Treating the Invisible Sex Addict', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 11, at pp. 167, 171. 80 See K. McGill, 'The Homeless and Sex Addiction', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 20. 81 Schaffer and Zimmerman, 'The Sexual Addict', 25, 28. 82 Todd, 'Premature Ejaculation of "Sexual Addiction" Diagnoses', pp. 71, 74, 79. 83 G. Nixon and B. N. Theriault, 'Nondual Psychotherapy and Second Stage Sexual Addictions Recovery: Transforming "Master of the Universe" Narcissism into Nondual Being', _International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction_ , 10:3 (2012), 368–85, quote at 380. 84 A. Ornstein, 'Erotic Passion: A Form of Addiction', in S. Dowling (ed.), _The Psychology and Treatment of Addictive Behavior_ (Madison, CT, 1995), ch. 5; W. A. Myers, 'Sexual Addiction', in Dowling (ed.), _Psychology and Treatment of Addictive Behavior_ , ch. 6. 85 Though see T. M. Tays, B. Garrett and R. E. Earle, 'Clinical Boundary Issues With Sexually Addicted Clients', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 7; J. P. Schneider, 'Understanding and Diagnosing Sex Addiction', in R. H. Coombs (ed.), _Handbook of Addictive Disorders: A Practical Guide to Diagnosis and Treatment_ (Hoboken, NJ, 2004), ch. 7, esp. pp. 224–5; R. Weiss, 'Treating Sex Addiction', in Coombs (ed.), _Handbook of Addictive Disorders_ , ch. 8, esp. pp. 257–8. 86 Ornstein, 'Erotic Passion', p. 106. 87 Myers, 'Sexual Addiction', pp. 118, 123. 88 Ibid., p. 130. 89 J. C. Cantor and others, 'A Treatment-Oriented Typology of Self-Identified Hypersexuality Referrals', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 42:5 (2013), 883–93. 90 R. M. Salisbury, 'Out of Control Sexual Behaviours: A Developing Practice Model', _Sexual and Relationship Therapy_ , 23:2 (2008), 131–9, quote at 132. 91 Ibid., 136. 92 M. P. Kafka, 'Hypersexual Disorder: A Proposed Diagnosis for DSM-V', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 39:2 (2010), 377–400. 93 Reid, Carpenter and Lloyd, 'Assessing Psychological Symptom Patterns of Patients', 48. 94 Ibid., 47. 95 Kafka, 'Hypersexual Disorder', Table 1, 379. For later modifications, see M. P. Kafka, 'The Development and Evolution of the Criteria for a Newly Proposed Diagnosis for DSM-5: Hypersexual Disorder', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 20:1–2 (2013), 19–26; J. C. Wakefield, 'The DSM-5's Proposed New Categories of Sexual Disorder: The Problem of False Positives in Sexual Diagnosis', _Clinical Social Work Journal_ , 40:2 (2012), 213–23. 96 C. P. Samenow, 'Editorial: What You Should Know about Hypersexual Disorder', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 18:3 (2011), 107–13. 97 Kafka, 'Hypersexual Disorder', 381. Once a day does not seem especially hypersexual. 98 J. Winters, K. Christoff and B. B. Gorzalka, 'Dysregulated Sexuality and High Sexual Desire: Distinct Constructs?', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 39:5 (2010), 1029–43, esp. 1032–4. There were 14,396 participants, but 11,219 completed all the questionnaires (1032). 99 J. Winters, ' 'Hypersexual Disorder: A More Cautious Approach', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 39:3 (2010), 594–6, quote at 595. 100 Ibid., 594. 101 N. J. Rinehart and M. P. McCabe, 'Hypersexuality: Psychopathology or Normal Variant of Sexuality?', _Sexual and Marital Therapy_ , 12:1 (1997), 45–60, quote at 59. 102 For such critiques, see Moser, 'Hypersexual Disorder: Just More Muddled Thinking', 227–9; Wakefield, 'DSM-5's Proposed New Categories', 215–18. 103 Moser, 'Hypersexual Disorder: Just More Muddled Thinking', 228. 104 Spenhoff, Kruger, Hartman and Kobs, 'Hypersexual Behavior in an Online Sample of Males', 2999. 105 D. Wines, 'Exploring the Applicability of the Criteria for Substance Dependence to Sexual Addiction', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 4:3 (1997), 195–200, at 209. The point being made is ours and not Wines's. 106 C. Moser, 'Hypersexual Disorder: Searching for Clarity', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 20:1–2 (2013), 48–58, quote at 52. 107 For the changing definitions, see Wakefield, 'DSM-5's Proposed New Categories', 215–18; Kafka, 'Development and Evolution of the Criteria', 19–26. 108 _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition – Revised): DSM-III-R_ (Washington, DC, 1987), p. 296. 109 H. I. Kaplan and B. J. Sadock (eds.), _Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Sixth Edition_ , 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1995), vol. 1, pp. 1311–13. 110 V. A. Sadock, 'Normal Human Sexuality and Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders', in B. J. Sadock and V. A. Sadock (eds.), _Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Seventh Edition_, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 1598–9. Emphasis in original. 111 Ibid, vol. 1, pp. 1599–60. 112 P. J. Carnes, 'Sexual Addiction', in Sadock and Sadock (eds.), _Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Eighth Edition_, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 2005), vol. 1, pp. 1991–2001. 113 A. Goodman, 'Sexual Addiction', in B. J. Sadock, V. A. Sadock and P. Ruiz (eds.), _Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Ninth Edition_, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 2009), vol. 1, pp. 2111–27. 114 _International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM), Tabular List of Diseases and Injuries_ (Geneva, 2014), p. 225. 115 A. Frances, 'DSM5 and Sexual Disorders – Just Say No', _Psychology Today_ , 17 March 2010: <http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/dsm5-and-sexual-disorders-%E2%80%94-just-say-no>. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. 118 A. Frances, 'DSM 5 Is Guide Not Bible – Ignore Its Ten Worst Changes', _Psychology Today_ , 2 December 2012: <http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201212/dsm-5-is-guide-not-bible-ignore-its-ten-worst-changes>. 119 See A. Frances, S. Sreenivasan and L. E. Weinberger, 'Defining Mental Disorder When It Really Counts: DSM-IV-TR and SVP/SDP Statutes', _Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law_ , 36:3 (2008), 375–84; M. B. First and R. B. Halon, 'Use of DSM Paraphilia Diagnoses in Sexually Violent Predator Cases', _Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law_ , 36:4 (2008), 443–54; R. A. Prentky, A. I. Coward and A. M. Gabriel, 'Commentary: Muddy Diagnostic Waters in the SVP Courtroom', _Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law_ , 36:4 (2008), 455–8; T. K. Zander, 'Commentary: Inventing Diagnosis for Civil Commitment of Rapists', _Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law_ , 36:4 (2008), 459–69; M. Testa and S. G. West, 'Civil Commitment in the United States', _Psychiatry (Edgemont)_ , 7:10 (2010), 30–40, esp. 35–6. 120 Zander, 'Commentary', 464, 465. 121 Ibid., 464. 122 Ibid., 460. 123 David Ley is currently working on the uncritical use of the concept of sex addiction in a variety of US legal proceedings. Personal communication, 29 July 2014. 124 A. Frances, 'Opening Pandora's Box: The 19 Worst Suggestions for DSM5', _Psychiatric Times_ , 11 February 2010: <http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/dsm-v/content/article/10168/1522341>. 125 Wakefield, 'DSM-5's Proposed New Categories', 215–18. 126 Ibid., 216. 127 Samenow, 'Editorial: What You Should Know about Hypersexual Disorder', 110. 128 Moser, 'Hypersexual Disorder: Just More Muddled Thinking', 228–9. 129 S. E. Hyman, 'The Diagnosis of Mental Disorders: The Problem of Reification', _Annual Review of Clinical Psychology_ , 6 (2010), 155–79, quotes at 157. 130 J. R. Giugliano, 'Sex Addiction as a Mental Health Diagnosis: Coming Together or Coming Apart', _Sexologies_ , 22:3 (2013), 109–11, quote at 109. 131 J. R. Giugliano, 'Sexual Addiction: Diagnostic Problems', _International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction_ , 7:2 (2009), 283–94. See his entry on the SASH website: <http://www.sash.net/john-giugliano-phd>. 132 _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fourth Edition): DSM-IV_ (Washington, DC, 1994), p. 538. 133 Schneider, 'Understanding and Diagnosing Sex Addiction', pp. 221–2, quote at p. 221. 134 J. P. Schneider and R. Irons, 'Differential Diagnosis of Addictive Sexual Disorders Using the DSM-IV', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 3:1 (1996), 7–21, quote at 8–9. 135 P. Hall, 'Sex Addiction – An Extraordinarily Contentious Problem', _Sexual and Relationship Therapy_ , 29:1 (2014), 68–75, quote at 74. 136 A. Katehakis, 'Sex Addiction Beyond the DSM-V', _Psychology Today_ , 21 December 2012: <http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-lies-trauma/201212/sex-addiction-beyond-the-dsm-v>. 137 Kafka, 'Nonparaphilic Hypersexuality Disorders', p. 285; _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fifth Edition): DSM-5_ (Washington, DC, 2013), p. 479. See also M. Kafka, ' 'What Happened to Hypersexual Disorder?', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , first published online: 21 June 2014. 138 G. Greenberg, _The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry_ (London, 2013), p. 68. 139 Ibid., p. 71. 140 D. Wines, 'Exploring the Applicability of the Criteria for Substance Dependence to Sexual Addiction', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 4:3 (1997), 195–200, at 209. 141 DSM-5, pp. 585–9, 795–8. 142 C. P. Samenow, 'Editorial: SASH Policy Statement (Revised): The Future of Problematic Sexual Behaviors/Sexual Addiction', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 20:4 (2013), 255–8, quote at 255. 143 Frances, 'DSM 5 Is Guide Not Bible'. 144 D. E. Smith, 'Editor's Note: The Process Addictions and the New ASAM Definition of Addiction', _Journal of Psychoactive Drugs_ , 44:1 (2012), 1–4. 145 DSM-5, p. 481. 146 Ibid., pp. 247–51, 254–7. 147 Davis, _Obsession_ , p. 171. 148 P. Carnes, _Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction_ (Minneapolis, 1983). 149 P. Carnes, _Don't Call It Love: Recovery from Sexual Addiction_ (New York, 1991), p. 223. 150 Ibid., p. 224. 151 Earle and Earle, _Sex Addiction_. Though they were aware of the use of SSRIs to control 'sexual obsessions': p. 11. 152 A. Rösler and E. Witztum, 'Pharmacotherapy of the Paraphilias in the Next Millennium', _Behavioral Sciences and the Law_ , 18:1 (2000), 43–56; T. Suarez and others, 'Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors as a Treatment for Sexual Compulsivity', in A. O'Leary (ed.), _Beyond Condoms: Alternative Approaches to HIV Prevention_ (New York, 2002), ch. 9, esp. p. 212; V. L. Codispoti, 'Pharmacology of Sexually Compulsive Behavior', _Psychiatric Clinics of North America_ , 31:4 (2008), 671–9; A. A. Assumpção and others, 'Pharmacologic Treatment of Paraphilias', _Psychiatric Clinics of North America_ , 37:2 (2014), 173–81. 153 See studies cited in Suarez and others, 'Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors as a Treatment for Sexual Compulsivity', p. 211. 154 D. J. Stein and others, 'Serotonergic Medications for Sexual Obsessions, Sexual Addictions, and Paraphilias', _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ , 53:8 (1992), 267–71. 155 R. T. Segraves, 'Antidepressant-Induced Sexual Dysfunction', _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ , 59 (suppl. 4) (1998), 48–54. More recently, see A. Clayton, A. Keller and E. L. McGarvey, 'Burden of Phase-Specific Sexual Dysfunction With SSRIs', _Journal of Affective Disorders_ , 91:1 (2006), 27–32. 156 P. D. Kramer, _Listening to Prozac_ (New York, 1993), pp. x–xi, 316n, 366–7n, quote at pp. x–xi. 157 Myers, 'Sexual Addiction', pp. 118, 121, 123, 126, 128, 130. 158 J. R. Sealy, 'Psychopharmacological Intervention in Addictive Sexual Behavior', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 13. Originally published in 1995. 159 Rösler and E. Witztum, 'Pharmacotherapy of the Paraphilias', 51. 160 Carnes, 'Sexual Addiction', p. 1997; Goodman, 'Sexual Addiction', pp. 2120–1. 161 O. Vesga-Lopez, A. Schmidt and C. Blanco, 'Update on Sexual Addictions', _Directions in Psychiatry_ , 27:12 (2007), 143–57. 162 F. D. Garcia and F. Thibaut, 'Sexual Addictions', _American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse_ , 36:5 (2010), 254–60, esp. 258–9, quote at 258. For the side effects of these drugs, including impact on the bones, see Rösler and Witztum, 'Pharmacotherapy of the Paraphilias', 46, 47, quote at 43. 163 Rosenberg, Carnes and O'Connor, 'Evaluation and Treatment of Sex Addiction', 86, 87. 164 M. P. Kafka, 'Paraphilia-Related Disorders: The Evaluation and Treatment of Nonparaphilic Hypersexuality', in S. R. Leiblum (ed.), _Principles and Practices of Sex Therapy, Fourth Edition_ (New York, 2007), ch. 15, quote at p. 467. 165 Ibid., pp. 468–9. 166 Ibid., pp. 467–70, quote at p. 467. In his contribution to the _Fifth Edition_ he refers to having treated more than 500 males but his conclusions regarding psychopharmacology are the same: M. P. Kafka, 'Nonparaphilic Hypersexuality Disorders', in Y. M. Binik and K. S. K. Hall (eds.), _Principles and Practices of Sex Therapy, Fifth Edition_ (New York, 2014), ch. 13, at p. 296. 167 T. W. Fong, R. De La Garza and T. F. Newton, 'A Case Report of Topiramate in the Treatment of Nonparaphilic Sexual Addiction', _Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology_ , 25:5 (2005), 512–13, quote at 513 (Letters to the Editors). 168 J. M. Bostwick and J. A. Bucci, 'Internet Sex Addiction Treated With Naltrexone', _Mayo Clinic Proceedings_ , 83:2 (2008), 226–30. 169 R. Dardennes, N. Al Anbar and F. Rouillon, 'Episodic Sexual Addiction in a Depressed Woman Treated with Cyproterone Acetate', _Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology_ , 33:2 (2013), 274–6, quote at 275 (Letters to the Editors). 170 The case started in 1996 but was reported in 2005: J. L. Elmore, 'Psychotropic Medication Control of Non-Paraphilic Sexual Addiction in a Female', _Sexual and Relationship Therapy_ , 20:2 (2005), 211–13, quote at 212. 171 J. L. Elmore, 'Fluoxetine-Associated Remission of Ego-Dystonic Male Homosexuality', _Sexuality and Disability_ , 20:2 (2002), 149–51. 172 M. Tyson with L. Sloman, _Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography_ (London, 2013), Ebook, locs. 7202–7. 173 Ibid., loc. 7178. 174 Ibid., loc. 7207. 175 R. Karim, 'Cutting Edge Pharmacology for Sex Addiction', California Society of Addiction Medicine, 14 October 2009: <http://www.csam-asam.org/pdf/misc/Sex_Addiction.pdf>. 176 H. Naficy, C. P. Samenow and T. F. Fong, 'A Review of Pharmacological Treatments for Hypersexual Disorder', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 20:1–2 (2013), 139–53, quotes at 148. 177 Wainberg and others, 'Double-Blind Study of Citalopram Versus Placebo', 1972. 178 For Viagra, see M. Loe, _The Rise of Viagra: How the Little Blue Pill Changed Sex in America_ (New York, 2004). 179 <http://www.psy-world.com/prime-md_print1.htm>. 180 H. Kutchins and S. A. Kirk, _Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders_ (New York, 1997), p. 13. 181 See _Instruction Manual: Instructions for Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) and GAD-7 Measures_ : <http://www.phqscreeners.com/overview.aspx>. 182 E. Shorter, _Before Prozac: The Troubled History of Mood Disorders in Psychiatry_ (Oxford, 2009), p. 209.
# Chapter 7
Sexual Conservatism
One of the strategies of the New Right's puritanism in sex therapy has been to set an arbitrary ideological norm for coital and orgasmic frequency. Frequency above the norm is defined as abnormal and is named _sexual addiction_.
John Money, 19991
'Our society is deteriorating at an alarming rate'; it was with these words that Anne Wilson Schaef began her 1987 bestseller on addicts in an addictive society.2 A chapter in an early collection on the treatment of sex addicts referred, in similarly doom-laden vein, to a purported rise in sexually transmitted diseases, pornography, unsafe sexual practices, '[s]exually related exposés and arrests' and the availability of phone sex 'even to young children'.3 Janice Irvine described 1980s sex addiction as a 'discourse of excess and control'; whatever the differences of approach, the variation in nomenclature of the support networks, or the order of the steps to recovery in the many manuals of advice, the focus was on 'the danger of uncontrolled sexuality'.4 The nurse Elizabeth Kennedy responded critically to an information piece on sex addiction in the journal _Nurse Practitioner_ in 1990 because she thought that, whatever the intentions of those who utilized the diagnosis, it played into the hands of conservatism: 'I am worried about the "sex addiction" movement', she wrote, 'during a period when the right wing is undermining reproductive rights, promoting censorship, using AIDS to discriminate against sexual minorities and in general portraying sex as destructive and dangerous.' The concept of sex addiction, she thought, colluded with the 'anti-sex movement'.5
If anything, the claims of sexual danger have intensified since sex addiction's early days. One of the features of sex addiction has been its adaptability; the way in which it responded to contemporary cultural anxieties, indeed reflected those concerns. Nowhere was this more evident than with the Internet. In the preface to his 2001 edition of _Out of the Shadows_ Patrick Carnes reflected on societal shifts since the book was first published in 1983. The 'sexual landscape' had 'changed dramatically': 'First, there was the AIDS epidemic...Then there was former President Clinton and the intern Monica Lewinsky...Almost simultaneously came the cybersex revolution.'6 And while AIDS and the Clinton affair may have indicated a cultural shift in sexual attitudes, it was the 'cybersex revolution' that seems to have had the most impact from Carnes's point of view. The new edition of _Out of the Shadows_ included a chapter on cybersex addiction as well as promotion of the significantly named _In the Shadows of the Net_ (2001), a book entirely devoted to cybersex addiction.7 The Internet has been such a game changer in the history of sex addictionology that a 2013 article in _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_ contrasted 'classic' sexual addiction with the new 'contemporary' phenomenon of 'rapid-onset sexual addiction', claimed to be a direct result of the 'explosive growth of Internet technology'.8
Online sex has achieved a privileged place in the checklist of sexual addiction. The Internet, advised the chapter on compulsive sex in a handbook for psychiatrists and psychologists, 'has introduced millions of people to a venue where the most explicit and varied sexual fantasies can be accessed all too easily, leading some men down the slippery slope of compulsivity'.9 Internet sex addiction is a double addiction: to sex and to the Internet. But the checklist of 'warning signs for cybersexual addiction' – using the Internet to find online and real-life sexual partners, 'masturbating online while engaged in erotic chat', switching gender roles, viewing pornography, sharing sexual fantasies – could, in a more sex-positive context, be read as a list of the main attractions of cybersex.10 The interpretation lies with the analyser. For the therapist of sex addiction, cybersex's 'endless variety of partners', idealized sexual encounters, 'intense orgasms from the minimal investment of a few keystrokes' and 'illusions of power and love' are indicative of sexual dysfunction: 'courtship disorder'.11 But for others this is its precise appeal and this 'world of illusions' is not at all incompatible with 'courtship' or longer-term commitment.12 As the progressive therapist Tracy Todd put it, 'society's definitions of healthy sexuality will continue to evolve. It is possible, indeed probable, that they will someday include cybersex and phone sex.'13
Marty Klein has summarized the differences between the sex-positive, sexologist clinician and therapists of the sex-negative, sex addiction movement. Twice-daily masturbation, extramarital affairs, sadomasochism, use of Internet pornography, resort to commercial sex, non-monogamy and fetishism – all were the mark of a sex addict in the sexual addiction model, whereas a clinical sexologist might diagnose such behaviour either as not necessarily a problem (the masturbation) or as sexual adventurousness (the non-monogamy).14 David Ley has similarly selected some of the characteristics of bad sex in the sex addiction framework – masturbation, fantasy – and compared them to more positive research findings published in the _Journal of Sex Research_.15 A New York qualitative study of men who had sex with men, and considered themselves to be sexually compulsive, found that even this group 'often implicitly identified harm reduction benefits of the internet'. The researchers, Christian Grov and others, recommended that 'health professionals might consider...a more nuanced assessment of internet use on a person's overall well-being, rather than assume that the internet primarily negatively impacts on sexual health'.16 Ley and his colleagues have indeed argued elsewhere that high-volume use of visual sexual stimuli, interpreted negatively by addictionologists as pornography addiction, can be viewed positively in all sorts of sexually enhancing ways including reducing the likelihood of unsafe sexual contact.17
It should be noted that the oscillation between sexual utopia and sexual hell can occur in the same discussion – even in one that assumed that such behaviour was disordered. Amusingly, David Delmonico's alarmist account of the evils of cybersex addiction ('Not all cybersex addicts are pedophiles') contained a detailed explanation of the Internet's sexual uses, including a list of the USENET forums – for example, sex.anal, sex.bestiality, sex.enemas – and Internet Relay Chat Channels – #playroom, #BIGCLITS, #fuckmywife and so on.18 Kimberly Young wrote that virtual sex could 'cater to any sexual desire or need imaginable', and she relayed stories of a Mormon grandmother indulging her fantasies in BDSM cybersex, and the 52-year-old nurse who found 'new sexual freedom online' as a dominatrix in a 'DomF4SubM' chat room –'for me, cybersex is the ultimate escape'.19 But the narrative was of inevitable progression to addiction – discovery and experimentation led to escalation, compulsivity and hopelessness – and of the treatment needed to save users: 'Internet sex addiction can have devastating effects as people can now freely explore sexual fantasies that once unlocked online can be difficult to put back inside the bottle.'20 The mixed metaphors captured the overall message. The Mormon grandmother's marriage was in trouble. The nurse's work and home life were badly affected by her liberation: 'The trouble is now I no longer want sex with my husband. I just want it from my cyberslaves. It's killing everything, my work, my marriage, but I feel helpless to stop.'21
It is ironic that so much of the popular success of sexual addiction as a concept – the impact of the self-diagnostic sex addiction tests, the web presence of the various treatment centres – is due to the influence of the Internet, and yet so much time and effort have gone into combating the perceived evils of what has proven to be such a useful servant. The website of the KeyStone Center (the treatment centre in Philadelphia where Russell Brand stayed) includes audio links, multimedia presentations, and links to nearly thirty other Internet sites where 'users' (in both senses of the term) can read about Carnes, the Twelve-Step philosophy and Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA), as well as other treatment facilities and support groups for people suffering from sex addiction.22 Carnes created the website SexHelp.com, which functions as a one-stop shop for information and links for assessment, diagnosis and therapy for the sex addict and their significant others.23 The Internet is now the first port of call for any form of self-diagnosis.
Therapists who have employed the idea of sexual compulsivity or sexual addiction have often denied that they were anti-sex and have argued that it was the issue of lack of control that was the problem. The authors of _Cybersex Unplugged_ distinguished between acceptable recreational cybersex and more problematic compulsive users.24 Eli Coleman warned professionals away from 'overpathologizing...normal sexual behavior'.25 Yet there is no denying a strong strand of sex-negativity in the discourse. An indication of what was considered non-normative heterosexual behaviour was provided in the examples of loss of sexual control given in _The Sex Addiction Workbook_ (2003): 'frequenting prostitutes, using pornography obsessively, engaging in Internet or telephone sex, having serial affairs, frequenting massage parlors, going to strip clubs obsessively, going to bathhouses for sex, frequenting topless bars obsessively, feeling driven to have sex many times a day'.26 Of the 152 patients in treatment for hypersexual disorder (144 of whom were male) in clinics in California, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah, part of a DSM-5 field trial published in 2012, most characterized their sexual disorder in terms of pornography consumption (81 per cent) and masturbation (78 per cent). Sex with 'someone other than their monogamous partner' was another 'specifier' for hypersexuality.27 The participants in the earlier-cited Candeo/Mormon study wanted 'to reduce, and in most cases completely eliminate pornography use. Many, but not all, would also like to reduce or eliminate masturbation.'28
Coleman's warning was clearly not always observed. Indeed, when Stephen Levine reviewed the cases of thirty men who had either been referred to him or self-presented for sex addiction, he found that despite the readiness of spouses (and family doctors) to attribute sexual lapses to sexual addiction, most were engaging in extramarital sex or not particularly unusual masculine behaviour: 'Many men masturbate to pornography, go to strip clubs and buy a lap dance, procure a prostitute's service, or have affairs...partner distress must be discounted as a sufficient criterion for the label.' Levine concluded that though they presented as such, 75 per cent of his patients were not sex addicts.29
Perhaps we should not be surprised by this essential illiberalism. As Charles Moser has noted, the implication behind the diagnosis of hypersexual disorder was that there was a 'healthy amount of sex (not too much, not too little, but just right)'.30 A quantitative study of media and audience discourses around celebrity sex scandals (we saw the link with alleged sexual addiction in earlier discussion) found a definite focus on heterosexuality and adultery, with noticeable reader judgementalism. The detected sexual frames in reader discussion of the scandals were 'conservative rather than liberal' and 'mostly reproduce normative values around morality and sexual conduct'.31
Critics of the concept of sexual addiction have always maintained that it was sexually conservative, defining breaches in an entirely normative moral code. An early detractor, Clark L. Taylor, an anthropologist who had read Carnes and attended one of his workshops, wrote of the addictionologists: 'The bottom line: They indicate sex for pleasure is wrong.' He noted a 'general lack of sex positive affirmation', the absence of discussion about the positive aspects of 'the use of sex to relieve anxiety' or 'how healthy it can be to watch people have sex or let people watch us or to enjoy explicit sexual materials', and that one did not hear either of those who had adjusted to AIDS or of the 'joy of multiple partners by risk reduction'. In Carnes's philosophy, Taylor continued, 'it becomes apparent that vanilla sex – judicious vaginal containment in the nuptial bed – is the only truly fulfilling, meaningful or healthy sex that exists'.32 Lawrence and Richard Siegel, who argued against the proposition that sex could be addictive, pulled no punches either:
The whole idea of 'sex addiction' is a metaphor gone amuck, and is borne out of a moralistic ideology masquerading as science. It is a concept that seems to serve no other purpose than to relegate sexual expression to the level of shameful acts, except within the extremely narrow and myopic scope of a monogamous, heterosexual marriage.
Consideration of the questions on a sex addiction screening test, they continued, would reveal 'a deep-seated bias against most forms of sexual expression'.33
The research psychoanalyst Paul Joannides has suggested that 'Someone who has strong religious beliefs might describe himself or herself as a sex addict, when another person who has similar sexual behaviors might not think anything of the kind.' He also thought that this lower definitional threshold for sex addiction would apply to some therapists as well as their patients.34 The large online study which compared self-identified sex addicts with those not being treated for hypersexuality found that, among males, the former were more likely to be religiously inclined. The researchers hypothesized that 'it is possible that a proportion of people who seek treatment for dysregulated sexuality experience increased distress due to socioethical and religious constraints on sexuality'.35 Another survey of psychology undergraduates at two Midwest universities found that the religious were more likely both to disapprove morally of pornography and to think that they were addicted to its use.36 And one could easily argue that the two Rochester psychiatrists who treated a man's 'Internet sex addiction' with sertraline and naltrexone for three years would have done better to have dealt with his 'conservative Christian beliefs' and conviction that his addiction was a result of 'negative influences from the devil'.37 In other words, a link between more conservative religious influences and belief in sex addiction seems likely. A survey of self-identified partners of sex addicts (mostly women) found that they claimed that spirituality was almost as important as therapy in coping with their situation, and that prayer and spiritual reading were the main forms that this support took.38 Carnes told Phil Donahue on his talk show in 1984 that sex addiction was linked to a background of conservative Christianity with its unhealthy attitude towards sex and that that was why the Alcoholics Anonymous-based, Twelve-Step programme with its spiritual dimension was an appropriate means of recovery.39
The sexual lapses of the male sex addicts of Meg Wilson's church-going community seemed relatively minor: viewing pornography and a 'nonphysical encounter with a woman' were sufficient to invoke charges of sexual compulsivity.40 Although Maurita Corcoran's husband had at least admitted to a hundred extramarital affairs, the threshold of defined sexual addiction was lower for some of the members of her support group. One woman had never recovered from the one affair that her husband had had; 'getting over his death to cancer had been easier than getting over his single affair that had happened more than twenty years earlier'.41
When, in an interview with _The Guardian_ 's Jon Henley, Catherine Millet recalled the promiscuity chronicled in _The Sexual Life of Catherine M_ (2001), the book that made her famous, she was careful not to invoke sexual addiction.
It's what I was truly good at – what I was the best at. I loved particularly the anonymity, the abandonment of orgies. The sensation that one was glorying in this unbelievable freedom, this transcendence. I look back on it with nothing but pleasure. It was very important to me, to my identity, my ego, but it wasn't an addiction. I was never a nymphomaniac. I did not pounce on everything that moved. I never provoked. I made myself available. I profited.42
Similarly, Helen Keane began her chapter on sex addiction with a contrast between Benoîte Groult's novel of cross-class sexual longing, _Salt On Our Skin_ (1992), and the literature of sex addiction. Both dealt with 'overwhelming and insistent erotic desire', but whereas the novel celebrated this passion, 'those at the mercy of uncontrollable desires' in sex addiction texts were 'victims of a virulent disease'.43
It must be shame that distinguishes the 'celebrity sex addict', when he or she actually exists, from the celebrity who just has lots of shameless sex. Where there is no shame there are no diagnoses. Hence the guiltless memoirs that (apart from a fleeting reference by Steven Tyler) contain no talk of sexual addiction at all despite sexual behaviour that in other life stories would be constructed and interpreted differently.44 Their sexual interactions, though excessive by most standards, are rarely medicalized in the manner encountered in the pages mentioned earlier. Tyler, no stranger to rehab, resisted the urge to pathologize: 'I had six or seven isms hung around my neck: drug addict, alcoholic, sex addict, codependent, family concerns, anger management...Oh yeah, I had a full range of life issues.' He recalled that counsellors 'were constantly trying to label me and figure me out...to make me recognize shame – feel _bad_ about my bad self'.45 Rob Lowe saw his behaviour as unrewarding but not exactly shameful.46 Brand did not self-diagnose but let his management admit him to a clinic when they convinced him that his career would be jeopardized by his behaviour: 'ambition is the most powerful force within me,' Brand explained, 'so once people convinced me that my sexual behavior might become damaging to my career, I found it easier to think of it as a flaw that needed to be remedied'.47 Keith Richards was relaxed and not especially interested in the sexual opportunities that fame brought.48 Fellow Rolling Stone Bill Wyman was matter-of-fact about everything, including the sex: 'In 1965 we sat down one evening in an hotel', he recalled, 'and worked out that since the band had started two years earlier, I'd had 278 girls, Brian 130, Mick about thirty, Keith six and Charlie none'.49
Shame has been a recurring theme in sex addiction. It has been there in clinical research: with testing of emotions, experimentation with sexualization, the Sexual False Self Scale and the evocatively named Shame Inventory.50 It surfaced in film – recall McQueen's _Shame_ and Waters's _A Dirty Shame_. The word 'shame' occurs 274 times in P. J. Carnes and K. M. Adams's edited sex addiction text _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ (2002).51 The word was there from the early days. Shame and its associated metaphor of the shadow led Carnes to change the name of his first publication from _The Sexual Addiction_ (1983) to _Out of the Shadows_ (1983).52 'As sexual compulsives, we live almost continually with shame, but often are hardly aware of it'; this was the statement of a seminar on shame organized in 1990 by the primarily gay and lesbian group Sexual Compulsives Anonymous. The pamphlet that resulted from the meetings was indeed called _Secret Shame_ (1991).53 Remember the patients who self-presented to the Toronto Sexual Behaviors Clinic as sex addicts but whose sexual behaviour was entirely in keeping with sexual norms and who were not sex addicts at all; their clinicians described them as suffering from 'Sexual Guilt' or from the 'highly restrictive sexual beliefs' of a partner.54 Todd, the sex-positive therapist, was convinced that the cursory diagnosis of sex addiction merely reinforced 'a culture of shame'.55
It is significant that PATHOS, the less-than-a-minute sexual addiction screening test, essentially measures shame:
1. Do you often find yourself preoccupied with sexual thoughts? **( **P** reoccupied)**
2. Do you hide some of your sexual behavior from others? **( **A** shamed)**
3. Have you ever sought help for sexual behavior you did not like? **( **T** reatment)**
4. Has anyone been hurt emotionally because of your sexual behavior? **( **H** urt others)**
5. Do you feel controlled by your sexual desire? **( **O** ut of control)**
6. When you have sex do you feel sad afterwards? **( **S** ad)**56
Although the devisors of the test claimed that it could 'be used to accurately detect individuals with sex addiction' and cited the high scores of those already in treatment for sex addiction compared to the lower scores of a college student sample, they were really only measuring attitudes to sex. What they termed the 'healthy' population were indeed healthy, not because they were not in treatment for sex addiction but because their attitude to sex was healthier than that of the patient sample.57 They were not ashamed; their sexual desires did not cause regret, feelings of unworthiness, disgrace or shame.
Sexual addiction is what Klein has termed 'pathology oriented'.58 Jerome Wakefield has referred to it mistaking 'highly culture-bound notions of morally proper sex' for 'biological normality'.59 In the play _Sexaholics_ 'Sex is dangerous', 'promiscuous sex can kill you' and 'Flagrant sex is a disease':
All we want, Julie...All we want is to get laid. We don't even care if it kills us. We don't even care if we create unbelievably horrible new diseases that could cripple our kids for generations and generations. We don't care, sweetheart. We wanna get laid; that's it, period!60
Jennifer Riemersma and Michael Sytsma claim that there is a new generation of rapid-onset sex addiction that is a result of 'chronic' exposure to graphic material on the Internet, a 'toxic cocktail' producing 'comorbid mood disorders, attachment ruptures, and cross-addictions'.61 Although their article did not provide keywords, they might have been 'pathologic', 'comorbid', 'toxic', 'worthlessness', 'trauma' and 'impaired'.62 Wilson's account of her husband's supposed addiction referred continually to darkness; 'dark land', 'dark feelings' and 'the dark of hopelessness' are all on the one page.63 Ricki Lake's mid-segment summary of her talk show special on sex addiction reminded her viewers 'We are looking at the dark world of women who are addicted to sex.'64 The 15-year-old 'sex addict' in _The Tyra Show_ said 'it's like I'm trapped in a dark place...I'm a prisoner'.65 Internet sex addicts 'are those who use the Internet as a forum for their sexual activities because of their propensity for _pathological_ sexual expression'.66 Keane's characterization of sexual addiction as 'the pathology of promiscuous desire' seems very apt.67
It is important to grasp that this pathology has permeated the various layers of sex addiction discourse and was not confined to talk shows and workbooks. The authors of a study of sexual compulsivity among a sample of gay, lesbian and bisexual New Yorkers referred to the 'significant public health ramifications' of the condition. 'The increased risk of HIV infection for persons who experience SC [sexual compulsivity] is perhaps one of the most threatening consequences, particularly for gay and bisexual men.'68 In his attempt to gain acceptance for his new sexual disorder, Martin Kafka stressed similar penalties. Hypersexual disorder could result in 'severe pair-bond dysfunction, marital discord, divorce, sexually transmitted diseases including HIV infection, substantial financial expenditures, job loss, and unplanned pregnancies'.69 Rory Reid and his co-researchers have written that 'Hypersexual patients often present with high levels of comorbid psychopathology including mood, anxiety, attention-deficit, and substance-related disorders.' They suffer from 'proneness to boredom...impulsivity and shame...interpersonal sensitivity, alexithymia, loneliness, and low self-esteem'. They are at 'increased risk for loss of employment, legal problems, social isolation, higher rates of divorce...and sexually transmitted infections'.70 (One is reminded of Carnes's claim on a national talk show in 1984 that car accidents were common among sex addicts because they were not focused on their driving!71) Sexual disorder indeed.
One might expect that this conservative agenda would have surfaced in sex addiction's attitude to same-sex sexual desire and acts. There were exceptions. The early 1990s self-help organization Sexual Compulsives Anonymous (SCA) aimed to help its gay and lesbian members come to terms with their sexualities rather than rejecting them: 'Success in SCA means learning to live contentedly with our sexual identity, not transcending it – much as many of us would like to.'72 But generally what we find in the story of same-sex sexual addiction is a rather tortured discussion of male homosexuality, a striking silence concerning lesbianism, and a permeating sexual conservatism. SCA, after all, rejected 'the nether-world of compulsive sex' and embraced same-sex monogamy.73
A New York sex therapist and psychologist and consultant to the Gay Men's Health Crisis reported that as early as 1982 gay men were approaching him:
In general, these men were highly anxious about AIDS and the risk that their sexual behavior seemed to hold. They reported not feeling in control of their sexual behavior, reported having more sex than they wanted, and reported feeling victimized by their frequent sexual activity, sometimes in a variety of ways beside the risk of AIDS. Many reported spending far too much time, by their own definition, in the pursuit of sex.74
This could have come straight from the pages of a sexual addiction self-help manual. A Manhattan therapist in the 1980s, who was critical of the very concept of sexual compulsion, thought that AIDS had 'created a new market for the sexual compulsion movement – people are scared to death for their very survival'.75 It was only a matter of time until the measures of sexual compulsivity were applied to gay men and such tests were used to predict 'a potential association between sexual compulsivity and HIV transmission risks'.76
Not just men were at risk, of course.77 The study of gay, lesbian and bisexual New Yorkers already referred to obviously included those other than homosexual men, indeed argued for the gendered nature of sexual compulsivity.78 However, the assumed link between hypersexuality and male homosexuality certainly stalks the literature. Lawrence Hatterer's work with 'changing' male homosexuality formed the basis for his pioneering sex addiction therapy. Most of the addictive sexual behaviour in _Changing Homosexuality in the Male_ (1970) involved same-sex sexual acts.79 In _The Pleasure Addicts_ (1980) Hatterer denied that he was arguing that 'all homosexual behavior and life-styles are addictive', drew a distinction between 'viable homosexual life-styles' and 'addictive and asocial homosexual practices', and certainly recognized homophobia as a factor in homosexual adjustment. But male, same-sex sexual interaction did form what was close to a default position in his book on the addictive process.80 His published case histories had strong homosexual content – 'Whenever I'm near Forty Second Street, with a porno shop every twenty feet, it's like I'm in a fever. Or in those movie houses, where everyone's wandering around looking for a blow job or to get jerked off.'81 His descriptions of addictive environments and sexual temptation were knowing maps of New York gay sex:
Tom's history does show that it is not easy to enter homosexual society and avoid addictive milieus. The first places homosexuals chance upon or are guided to that offer anonymity, comfort, and peer support are commercial (homosexual bars, baths, movie houses, and discos) or public (cruising neighborhoods, parks, auto rest stops, urinals, transportation stations).82
Hatterer's justification for this focus was 'because of many homosexuals' greater vulnerability to being driven into sexual addictiveness'.83 Yet we should remind ourselves that this was the author who had referred to 'recovered' homosexuals, 'homosexual illness' and 'dehomosexualizing the patient', and who certainly stressed the more negative aspects of homosexuality.84 As one of his patients challenged him, 'I don't know whether you realize it, but you often talk about homosexuals as if they are some kind of inferior people.'85
It is difficult to avoid the impression, then, that for Hatterer (and many but not all of his patients) it was the behaviour itself that was the problem. His case histories mention his self-help group Homosexuals Anonymous as 'a group where they help gay guys who don't want to be gay'.86 'He said you told him tricking like we do is like...an addiction...it starts different, but when it gets to be too much of a habit it makes you spaced-out and stuff, and you're like a sex head.'87 Hatterer's Homosexuals Anonymous appears to have been for those who were troubled by their same-sex desires.88 Homosexuality and sexual addiction were merged in the therapeutic logic of this early addictionologist.
On the one hand, male bisexual and homosexual sexual culture has been a kind of outer limit for gauging compulsive sex. What is problematic in heterosexuality may be accepted in the world of same-sex sex. If hypersexuality – masturbation, use of pornography, 'engaging in sex with multiple anonymous partners' – is an 'exaggerated expression of more socially accepted behaviors', where does that leave such actions in gay New York where norms are 'more liberal'? If the test for compulsive sexual behaviour holds up in that environment, for those recruited from online chat rooms and outside parks and bath houses rather than from SAA meetings, then the condition seems confirmed.89
On the other hand, Keane has referred to same-sex desire being considered 'guilty until proven innocent' in sex addiction discourse and written that HIV/AIDS was the addictionologists' 'trump card' in their warnings of the dangers of the sexual malady.90 As a 1989 advice book stated, 'With the devastating epidemic of AIDS transforming every casual sexual encounter into a potentially fatal one, people will certainly die as a direct consequence of sex addiction.'91 'The numbers of gay men seeking relief from sexually dependent behaviors have clearly risen with the advent of HIV and AIDS', wrote Robert Weiss in an influential sex addiction text in 2002; 'Long-term illness and death, relating in part to sexual behaviors, have vitalized the sexual recovery movement and brought forward tragic realities to the gay community.'92 Indeed some accounts treat gay men as the ground zero of sexual danger. If normal sex addicts suffer from clustered disorders or Triple Diagnosis, 'Quadruple Diagnosis' is 'common' in gay men: with comorbid substance abuse, depression, sexual compulsivity and HIV/AIDS.93 'It is a reasonable hypothesis...that homosexual male sexual addicts would report even higher occurrences of multiple addiction than do heterosexual sexual addicts', Weiss claimed.94 'Estimates indicate that rates of hypersexuality are higher among gay and bisexual men (GBM)', wrote the authors of a 2013 study, 'ranging from 14% to 28% among community examples'.95 Moreover, the symptomatic shame in the sex addiction of gay men was a double shame: ingrained shame of self as well as of sexual longings, their 'shaming and disavowed sexual histor[ies]' the more intense.96 Not much sense of gay pride for these men.
Yet AIDS and the homosexuality with which it was so firmly linked in the 1980s and 1990s have not proven as central to the sex addiction project as one might have predicted when the initial phase of the impact of AIDS was seen as an opportunity to rethink issues of sexual control. Perhaps this was because a double standard was operating with respect to homosexual sex in matters of sex addiction. With heterosexual sex, as we have seen, almost any casual encounter could come into the territory of troublesome and addictive behaviour. This contrasts with the advice given to gay male sex addicts in _Cruise Control_ (2005), which reassured the reader that
Not everyone who engages in anonymous sex, sees prostitutes, has multiple partners, is involved in the B/D-S/M or fetish scene, or participates in public sex is a sex addict. Not everyone who has affairs, unsafe sex, or keeps sexual secrets is a sex addict: indeed most people who fit these descriptions are likely not.97
Sexual addiction was thought to exist for gay men – hence _Cruise Control_ – but the moral parameters were vastly different, the definitional criteria varied. Weiss, the author of _Cruise Control_ and founder of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles, saw sexual addiction in gay men as hidden in a culture generally supportive of (safe) casual sex: 'a counterculture of unfettered sexual expression can also serve to enable the denial of men who are locked into destructive addictive sexual patterns'. (Weiss defined the line being crossed as the point at which 'you lose the ability to choose whether or not you are going to be sexual'.) Of course this invisibility only served to reinforce the claims to the ubiquity of the malady by industry practitioners. Without any verification, Weiss asserted that 'Approximately 10% of gay men are sex addicts.'98
However, this does not explain the whole picture. Addictionology has been inconsistent in its attitudes to homosexuality. The various quoted comments in the preceding pages about bath houses, Internet hooking-up, cruising, attraction to she-males and so on have implied a sense in which homosexual sex was assumed to be compulsive. This was surely what Weiss's angry interveners at a sex addiction training programme meant when they said that the concept pathologized 'gay male culture while promoting the "traditional heterosexual values of single partnership and marriage" '. Multi-partnered, casual sex was 'the birthright of gay men who had long been shamed enough for their sexual choices'.99 Harrison's sexual behaviour in a case study presented in an issue of the _Journal of Social Work Practice_ (2001), amidst dire warnings of 'genital/urinary disorders and seropositive illnesses (hepatitis and HIV infection)', consisted of anonymous movie theatre and restroom sex of a sort not at all out of keeping with gay sex in any urban environment.100 Though Harrison was conflicted by his practice of oral sex and mutual masturbation, it is unlikely that he was helped much by the treatment regime of bibliotherapy (reading Carnes), self-hypnosis, increased church activities and avoiding subway routes with 'gay bathrooms'. The fact that he initially reduced his encounters from five to three a week, then two, then abstention for 37 days, with a 'slip' on the thirty-eighth, indicates as much.101 Coming to terms with his sexuality might have been a more productive solution. The significant point, though, is that it was the same-sex sexual practices that were the marker of compulsive sexuality.
Yet it remains true that addictionology's preoccupation has been with heterosexual rather than homosexual loss of control. As befitting a normative discourse in a heteronormative culture, sexual addiction has been remarkably heterosexual in its predilections. The literature is curiously fixated with heterosexual sex and with the encouragement of a very restrained, confined practice of heterosexuality. As Keane has put it, 'Sex addiction discourse...repeats the valorization of conventional heterosexual intimacy as the only source of real and lasting happiness...the only possible venue for genuine relationships and genuine self-development...is the family home'.102
When Lars von Trier has Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the nymphomaniac in _Nymphomaniac: Volume 2_ (2014), tear up her prepared speech and proclaim to a meeting of female sex addicts that she is not like them, call the facilitator a member of 'society's morality police' and shock the self-help group with her pride in her perversity – 'I love my cunt and my filthy, dirty lust' – he was making a very similar point to the chapter that you have just read.103 Sex addiction is sexually conservative.
## Notes
1 J. Money, _The Lovemap Guidebook: A Definitive Statement_ (New York, 1999), p. 52. 2 A. W. Schaef, _When Society Becomes an Addict_ (New York, 1988), p. 3. First published in 1987. 3 W. Lord, 'A Diagnostic Proposal with Neurochemical Underpinnings', in E. Griffin-Shelley (ed.), _Outpatient Treatment of Sex and Love Addicts_ (Westport, CT, 1993), ch. 3, quotes at p. 21. 4 J. M. Irvine, 'Reinventing Perversion: Sex Addiction and Cultural Anxieties', _Journal of the History of Sexuality_ , 5:3 (1995), 429–50, quotes at 430, 432. 5 E. Kennedy, 'Sexual-Addiction Diagnosis Supports Anti-Sex Movement', _Nurse Practitioner_ , 16:8 (1991), 13 (Letters to the Editor). 6 P. Carnes, _Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction_ (Center City, MN, 2001), p. xiii. 7 P. Carnes, D. L. Delmonico and E. Griffin, _In the Shadows of the Net: Breaking Free of Compulsive Online Sexual Behavior_ (Center City, MN, 2001). 8 J. Riemersma and M. Sytsma, 'A New Generation of Sexual Addiction', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 20:4 (2013), 306–22, quotes at 306. 9 A. Cooper and I. D. Marcus, 'Men Who Are Not In Control of Their Sexual Behavior', in S. B. Levine, D. B. Risen and S. E. Althof (eds.), _Handbook of Clinical Sexuality for Mental Health Professionals_ (New York, 2003), ch. 18, quote at p. 311. 10 M. Griffiths, 'Sex on the Internet: Observations and Implications for Internet Sex Addiction', _Journal of Sex Research_ , 38:4 (2001), 333–42, quotes at 336. 11 M. F. Schwartz and S. Southern, 'Compulsive Cybersex: The New Tea Room', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 7:1–2 (2000), 127–44, quotes at 128, 139. 12 In contrast to alarmist accounts, see B. L. A. Mileham, 'Online Infidelity in Internet Chat Rooms: An Ethnographic Exploration', _Computers in Human Behavior_ , 23:1 (2007), 11–31. 13 T. Todd, 'Premature Ejaculation of "Sexual Addiction" Diagnoses', in S. Green and D. Flemons (eds.), _Quickies: The Handbook of Brief Sex Therapy_ (New York, 2004), ch. 5, quote at p. 86. 14 M. Klein, 'Sex Addiction: A Dangerous Clinical Concept', _SIECUS Report_ , 31:5 (2003), 8–11. 15 D. J. Ley, _The Myth of Sex Addiction_ (Lanham, MD, 2012), ch. 5. 16 C. Grov and others, 'Exploring the Internet's Role in Sexual Compulsivity and Out of Control Sexual Thoughts/Behaviour: A Qualitative Study of Gay and Bisexual Men in New York City', _Culture, Health & Sexuality_, 10:2 (2008), 107–25, quotes at 120. 17 D. Ley, N. Prause and P. Finn, 'The Emperor Has No Clothes: A Review of the "Pornography Addiction" Model', _Current Sexual Health Reports_ , 6:2 (2014), 94–105. 18 D. L. Delmonico, 'Sex on the Superhighway: Understanding and Treating Cybersex Addiction', in P. J. Carnes and K. M. Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ (New York, 2002), ch. 15, quote at p. 237. 19 K. S. Young, 'Internet Sex Addiction: Risk Factors, Stages of Development, and Treatment', _American Behavioral Scientist_ , 52:1 (2008), 21–37, quotes at 22, 27–8. 20 Ibid., 23. 21 Ibid., 28. 22 www.keystonecenterecu.net. 23 www.sexhelp.com. 24 Edwards, Delmonico and Griffin, _Cybersex Unplugged_ , pp. 37–9. 25 E. Coleman, 'Compulsive Sexual Behavior: What To Call It, How To Treat It', _SIECUS Report_ , 31:5 (2003), 12–16, quote at 13. 26 T. P. Sbraga and W. T. O'Donohue, _The Sex Addiction Workbook: Proven Strategies to Help You Regain Control of Your Life_ (Oakland, 2003), pp. 12–13. 27 R. Reid and others, 'Report of Findings in a DSM-5 Field Trial for Hypersexual Disorder', _Journal of Sexual Medicine_ , 9:11 (2012), 2868–77, quotes at 2874. 28 S. A. Hardy, J. Ruchty, T. D. Hull and R. Hyde, 'A Preliminary Study of an Online Psychoeducational Program for Hypersexuality', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 17:4 (2010), 247–69, quote at 253. 29 S. B. Levine, 'What Is Sexual Addiction?', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 36:3 (2010), 261–75, quote at 272. 30 C. Moser, 'Hypersexual Disorder: Just More Muddled Thinking', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 40:2 (2011), 227–9, quote at 228. 31 H. Van Den Bulck and N. Claessens, 'Guess Who Tiger is Having Sex With Now? Celebrity Sex and the Framing of the Moral High Ground', _Celebrity Studies_ , 4:1 (2013), 46–57, quotes at 54, 55. 32 C. L. Taylor, 'A Social Science Perspective of Sexual Addiction', _TAOS Newsletter_ , 3:7 (1985), 28–31. 33 L. A. Siegel and R. M. Siegel, 'Sex Addiction: Semantics or Science', in W. J. Taverner and R. W. McKee (eds.), _Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Human Sexuality, Twelfth Edition_ (New York, 2012), pp. 39–46, quotes at pp. 39, 43. 34 P. Joannides, 'The Challenging Landscape of Problematic Sexual Behaviors, Including "Sexual Addiction" and "Hypersexuality" ', in P. J. Kleinplatz (ed.), _New Directions in Sex Therapy: Innovations and Alternatives, Second Edition_ (New York, 2012), ch. 5, quote at p. 77. 35 J. Winters, K. Christoff and B. B. Gorzalka, 'Dysregulated Sexuality and High Sexual Desire: Distinct Constructs?', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 39:5 (2010), 1029–43, quote at 1039. 36 J. B. Grubbs and others, 'Transgression as Addiction: Religiosity and Moral Disapproval as Predictors of Perceived Addiction to Pornography', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , first published online: 12 February 2014. 37 J. M. Bostwick and J. A. Bucci, 'Internet Sex Addiction Treated with Naltrexone', _Mayo Clinic Proceedings_ , 83:2 (2008), 226–30, quotes at 226. 38 S. E. Pollard, J. N. Hook, M. D. Corley and J. P. Schneider, 'Support Utilization by Partners of Self-Identified Sex Addicts', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 40:4 (2014), 339–48, at 343. 39 The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, University of Indiana, Bloomington, 'Donahue Transcript, 1984, Multimedia Entertainment Inc.', p. 2. 40 M. Wilson, _Hope After Betrayal: Healing When Sex Addiction Invades Your Marriage_ (Grand Rapids, MI, 2007), p. 15. 41 M. Corcoran, _A House Interrupted: A Wife's Story of Recovering from Her Husband's Sex Addiction_ (Carefree, AZ, 2011), p. 89. 42 J. Henley, 'How Catherine Millet Discovered Jealousy', _The Guardian_ , 29 October 2009: <http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/29/catherine-millet-jealous>. 43 H. Keane, _What's Wrong With Addiction?_ (Melbourne, 2002), p. 138. 44 For example, T. Lee, M. Mars, V. Neil and N. Sixx, _Mötley Crüe: The Dirt – Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band_ (New York, 2002); S. Tyler, _Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir_ (New York, 2011). 45 Tyler, _Does the Noise_ , p. 267. 46 R. Lowe, _Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography_ (New York, 2011). 47 R. Brand, _My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up_ (New York, 2009), p. 9. 48 K. Richards, _Life_ (New York, 2010). 49 B. Wyman, _Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock 'n' Roll Band_ (London, 1990), p. 355. 50 For the clinical research, see R. C. Reid, 'Differentiating Emotions in a Sample of Men in Treatment for Hypersexual Behavior', _Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions_ , 10:2 (2010), 197–213; R. Petrican, C. T. Burris and M. Moscovitch, 'Shame, Sexual Compulsivity, and Eroticizing Flirtatious Others: An Experimental Study', _Journal of Sex Research_ , first published online: 3 December 2013; C. T. Burris and K. M. Schrage, 'Incognito Libido: Introducing the Sexual False Self Scale', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 21:1 (2014), 42–56; R. C. Reid, J. Temko, J. F. Moghaddam and T. F. Fong, 'Shame, Rumination, and Self-Compassion in Men Assessed for Hypersexual Disorder', _Journal of Psychiatric Practice_ , 20:4 (2014), 260–8. 51 Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_. Calculated from the Ebook version. 52 Carnes, _Out of the Shadows_ (2001), p. xi. 53 Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, _Secret Shame: Sexual Compulsion in the Lives of Gay Men and Lesbians_ (New York, 1991), Ebook, loc. 17. 54 J. C. Cantor and others, 'A Treatment-Oriented Typology of Self-Identified Hypersexuality Referrals', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 42:5 (2013), 883–93, quotes at 888–9. 55 Todd, 'Premature Ejaculation of "Sexual Addiction" Diagnoses', p. 85. 56 P. J. Carnes and others, 'PATHOS: A Brief Screening Application for Assessing Sexual Addiction', _Journal of Addiction Medicine_ , 6:1 (2012), 29–34, at 31. 57 Ibid. 58 Klein, 'Sex Addiction', 8. 59 J. C. Wakefield, 'The DSM-5's Proposed New Categories of Sexual Disorder: The Problem of False Positives in Sexual Diagnosis', _Clinical Social Work Journal_ , 40:2 (2012), 213–23, quote at 216. 60 M. Schisgal, _Sexaholics_ (New York, 1995), pp. 29, 31. 61 Riemersma and Sytsma, 'A New Generation of Sexual Addiction', 307. 62 Ibid., 306–22. 63 Wilson, _Hope After Betrayal_ , p. 12. 64 _Ricki Lake_ : 'Exposed: Female Sex Addicts!', 3 March 2004. 65 _The Tyra Show_ , 'Sex Rehab Clinic', 24 November 2009. 66 Griffiths, 'Sex on the Internet', 336. Emphasis ours. 67 H. Keane, 'Disorders of Desire: Addiction and Problems of Intimacy', _Journal of Medical Humanities_ , 25:3 (2004), 189–204, quote at 194. 68 B. C. Kelly and others, 'Sexual Compulsivity and Sexual Behaviors Among Gay and Bisexual Men and Lesbian and Bisexual Women', _Journal of Sex Research_ , 46:4 (2009), 301–8, quotes at 306. 69 M. P. Kafka, 'What Is Sexual Addiction? A Response to Stephen Levine', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 36:3 (2010), 276–81, quote at 277. 70 R. C. Reid, J. E. Bramen, A. Anderson and M. S. Cohen, 'Mindfulness, Emotional Dysregulation, Impulsivity, and Stress Proneness Among Hypersexual Patients', _Journal of Clinical Psychology_ , 70:4 (2014), 313–21, quote at 314. 71 'Donahue Transcript, 1984, Multimedia Entertainment Inc.', p. 4. 72 Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, _Secret Shame_ , loc. 159. 73 Ibid., locs. 186, 193. 74 M. C. Quadland and W. Shattls, 'AIDS, Sexuality, and Sexual Control', _Journal of Homosexuality_ , 14:1–2 (1987), 277–98, quote at 287. See also M. C. Quadland, 'Compulsive Sexual Behavior: Definition of a Problem and an Approach to Treatment', _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_, 11:2 (1985), 121–32. 75 R. William Wedin, quoted in G. Destefano, 'The Gay Sex Addict Controversy', _Forum_ , 15:4 (1986), 54–9, quotes at 57, 58. 76 J. T. Parsons and D. S. Bimbi, 'Intentional Unprotected Anal Intercourse Among Sex [sic] Who Have Sex With Men: Barebacking – From Behaviour to Identity', _AIDS and Behavior_ , 11:2 (2007), 277–87; C. Grov, J. T. Parsons and D. S. Bimbi, 'Sexual Compulsivity and Sexual Risk in Gay and Bisexual Men', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 39:4 (2010), 940–9, quote at 941; E. Coleman and others, 'Compulsive Sexual Behavior and Risk for Unsafe Sex Among Internet Using Men Who have Sex with Men', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 39:5 (2010), 1045–53. 77 See S. C. Kalichman and D. Rompa, 'The Sexual Compulsivity Scale: Further Development and Use With HIV-Positive Persons', _Journal of Personality Assessment_ , 76:3 (2001), 379–95. 78 Kelly and others, 'Sexual Compulsivity', 301–8. 79 L. J. Hatterer, _Changing Homosexuality in the Male: Treatment for Men Troubled by Homosexuality_ (New York, 1970). 80 L. J. Hatterer, _The Pleasure Addicts: The Addictive Process – Food, Sex, Drugs, Alcohol, Work, and More_ (Cranbury, NJ, 1980), quotes at pp. 120, 121. 81 Ibid., p. 205. 82 Ibid., p. 120. 83 Ibid., p. 121. 84 Hatterer, _Changing Homosexuality_ , pp. viii, 63, 86, and esp. ch. 10. 85 Ibid., p. 251. 86 Hatterer, _The Pleasure Addicts_ , p. 89. 87 Ibid., p. 91. 88 Not to be confused with the Pennsylvania-based, homosexual-conversion group Homosexuals Anonymous, founded in the early 1980s. For this latter group, see A. F. Ide, _Homosexuals Anonymous: A Psychoanalytic and Theological Analysis of Colin Cook and His Cure for Homosexuality_ (Garland, TX, 1987). See also D. C. Haldeman, 'The Practice and Ethics of Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy', _Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology_ , 62:2 (1994), 221–7; J. G. Ford, 'Healing Homosexuals: A Psychologist's Journey Through the Ex-Gay Movement and the Pseudo-Science of Reparative Therapy', _Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy_, 5:3–4 (2002), 69–86. 89 J. Morgenstern and others, 'Non-Paraphilic Compulsive Sexual Behavior and Psychiatric Co-Morbidities in Gay and Bisexual Men', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 18:3 (2011), 114–34, quotes at 115, 117. 90 H. Keane, 'Taxonomies of Desire: Sex Addiction and the Ethics of Intimacy', _International Journal of Critical Psychology_ , 1:3 (2001), 9–28, quotes at 12, 16. 91 R. Earle and G. Crow, _Lonely All the Time: Recognizing, Understanding, and Overcoming Sex Addiction, For Addicts and Co-Dependents_ (New York, 1989), p. 5. 92 R. Weiss, 'Treatment Concerns for Gay Male Sex Addicts', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 21, quote at p. 333. Originally published in 1997. 93 J. R. Sealy, 'Dual and Triple Diagnoses: Addictions, Mental Illness, and HIV Infection Guidelines for Outpatient Therapists', in Carnes and Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ , ch. 14, quotes at p. 217. Originally published in 1999. See also E. Cuestas-Thompson, 'Treating Quadruple Diagnosis in Gay Men: HIV, Sexual Compulsivity, Substance Use Disorder, and Major Depression – Exploring Underlying Issues', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 4:4 (1997), 301–21. 94 Weiss, 'Treatment Concerns for Gay Male Sex Addicts', p. 336. 95 J. T. Parsons and others, 'A Psychometric Investigation of the Hypersexual Disorder Screening Inventory Among Highly Sexually Active Gay and Bisexual Men: An Item Response Theory Analysis', _Journal of Sexual Medicine_ , 10:12 (2013), 3088–101, quote at 3089. 96 This seems to be the message of Weiss, 'Treatment Concerns for Gay Male Sex Addicts', quote at p. 330. 97 R. Weiss, _Cruise Control: Understanding Sex Addiction in Gay Men_ (Los Angeles, 2005), p. 21. 98 Ibid., pp. 20–1. 99 Quoted in Weiss, 'Treatment Concerns for Gay Male Sex Addicts', p. 332. 100 M. Cooper and R. A. Lebo, 'Assessment and Treatment of Sexual Compulsivity', _Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions_ , 1:2 (2001), 61–74, quotes at 63–4. 101 Ibid., 70. 102 Keane, 'Disorders of Desire', 202. 103 _Nymphomaniac: Volume 2_ (2014: Lars von Trier).
# Chapter 8
Conclusion
Tiger Woods claims to be addicted to sex. Bullshit! These are hot women he was having sex with. If he was having sex with a dead chicken, I'd say, wow, that guy is addicted to sex.
Greg Rogell, 20111
To achieve a sense of perspective on the issue of sex addiction, it is instructive to consider a study of the general population carried out in New Zealand and published in 2010. It formed part of a unique longitudinal study of a cohort of more than a thousand people born in the city of Dunedin in 1972/3 and studied and surveyed (mainly on matters other than sex) at various stages in their development. The investigation of their reported sexual behaviour and attitudes targeted 940 people, the bulk of the surviving cohort interviewed at the age of 32 and willing to discuss their sexual experiences and beliefs. The advantage of this study is that it surveyed a sample of the general population rather than an unrepresentative, targeted one (Candeo's Mormons or Carnes's participants, for example). The participants were asked if, in the last 12 months, they had had 'sexual fantasies, urges or behavior' that they had felt were 'out of control'. These were called 'out of control sexual experiences' – which, it should be noted, are different to out-of-control sexual _behaviour_. They were asked whether both their out-of-control sexual experiences and their actual sexual behaviour had interfered with their lives.
What is interesting about the study is that while 13 per cent of men and 7 per cent of women reported out-of-control sexual experiences in the preceding year, very few of the total group – 4 per cent of men and 2 per cent of women – thought that it actually interfered with their lives. Most of the reported anxiety involved fantasies and urges rather than actions. Few reported that their actual behaviour affected their lives adversely (a huge part of the sexual addiction rationale): less than 1 per cent of all men and even fewer women were so affected. As the researchers concluded, 'This suggests that the clinical syndrome of out of control sexual behavior may be unlikely to occur as frequently as has been previously surmised.'2 Though they did not state it, the disparity between the levels of reported out-of-control sexual experiences as fantasy or impulse (on the one hand) and actual sexual behaviour (on the other) may have suggested the anxiety-producing effects of sexual addiction discourse.
Or we could consider Eric Blumberg's fascinating study of forty-four highly sexual women, those who desired sex six or seven times a week or more and/or saw sex as central to their lives and considered themselves to be highly sexual. (For example, one woman's reported weekly sexual outlet was masturbating fourteen times, having ten sexual interactions with a primary partner and twenty with another contact or contacts.)3 These women might have been considered prime candidates for a diagnosis of sex addiction. Yet it was a description not used until societal and medical attitudes were discussed: 'That was when they labeled me addicted to sex', one woman reported of her encounter with a therapist.4 The women claimed satisfaction and pleasure from their sexuality as well as 'negative themes'.5 But the negative aspects, apart from relationship difficulties, featured societal attitudes: the reactions of other women and a cultural discomfort with highly sexual women, including allegations of sex addiction and nymphomania. They were not the dysfunctions of the sex addict stereotype. Moreover, Blumberg, 'an experienced addictionologist', considered and rejected the label of sex addiction as 'not useful in understanding the behavior of the study participants'.
The interviewees overall expressed strong satisfaction with themselves and their sexual choices and had grown to see themselves as psychologically strong because of having to make conscious choices in this area. Their behavior in meeting their sexual desires was typically planned, deliberate, and under their complete control. The participants did not describe their sexual behavior in ways that suggested they used it to cope with life circumstances to the exclusion of other coping mechanisms.6
It was far from the distressed, problematic sex of defined sexual addiction.
The narrative of sex addiction's progress is, of course, not yet concluded. The story in the US seems very different from that in the UK, where, despite its media profile, sexual addiction has made little impact on the mental health provisions of the British National Health Service.7 It is likely that the Internet will continue to play a role, especially given that cybersex addiction is but one of many examples of Problematic Internet Use (PIU).8
One of the more concerning developments in addictionology has been its embracing of the neurobiological and genetic turn.9 As Ian Hacking wrote in 2007, 'There is now a steady drive to trace the medical to the biological, and the biological to the genetic.'10 Research on neural circuits and genetic influences has taken hold in psychiatry – correlating anxiety disorders with 'neural mechanisms' and 'risk genes'.11 It is impacting modifications to DSM-5 as we write; the latest _Manual_ specifically refers to the structural influences of neuroscience and genetics.12 And there have been highly influential calls for rethinking categories in the light of 'the most compelling current neurobiological and genetic hypotheses'.13 'More Than Meets the Brain: Inside Neuropsychiatry's Secrets' was the heading of a publicity email from the psychiatrist's trade publication _Psychiatric Times_ that arrived in one of the authors' inboxes as we were writing this section.14 It was entirely predictable that neuropsychiatry would impact on sex addiction studies – especially given the latter's bid for DSM recognition of hypersexual disorder. 'Do those who develop out-of-control patterns of sexual behavior have lower levels of serotonin transporter gene markers?' John Bancroft mused in 2008.15
Hence a 2012 article hypothesized that sex released neuronal dopamine (DA) in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) section of the brain, analogous to the inducements of drugs: 'both drug addiction and sexual addiction represent pathological forms of neuroplasticity along with the emergence of aberrant behaviors involving a cascade of neurochemical changes mainly in the brain's rewarding circuitry'.16 The authors cogitated on the roles of individual receptor (e.g. DRD2, DRD4, AVPR1A) and transporter genes (DAT1). Yet the article's scientific methodology consisted mainly of the citing of multiple studies involving copulating mice, rabbits, prairie voles and hamsters, and extrapolations from studies of music response and psychoactive drug intake.17 It also involved some rather clumsy imposing of genotypes on to social scenarios. For example, Amy's failure to relate to men other than sexually, her constant flirting and inability to find satisfaction in long-term fidelity: 'This may be a case where "no satisfaction" could be lack of sufficient DA D2 receptor density.' (Not that Amy's genes had been profiled.)18 And the stripper-related problems of Roger the club owner may have had something to do with DRD2. (Not that he was tested either.) This teaming of sex addiction therapists (Stefanie and Patrick Carnes are among the co-authors) and neuroscientists does not inspire great confidence in future collaborations of this type.
It seems, then, that the rush to pair addictionology and neurobiology has outstripped the current state of knowledge (much like the critique of DSM-5's premature embrace of neuroscience). Fred Berlin was hopeful of the possibilities of the use of positron emission topography (PET scanning) to monitor the brain changes of paedophiles during sexual arousal (his area of specialization). But Berlin, the founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic, has been far more cautious in his assessment of the general applicability of neurobiological research to sexual compulsivity, pointing out that the bulk of the science has related to animals and that human research has been very limited: 'Little is known about neurobiologic factors that may be correlated with sexual compulsivity.'19
It is possible, given both the focus on neurobiology and the obsession with cybersex, that another trend will be that the patients will get younger. Eric Griffin-Shelley warned in 2002, without any cited evidence, that the plight of adolescent sex addicts was worse than that of those with general mental health problems: 'Very few of them are identified, and fewer are receiving any type of care or counseling...Most sex and love addicts trace their initial acting out to adolescence or before.'20 Jennifer Riemersma and Michael Sytsma's previously cited study of what they term the 'GenText' generation warned of what amounted to brain damage as a result of early exposure to graphic sexual material on the Internet: 'Neurochemical alterations associated with addiction profoundly influence the young adults' [sic] developing brain, and may set the young addict up for more intense and dangerous forms of sexually addictive behavior.'21 They argued therefore – in keeping, it has to be said, with DSM's trend towards the younger patient – that 'prevention and early intervention strategies' were needed: 'Specialized treatment with child and adolescent therapists trained in sexual addiction is extremely uncommon. Yet significant numbers of children, adolescents, and young adults are in need of just such specialized treatment.'22 Watch out for 10-year-old sex addicts.
Hacking once discussed the various elements that go into what he has termed 'making up people': the classification (the naming of the 'disorder' – his example was Multiple Personality Disorder); the people (the patients suffering from what is claimed to be the malady); the institutions (like IITAP, SASH and SAA in the case of sex addiction, though they were not his illustrations; but also, in his framework, establishments such as therapy workshops and talk show television); knowledge, both expert and popular (we saw that in the case of sex addictionology the boundaries were somewhat indistinct); and finally the experts (again a fuzzy category in the case of sex addiction, including patients themselves, psychiatrists, psychologists, media personalities, talk show hosts, filmmakers, therapists and, of course, the DSM).23
As the case of 'making up people' explored in our book makes clear, the interactions between the various elements vary; different categories of what are claimed to be disorders have different histories. When Peter Conrad examined the concept of medicalization in an exploratory article in 1992, he specifically mentioned sex addiction, along with alcoholism, as examples of minimal medicalization in the sense that their treatment as diseases (part of the concept of medicalization) was not dependent on the medical profession (he referred to the lack of DSM endorsement) and relied rather on media publicity and lay interests.24 In other words, sex addiction conformed to two of the essential elements of medicalization identified by Conrad – a conceptual frame and appeal at a popular, non-specialist level – but did not have the third ingredient – institutional promulgation.25 We have discussed sex addiction's part in the process in preceding pages, and Conrad might well have seen things differently had he been writing in 2012 rather than 1992. Sex addiction has moved _from_ a thing named and publicized in mass culture but with relatively little purchase in official medical culture _to_ a syndrome vying for DSM endorsement, with the research culture necessary for that bid, enthusiastic brokers, some medical acceptance (despite the DSM) and drug treatment, and enhanced popular recognition and media acceptance (unthinking credence, we would argue). If DSM acceded and the pharmaceutical companies showed more interest, this history could prove very different.
Helen Keane once wrote of the work that has gone into constructing the syndrome of sexual addiction. It was 'not just a matter of recognizing an already-existing pathology, but of producing a recognizable disease entity through epistemological labour'.26 Readers of this book will have some idea of the variety and extent of this work – and of our own labour in unpicking the very constituting of the syndrome. We have argued that sexual addiction's strange, short story of social opportunism, diagnostic amorphism, therapeutic self-interest and popular cultural endorsement is marked by an essential social conservatism. 'Sex addiction' has become a convenient term to describe disapproved sex, what Jerome Wakefield has termed a confusion of 'social disapproval and morality with issues of health and disorder'.27 We can wonder at its reductive powers – as we saw in Chapter 4's discussion of film. In a remarkable instance of this the addictionologist Robert Weiss managed to make Lars von Trier's _Nymphomaniac_ (2014), a film that was perversely about nymphomania, not sex addiction, in fact consciously critical of sex addiction, into a case study of the malady: 'sex addiction accurate'.28 We can marvel at the survival of a category amidst all the evidence to the contrary and the stretching of its meaning beyond...well...meaning.
Mentalization-based therapy for sex addiction (MBT-SA) – 'founded on research from evolutionary science, developmental psychology, attachment theory, psychotherapeutic clinical trials, and neuroscience' – encourages therapists and their sexually addicted patients to apply social constructionism to their problem, to think reflectively, to question, challenge and 'not-know', to embrace open-mindedness, to read Stephen Levine, to actually 'problematize the very concept of "sexual addiction" '.29 But its advocates persist (in 2014) in their acceptance of the concept of sex addiction as a condition in need of therapy, 'We theorize that sexual addiction may be influenced or characterized in part by dysfunctional mentalization.'30 The role of the clinician is to evaluate 'the features/symptoms of the client's sexual addiction'.31 There is little actual problematizing of the concept.
Sexual addiction's sufferers are persuaded of its existence yet are not invariably convinced to translate their thoughts into action. Rory Reid found that of sixty-seven male outpatients at a clinic specializing in hypersexuality, 70 per cent (forty-seven) were ambivalent about that treatment and only 11 per cent (seven) 'were actively engaged in modifying their behavior'. The remaining 19 per cent (thirteen) had made minor efforts, but their sexual adjustments were planned rather than actually enacted.32 In other words, hesitation extended to almost 90 per cent of those sexually addicted.
For all the discussion, the central issue remains: sex addiction is a label without explanatory force. As a study of 'sexual compulsivity' among students at (appropriately) Alfred Kinsey's University of Indiana concluded, 'What may appear to be pathological compulsive sexual behavior to researchers and health professionals may actually be experienced as normal sexual exploration by college students.'33 And this, though put somewhat more crudely, was Greg Rogell's point in this chapter's epigraph about Tiger Woods and the dead chicken.
## Notes
1 G. Rogell, 'Eddie', in _Louie_ , Season 2, Episode 9, 11 August 2011. 2 K. Skegg, S. Nada-Raja, N. Dickson and C. Paul, 'Perceived "Out of Control" Sexual Behaviour in a Cohort of Young Adults from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study', _Archives of Sexual Behavior_ , 39:4 (2010), 968–78, quote at 977. 3 E. S. Blumberg, 'The Lives and Voices of Highly Sexual Women', _Journal of Sex Research_ , 40:2 (2003), 146–57, example from 149. 4 Ibid., 150. 5 Ibid., 151. 6 Ibid., 153–4. 7 M. D. Griffiths and M. K. Dhuffar, 'Treatment of Sexual Addiction Within the British National Health Service', _International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction_ , first published online: 11 February 2014. 8 P. R. Recupero, 'The Mental Status Examination in the Age of the Internet', _Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law_ , 38:1 (2010), 15–26. 9 For a thoughtful account of the rise of neuroscience, see N. Rose and J. M. Abi-Rached, _Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind_ (Princeton, 2013). 10 I. Hacking, 'Kinds of People: Moving Targets', _Proceedings of the British Academy_ , 151 (2007), 285–318, quote at 310. 11 S. E. Hyman, 'The Diagnosis of Mental Disorders: The Problem of Reification', _Annual Review of Clinical Psychology_ , 6 (2010), 155–79, quotes at 173. For this turn, and its problems, see J. Paris, 'The Ideology Behind DSM-5', in J. Paris and J. Phillips (eds.), _Making the DSM-5, 2013: Concepts and Controversies_ (New York, 2013), ch. 3. 12 _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fifth Edition): DSM-5_ (Washington, DC, 2013), p. xlii. 13 Hyman, 'Diagnosis of Mental Disorders', 173. 14 'More Than Meets the Brain: Inside Neuropsychiatry's Secrets', email 11 April 2014: psychiatrictimes@email.cmpmedica-usa.com. 15 J. Bancroft, 'Sexual Behavior That is "Out of Control": A Theoretical Approach', _Psychiatric Clinics of North America_ , 31:4 (2008), 593–601, quote at 597. 16 K. Blum and others, 'Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll: Hypothesizing Common Mesolimbic Activation as a Function of Reward Gene Polymorphisms', _Journal of Psychoactive Drugs_ , 44:1 (2012), 38–55, quote at 50. 17 For an informative discussion of the use of animal models in neuroscience, see Rose and Abi-Rached, _Neuro_ , ch. 3. 18 Blum and others, 'Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll', 51. 19 F. S. Berlin, 'Basic Science and Neurobiological Research: Potential Relevance to Sexual Compulsivity', _Psychiatric Clinics of North America_ , 31:4 (2008), 623–42, quote at 629. 20 E. Griffin-Shelley, 'Adolescent Sex and Love Addicts', in P. J. Carnes and K. M. Adams (eds.), _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ (New York, 2002), ch. 22, quote at p. 341. 21 J. Riemersma and M. Sytsma, 'A New Generation of Sexual Addiction', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 20:4 (2013), 306–22, quote at 311. 22 Ibid., 317, 318. 23 Hacking, 'Kinds of People: Moving Targets', 298. 24 P. Conrad, 'Medicalization and Social Control', _Annual Review of Sociology_ , 18 (1992), 209–32, esp. 219. 25 Ibid., 211. 26 H. Keane, 'Taxonomies of Desire: Sex Addiction and the Ethics of Intimacy', _International Journal of Critical Psychology_ , 1:3 (2001), 9–28, quote at 14. 27 J. C. Wakefield, 'The DSM-5's Proposed New Categories of Sexual Disorder: The Problem of False Positives in Sexual Diagnosis', _Clinical Social Work Journal_ , 40:2 (2012), 213–23, quote at 215. 28 _Nymphomaniac: Volume 1_ and _Nymphomaniac: Volume 2_ (2014: Lars von Trier); R. Weiss, 'Thoughts on Nymphomaniac: Volume 1', _The Huffington Post_ , 20 March 2014: <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-weiss/thoughts-on-nymphomaniac_b_5002574.html>. 29 M. D. Berry and P. D. Berry, 'Mentalization-Based Therapy for Sexual Addiction: Foundations for a Clinical Model', _Sexual and Relationship Therapy_ , 29:2 (2014), 245–60, quotes at 247, 248. 30 Ibid., 247. 31 Ibid., 255. 32 R. C. Reid, 'Assessing Readiness to Change Among Clients Seeking Help for Hypersexual Behavior', _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_, 14:3 (2007), 167–86. Quote and figures on 171, 175. 33 B. Dodge, M. Reece, S. L. Cole and T. G. M. Sandfort, 'Sexual Compulsivity Among Heterosexual College Students', _Journal of Sex Research_ , 41:4 (2004), 343–50, quote at 349.
# Index
* * * AA _see_ Alcoholics Anonymous
* academic engagement with sex addiction
* Adams, Kenneth M.
* Addiction Interaction Disorder
* * _see also_ cross-addiction/multiple addictions
* * addictionology
* adolescent sex addiction
* AIDS _see_ HIV/AIDS
* Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)
* alcoholism
* Aldrich, Curt
* Allen, Clifford
* _American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse_
* American Psychiatric Association
* * _see also DSM_
* * American Psychoanalytic Association
* American Society of Addiction Medicine
* _Anger Management_ (comedy series)
* antidepressants
* Aronowitz, Robert
* Attwood, Feona
* _Auto Focus_ (film)
* * * Baio, Scott
* Bancroft, John
* Barnes, Djuna
* Barnett, Laura
* Barry, Marion
* Berlant, Lauren
* Berlin, Fred
* Berlusconi, Silvio
* Bloch, Iwan
* Blumberg, Eric
* Boggs, Wade
* Boykin, Kelly
* Brand, Russell
* _British Journal of Sexual Medicine_
* Brodsky, Archie
* Brutsman, Joseph
* Burks, A. D.
* Burton, Catherine
* * * _Californication_ (TV series)
* Candeo
* Cantor, James
* Capitol, Ryan
* Carnes, Patrick
* * _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_
* _Contrary to Love_
* _Don't Call it Love_
* _A Gentle Path Through the Twelve Steps_
* _In the Shadows of the Net_
* _Out of the Shadows_
* _The Sexual Addiction_ _see also_ Carnes, Patrick, _Out of the Shadows_
* * Carnes, Stefanie
* Casanova, Corrine
* Castro, Ariel
* _Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew_ (reality series)
* celebrity and sex addiction
* Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT) programme
* Cheever, John
* Cheever, Susan
* _Chelsea Lately_ (talk show)
* children and sex addiction
* * _see also_ adolescent sex addiction
* * _Choke_ (film)
* _Choke_ (novel)
* Clark, LeMon
* _Clinical Management of Sex Addiction_ (Carnes and Adams)
* _Clinical Social Work Journal_
* Clinton, Bill
* Clinton/Lewinsky affair (1998)
* Cloud, John
* co-addiction/addicts
* codependency
* Coleman, Eli
* _Columbia Journalism Review_
* compulsive sexual behaviour (CSB)
* Conrad, Peter
* conservatism
* Corcoran, Maurita
* Corley, Deborah
* Crane, Bob
* cross-addiction/multiple addictions
* cybersex/cybersex addiction
* * * Daigle, Steven
* Davis, Lennard
* Dawson, Emma
* De Barres, Michael
* DeBusk, Dianne
* Delmonico, David
* Depo-Provera
* definitions of sex addiction
* diagnosis of sex addiction
* * self-diagnosis
* _see also_ definitions of sex addiction
* * _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual_ _see_ _DSM_
* _Diary of a Sex Addict_ (film)
* Díaz, Junot
* _Directions in Psychiatry_ (journal)
* _Dirty Shame, A_ (film)
* Don Juanism
* _Donahue_ (talk show)
* Donner, William
* Douglas, Michael
* _Dr. Drew's Sex Rehab_ (reality series)
* _Dr. Phil_ (talk show)
* drug addiction
* * analogizing sex addiction with
* * drug companies
* drug treatment for sex addiction
* _DSM_ ( _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual_ )
* Duchovny, David
* Duggan, Lisa
* dysregulated sexuality
* * * Earle, Ralph and Marcus
* Eisenstein, Victor
* Elliott, Don
* Ellis, Albert
* Ellis, Havelock
* _Evaluation & the Health Professions_ (journal)
* * * Fassbender, Michael
* female sex addiction
* Fenichel, Otto
* Ferrara, Abel
* Ferree, Marnie
* film and sex addiction
* Fink, Jesse
* Fisher, Mark
* Ford, Gerald
* Franc, John
* Frances, Allen
* Furedi, Frank
* * * Gardere, Jeff
* Gay Men's Health Crisis
* gender and sexual addiction/compulsion
* general systems theory
* genetics
* genogram process
* Gentle Path Press
* Gentle Path Treatment Programs
* _Geraldo_ (talk show)
* _Girlfriends_ (sitcom)
* Giugliano, John
* Goodman, Aviel
* Google Ngram Viewer
* Greenberg, Gary
* Griffin-Shelley, Eric
* Groneman, Carol
* Groult, Benoîte
* Grov, Christian
* _Guardian, The_
* guilt
* * _see also_ shame
* * * Hacking, Ian
* Hall, Paula
* Hamilton, Nigel
* _Handbook of Addictive Disorders, The_
* _Handbook of Clinical Sexuality for Mental Health Professionals_
* Hastings, Anne
* Hatterer, Lawrence
* Herkov, Michael
* heterosexuality
* Hijuelos, Oscar
* Hirschfeld, Magnus
* HIV/AIDS
* homosexuality
* Hook, Joshua
* Horwitz, Allan
* _Huffington Post, The_
* hyperaesthesia
* hypererotism
* hypersexuality/hypersexual disorder
* * * _I Am a Sex Addict_ (film)
* International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals (IITAP)
* Internet
* * _see also_ cybersex/cybersex addiction
* * Iowa study
* iRecovery app
* Irvine, Janice
* Isikoff, Michael
* * * James, Nick
* Joannides, Paul
* Jong, Erica
* _Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology_
* _Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy_
* _Journal of Sex Research_
* _Journal of Social Work Practice_
* * * Kafka, Martin
* _Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry_
* Karim, Reef
* Kasl, Charlotte Davis
* Katehakis, Alexandra
* Kavka, Misha
* Keane, Helen
* Kennedy, Elizabeth
* Ketcham, Jennifer
* KeyStone Center
* Kinsey, Alfred
* Kirk, Stuart
* Klein, Marty
* Kneen, Krissy
* Kor, Ariel
* Krafft-Ebing, Richard von
* Kramer, Peter
* Kutchins, Herb
* * * Laaser, Mark
* Lake, Ricki
* Landers, Ann
* Lane, Christopher
* Lee, Christopher
* Letterman, David
* Levin, Jerome
* Levine, Martin
* Levine, Stephen
* Levitt, Eugene
* Lewinsky, Monica
* Ley, David
* library catalogues
* Library of Congress
* Longstaff, Gareth
* Lowe, Rob
* * * McDaniel, Kelly
* McGraw, Phil
* McQueen, Steve
* Malti-Douglas, Fedwa
* Mason-Schrock, Douglas
* masturbation
* _Maury_ (talk show)
* Means, Marsha
* media
* _Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality_ (journal)
* medicalization
* * of sex addiction
* of society
* * Melinkovich, Neil
* memoirs
* mentalization-based therapy for sex addiction (MBT-SA)
* Michie, Helena
* Millet, Catherine
* Money, John
* Moorhead, Joanna
* Morand, Paul
* Morgan, Abi
* Moser, Charles
* Moskovitz, Eva
* multimodality approach
* multiple addictions _see_ cross-addiction/multiple addictions
* Murray, Marilyn
* Myers, Wayne
* * * Nabokov, Vladimir
* Narain, Nicole
* neuroscience and neurobiology
* * _see also_ genetics
* * New York and Los Angeles Sexual Compulsives Anonymous
* _New York Times, The_
* New Zealand study on sexual behaviour (2010)
* _Newsweek_
* Norton, Edward
* _Nurse Practitioner_
* nymphomania
* _Nymphomaniac_ (film)
* * * Offit, Avodah
* online sex _see_ cybersex/cybersex addiction
* * _see also_ Internet
* * Orford, Jim
* orgasms
* origins and early references to sex addiction
* out-of-control sexual behaviour
* 'Overcoming Sex Addiction' app
* Özil, Mesut
* * * Palahniuk, Chuck
* Paltrow, Gwyneth
* Parker, Trey
* Partner Sexuality Screening test (PSS)
* PATHOS
* Peele, Stanton
* Pelullo, Peter
* Peniche, Kari Ann
* Pfizer
* pharmaceutical companies
* Pinsky, Drew
* popular culture and sex addiction
* pornography
* Porter, Jake
* post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
* Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders
* Prozac
* PsychCentral.com
* _Psychiatric Times_
* psychopharmacy and treatment of sex addiction
* PsycINFO
* pulp fiction
* * * reality TV
* Reid, Rory
* Renshaw, Domeena C.
* Resnick, Rachel
* Richards, Keith
* _Ricki Lake_ (talk show)
* Riemersma, Jennifer
* Roethlisberger, Ben
* Rogell, Greg
* Rösler, Ariel
* Rossi, Kendra Jade
* Roth, Philip
* Roy, Duncan
* Rush, Benjamin
* Ryan, Michael
* * * SAA (Sex Addicts Anonymous)
* Sadock, Virginia
* Sagarin, Edward
* _Sally Jesse Raphael_ (talk show)
* Saltz, Gail
* Samenow, Charles
* same-sex sexual addiction
* * _see also_ homosexuality
* * Sandhu, Sukhdev
* SARA (Sex Addiction Risk Assessment test)
* SAST (Sex Addiction Screening Test)
* SAST-R (SAST Revised)
* satyriasis
* SCA (Sexual Compulsives Anonymous)
* Schaef, Anne Wilson
* Schneider, Jennifer
* Schrader, Paul
* Schwartz, L. J.
* Sealy, John
* Segal, Morey
* selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)
* self-tests
* * Partner Sexuality Screening test (PSS)
* Sex Addiction Risk Assessment test (SARA)
* Sex Addiction Screening Test (SAST)
* Sexual Addiction Self Test
* * Sex Addiction Risk Assessment test _see_ SARA
* Sex Addiction Screening Test _see_ SAST
* _Sex Addiction Workbook, The_
* Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA)
* Sexaholics Anonymous (SA)
* _Sexaholics_ (play)
* SexHelp.com
* _Sexology_ (magazine)
* sexology/sexologists
* sexual abuse
* _Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity_ (journal)
* Sexual Compulsives Anonymous _see_ SCA
* Sexual Dependency Inventory (SDI)
* Sexual False Self Scale
* Sexual Recovery Institute (Los Angeles)
* _Sexual and Relationship Therapy_ (journal)
* sexualization of culture
* sexually violent predators (SVPs)
* shame
* _Shame_ (film)
* Shattuc, Jane
* Sheen, Charlie
* Shorter, Edward
* Siegel, Lawrence and Richard
* Silverman, Sue William
* SLAA _see_ Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous
* Smith, Amber
* Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health (SASH)
* _South Park_ (animation)
* Spitzer, Eliot
* Springfield, Rick
* _Starr Report_
* Steffens, Barbara
* Stekel, Wilhelm
* Stoller, Robert
* Stone, Matt
* Strauss-Kahn, Dominique
* Sytsma, Michael
* Szasz, Thomas
* * * talk shows and sex addiction
* Taylor, Clark L.
* television and sex addiction
* _Thanks for Sharing_ (film)
* therapy
* * _see also_ treatment
* * _Time_
* _Today Show, The_
* Todd, Tracy
* Toobin, Jeffrey
* Toronto study (2013)
* Travis, Trysh
* treatment
* * and Twelve-Step therapy model
* use of drugs
* _see also_ therapy
* * Troiden, Richard
* Tutera, David
* Tyler, Steven
* Tyson, Mike
* Twelve-Step Model _see_ treatment
* * * Varon, Jeremy
* Varone, Phil
* Vatz, Richard
* von Trier, Lars
* Vukadinovic, Zoran
* * * Wakefield, Jerome
* Wallace, Mike
* Walters, Barbara
* Warhol, Robyn
* Waters, John
* Weinberg, Lee
* Weiner, Anthony
* Weiss, Douglas
* Weiss, Robert
* _Welcome to New York_ (film)
* West, Amy
* WHO (World Health Organization), ICD-10
* Williams, Linda
* Willis, Stanley
* Wilson, Marie
* Wilson, Meg
* Winters, Jason
* Witztum, Eliezer
* Womack, Stephanie
* women _see_ female sex addiction
* Woods, Tiger
* workbooks
* World Health Organization _see_ WHO
* Wyman, Bill
* * * Yant, R. L.
* Young, Kimberly
* * * Zahedi, Caveh
* Zuma, Jacob
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end,
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};
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 4,029
|
Q: Windows - New administrative user not an administrator In Windows Server 2008, I have create a new user and added it to the Administrator group ("Administrators have complete and unrestricted access to the computer/domain.")
However, in most instances this user is not treated as an Administrator. For example, when logged in under the new administrative user's account, Internet Explorer treats the login as a regular user, even though IE ESC is turned of for administrators.
A: UAC is still turned on. This means that, while unelevated, your administrator user account is actually just the same as a regular user account.
More information here.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 5,603
|
Q: How to map to array instead of object I have a map below
map(x => ({
name: 'Name',
series: []
})),
that returns an Object {name: "Platform", series: Array(10)} but what I need is an array [{name: "Platform", series: Array(10)}]
How would you do that?
A: There are two main ways you could approach that problem
first being simply putting object into array and returning it the shortened way
map(x => [{
name: 'Name',
series: []
}]
)
and second being returning the array with a return statement in case you need some additional functionality in there
map(x => {
//additional functionality here
return [{
name: 'Name',
series: []
}]
})
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 6,559
|
Candidates must be native speakers of the language involved.
LocTeam is looking for a Dutch QA Tester.
Under the direction of a Project Manager, the candidates will perform linguistic and phonological testing of a voice recognition software in order to ensure it meets the quality specifications.
In compliance with current Regulation (EU) 2016/679, we hereby inform you that the personal data provided by you will be processed for the following purposes: To carry out staff selection processes.
Said data processing is legitimized by your consent. By pressing the "SEND" button, the user consents to the processing described above.
Your data shall not be disclosed to third parties, unless we are legally required to do so or you grant your explicit consent.
De conformidad con el vigente Reglamento (UE) 2016/679, le informamos de que los datos de carácter personal que nos proporcione se tratarán con la siguiente finalidad: Realizar procesos de selección de personal.
Dicho tratamiento de sus datos estará amparado en su propio consentimiento. Al pulsar el botón "SEND", el usuario consiente el tratamiento arriba descrito.
LocTeam is looking for a Norwegian QA Tester.
LocTeam is looking for a Swiss German QA Tester.
LocTeam is looking for Dutch native speakers for a permanent/temporary project.
Under the direction of a Project Manager, candidates will review, correct and grade information obtained from audios in Dutch.
LocTeam is looking for English (from Australia) native speakers for a permanent/temporary project.
Under the direction of a Project Manager, candidates will review, correct and grade information obtained from audios in the English (from Australia) language.
LocTeam is looking for French native speakers for a permanent/temporary project.
Under the direction of a Project Manager, candidates will review, correct and grade information obtained from audios in French.
LocTeam is looking for German native speakers for a permanent/temporary project.
Under the direction of a Project Manager, candidates will review, correct and grade information obtained from audios in German.
LocTeam is looking for Spanish (from Chile) native speakers for a permanent/temporary project.
Under the direction of a Project Manager, candidates will review, correct and grade information obtained from audios in the Spanish (from Chile) language.
Under the direction of a Project Manager, candidates will review, correct and grade information obtained from audios in the Dutch language.
Under the direction of a Project Manager, candidates will review, correct and grade information obtained from audios in the French language.
Under the direction of a Project Manager, the candidates will check and correct automatic transcriptions in the German language.
LocTeam is a multicultural language service provider which collaborates in projects involving the latest developments in one of the most advanced voice recognition systems.
If you would like to be part of this cutting-edge sector, we are looking for candidates who are passionate about technology and language. Applicants should have technical expertise, troubleshooting skills and excellent language awareness.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
}
| 761
|
Q: UIsearchbar searching for email and username I have UIsearchbar in my app view. The UIsearchbar allows the user to search by username. we need to add one more feature is to allow the search by username and email address. I want to ask how I can modify my search function to search username and email?
public func searchBar(_ searchBar: UISearchBar, textDidChange searchText: String) {
filteredUsers = users.filter({( user : User) -> Bool in
print(searchText)
return user.username.lowercased().contains(searchText.lowercased())
})
tableViewUsers.reloadData()
}
A: Just OR both predicates. A more efficient API than lowercased().contains() is range(of:options: .caseInsensitive).
public func searchBar(_ searchBar: UISearchBar, textDidChange searchText: String) {
filteredUsers = users.filter {
$0.username.range(of: searchText, options: .caseInsensitive) != nil ||
$0.email.range(of: searchText, options: .caseInsensitive) != nil
}
tableViewUsers.reloadData()
}
Other options which can be combined are diacriticInsensitive and anchored
A: You can try
filteredUsers = users.filter { $0.username.lowercased().contains(toSearch)
|| $0.email.lowercased().contains(toSearch) }
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 2,319
|
Benjamin Gottlieb Schneider, boktryckare i Stockholm med eget tryckeri från 1726 till sin död 1738.
Schneider kom från Tyskland till Stockholm i början av 1720-talet. Han var under åren 1722-26 faktor (föreståndare) för Jacob Wildes tryckeri. Därefter startade han en egen verksamhet som blev framgångsrik. Han tryckte framför allt många översättningar från engelska och tyska. Också några svenska tidskrifter fanns i produktionen, bland annat Sedolärande Mercurius (1730-31), redigerad av Carl Carleson och Edvard Carleson, och Then Swänska Argus (1732-1734) av Olof von Dalin. Dessa tidskrifter tillhörde en ny genre som brukar kallas "moraliska veckoskrifter" eller "Spectator-tidskrifter". De utgavs en gång i veckan hade en ambition att underhålla läsarna. Innehållet bestod av satirer och debatter. Läsarna inbjöds att bidra med insänt material. Tidskrifterna blev föremål för censurens uppmärksamhet och åtgärder.
Genom Then Swänska Argus har Schneider också gått till historien som en litterär gestalt. Dalin tar upp problem associerade med tryckningen vid ett flertal tillfällen och vänder sig ofta direkt till Schneider i texterna. Boktryckaren får såväl kritik som beröm.
Schneider var gift med Rachel Speck. Efter Schneiders död gifte hon om sig med Lorens Ludwig Grefing, som blev ny ägare av tryckeriet 1739.
Böcker tryckta hos B G Schneider
Then Swänska Psalmboken 1695 års upplaga, 1738
Även en bibel tryckt 1729
Källor
Tilda Maria Forselius: '"Aber mein Lieber Schneider": The Printer as a Media Actor and the Drama of Production in Then Swänska Argus (1732–34)', Journal of European Periodical Studies, 1.1 (Summer 2016), 25–36.
Tilda Maria Forselius: God dag, min läsare! Bland berättare, brevskrivare, boktryckare och andra bidragsgivare i tidig svensk veckopress 1730-1773. (Lund, 2015).
Gustaf Edvard Klemming & Johan Gabriel Nordin: Svensk boktryckerihistoria 1483-1883 / med inledande allmän öfversigt af G. E. Klemming och J. G. Nordin (Bromma, 1983) Faksimil av 1. upplagan, Stockholm, 1883.
Karl-Erik Gustafsson & Claes-Göran Holmberg, Per Rydén, Jarl Torbacke och Ingemar Oscarsson: Den svenska pressens historia. 1, I begynnelsen (tiden före 1830) (Stockholm, 2000).
Avlidna 1738
Svenska boktryckare
Män
Tyska boktryckare
Personer inom Sveriges näringsliv under 1700-talet
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
}
| 1,112
|
{"url":"https:\/\/bitesizebio.com\/24894\/4-easy-steps-to-analyze-your-qpcr-data-using-double-delta-ct-analysis\/comment-page-3\/","text":"# 4 Easy Steps to Analyze Your qPCR Data Using Double Delta Ct Analysis\n\nYou are at the airport burning away time with a report due tomorrow morning for your professor. You have your data. Why not take advantage of the time and calculate the expression fold change for the genes you have tested in that first qPCR experiment you did last week?\n\nIt\u2019s easy \u2013 I\u2019ll show you how.\n\nThere are two main ways to analyze qPCR data: double delta Ct analysis and the relative standard curve method (Pfaffl method). Both methods make assumptions and have their limitations, so the method you should use for your analysis will depend on your experimental design.\n\nThe double delta Ct analysis assumes that:\n\n\u2022 there is equal primer efficiency between primer sets (i.e. within 5%);\n\u2022 there is near 100% amplification efficacy of the reference and the target genes;\n\u2022 the internal control genes are constantly expressed and aren\u2019t affected by the treatment.\n\nThe method generally caters to experiments with a large number of DNA samples and a low number of genes to be tested.\n\nThe relative standard curve method assumes that:\n\n\u2022 there are equal efficiencies between the control and the treated samples.\n\nThis method works better if you have fewer DNA samples but a larger number of genes to test.\n\n## What You Need for Double Delta Ct Analysis\n\n\u2022 qPCR Ct values (raw data) for:\n\u2022 the housekeeping gene: control and experimental conditions;\n\u2022 the gene of interest: control and experimental conditions;\n\nAnd that\u2019s it! No expensive software required.\n\nHere is a quick summary of the key steps in the double delta Ct analysis (for a detailed explanation read this paper).\n\n## 4 Steps for Double Delta Ct Analysis\n\n1.\u00a0 Take the average of the Ct values for the housekeeping gene and the gene being tested in the experimental and control conditions, returning 4 values. The 4 values are Gene being Tested Experimental (TE), Gene being Tested Control (TC), Housekeeping Gene Experimental (HE), and Housekeeping Gene Control (HC).\n\nAverage Experimental Ct ValueAverage Experimental Ct ValueAverage Control Ct ValueAverage Control Ct Value$\\Delta$Ct Value (Experimental)$\\Delta$Ct Value (Control)\nTEHETCHC$\\Delta$CTE$\\Delta$CTC\n21.2720.2319.6019.271.030.33\n\n2.\u00a0 Calculate the differences between experimental values (TE \u2013 HE) and the control values (TC \u2013 HC). These are your $\\Delta$Ct values for the experimental ($\\Delta$CTE) and control ($\\Delta$CTC) conditions, respectively.\n\n3.\u00a0 Then, calculate the difference between the $\\Delta$CT values for the experimental and the control conditions ($\\Delta$CTE \u2013 $\\Delta$CTC) to arrive at the double delta Ct value (ddCt).\n\n4.\u00a0 Since all calculations are in logarithm base 2, every time there is twice as much DNA, your Ct values decrease by 1 and will not halve. You need to calculate the value of 2$^{-2\\Delta\\Delta C_{t}}$ to get the expression fold change.\n\ndCt Value (Experimental)dCt Value (Control)ddCt ValueExpression Fold Change\ndCTEdCTCddCt2^-ddCt\n1.030.330.700.615572207\n\n## What Does the Value Mean?\n\nNow that you have your value for fold change, what does it actually mean? This value is the fold change of your gene of interest in the test condition, relative to the control condition, which has all been normalized to your housekeeping gene.\n\nTo make it a little clearer \u2013 you can think about it as a percentage. A fold change of 1 means that there is 100% as much gene expression in your test condition as in your control condition \u2013 so there is no change between the experimental group and the control group. A fold-change value above 1 is showing upregulation of the gene of interest relative to the control (1.2-fold change = 120% gene expression relative to control, 5 = 500%, 10 = 1,000%, etc.). Values below 1 are indicative of gene downregulation relative to the control (fold change of 0.5 is 50% gene expression relative to control, so half as much expression as in the control, etc.).\n\nYou can present these data as fold-change bar charts, graphing the control conditions equal to 1. You can also use statistical analyses to check the significance of the changes, e.g. using an analysis of variance (ANOVA) or t-tests, whatever is appropriate for your experimental set-up!\n\nUsing these steps you can conduct your qPCR analysis wherever you are, even if you\u2019re on a road trip. To make things even easier, you can create an Excel template to use each time. Then you will only have to input your data and you will astonish others with your alacrity in conducting analyses!\n\nOriginally published July 9, 2016. Reviewed and updated on February 8, 2021.\n\nLivak KJ, Schmittgen TD. Analysis of Relative Gene Expression Data Using RealTime Quantitative PCR and the 2$^{-2\\Delta\\Delta C_{t}}$ Method. Methods. 2001;25:402\u20138.\n\n1. Dr.Mohammad on March 12, 2019 at 3:21 pm\n\nHi, i want ask you if i got on fold change 0.7 ok. now this down regulated because If the ddCt has a positive value, the gene of interest is upregulated, because the fold change will be larger than 1. On the other hand, if the ddCt has a negative value, the gene is downregulated and the fold change is <1. i got it from researchgate but this against with your excel sheet. and please tell me can i say this gene was downregulated in 10-fold for example. is there any realation between delta delta ct and fold because if i get negative value in delta delat and fold change 17 fold what does mean? and also how to create graph and which value u put in it?\nplease can you send me your email i want to send you my results to check it\n\n2. Ellie on February 25, 2019 at 12:09 pm\n\nIf I have 3 experimental cell lines, plus 3 wild type cell lines, how would I input this into the spreadsheet? I don\u2019t want to take the average of the experimental or controls, because these are meant to be independent replicates. I want to see how each of the 6 lines compare to all others. I could input 1 experimental vs 1 wild type, 3 times, but this would be biasing results as I would have to pick how to pair them. Any advice?\n\n\u2022 Sadia Nazir on July 1, 2019 at 1:46 pm\n\ntake average of control and than subtract from experimental in order to avoid bias and then you will get three indepedent values in the end. however it is advisable to take average of technical replicates, at the least.\n\n3. parom_d on December 3, 2018 at 7:37 pm\n\nIf i use exogenous control cel-39-3p for normalization instead of housekeeping gene , will it be same process for analysis?\n\n4. Dami on November 1, 2018 at 1:08 pm\n\nCan I still use this method if primer efficiency of my target gene is 104% and of my housekeeping gene 93%?\n\n5. Akhter on April 10, 2018 at 10:49 am\n\nHi\u2026\ncan relative quantification be used without using housekeeping genes, when we test the effect of such substance on the expression of some genes, considering the untreated sample as a control, therefore how does the fold change calculated?\n\n\u2022 Rongchang Yang on May 8, 2019 at 3:26 am\n\nTheoretically, you can conduct the relative quantitative PCR without house keep genes if you can be sure all the samples have the same concentration of DNA or cDNA,. In fact, it is impossible to do so. Therefore, house keep gene (s) are required.\n\n6. nosheen on March 24, 2018 at 10:01 am\n\nif we want to compare which gene is strong negative regulator of growth then in qrt pcr at growth maximum stage, the gene that will least express is more strong negative regulator and at minimum growth stage the gene that will more expressed is more strong negative regular. am i right?\n\n7. nosheen on March 24, 2018 at 9:40 am\n\ni have checked the normal gene expression of different genes after extracting RNA from different stages. now after deletion or overexpression of some specific gene, do i again need to check the expression level using qrt pcr? it will confirm that gene deleted\/overexpressed or not. is there any other method to confirm this thing that gene modification is successfully done?\n\n8. Rauan on March 22, 2018 at 8:17 pm\n\nHi,\nIf I see 0.9 fold change, is it significant up regulation?\n\n9. Jess on March 9, 2018 at 11:34 am\n\nThis is amazing, Thanks so much!!\n\n10. tannaz on November 13, 2017 at 10:08 am\n\nhi.how can i report my rtpcr ????\n\nScroll To Top","date":"2021-04-13 20:47:15","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 12, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.3379851281642914, \"perplexity\": 1928.3090547312336}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": false, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-17\/segments\/1618038074941.13\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210413183055-20210413213055-00213.warc.gz\"}"}
| null | null |
Mona Lisa Smile
Review by Marty Mapes
Mona Lisa Smile takes a brave political stand and boldly asserts that women, like men, deserve a college education. I'm not sure America is ready for such a radical notion, but hey, if we can change our minds about slavery, maybe we'll come around to this way of thinking too.
Julia Roberts switches from art history to art appreciation
Juliet Stevenson
Lawrence Konner
Mark Rosenthal
PG-13 for Sexual content, thematic issues
Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts) heads to Wellesley College in 1953 to teach young women about art. To her chagrin, she shows up on day one, unable to teach the girls anything. They have all already read the text for the entire semester. There is something aggressive about the way the students have prepared, as though they are telling Katherine how irrelevant she is.
But Katherine rebounds, with the help of her roommates. Nancy (Marcia Gay Harden) teaches poise and fits into the stoic, conservative Wellesley system quite nicely. Amanda (Juliet Stevenson) is a lesbian (shh!) and if she fits in, it is only because she has been defeated by the system.
To keep her students challenged, Katherine decides her class will no longer be Art History, but Art Appreciation. Instead of quizzing them on names and dates, she will ask them "is it any good?" and "why?"
Plot 1, Characters 0
Mona Lisa Smile follows Katherine and her students for a year, and it plays more or less like a female version of Dead Poets Society. Friendships are formed and lessons are learned. In the end, Katherine hopes her girls will stop being such Stepford wives and learn to think for themselves.
Roberts stands at the center of a whirlwind and grins the smug grin of an entertainer who knows the audience loves her. A constellation of young starlets surrounds her, each with a cute "type" role. Maggie Gyllenhall is the naughty one, Ginnifer Goodwin is the insecure chubby one, Julia Stiles is the smart one. Only one is girl is saddled with being a jerk, Kirsten Dunst, and she's given the chance to repent before the movie is over.
The characters in Mona Lisa Smile are actually pretty likeable. The trouble is that the movie won't let them drive the action. Plot requirements force Dunst to be a villain, Goodwin to be a dupe, and Roberts to fall in love.
Director Mike Newell pumps the contrast in these developments so that Katherine is actually more progressive (and with better hair) than anyone in 1953. And the villains — Dunst and the school's administrators — are all more closed-minded, regressive, and bitchy than your average human beings. As an example, one of the administrators is hesitant to give Katherine a break because she finds genius in the work of that no-talent, upstart "painter" named Picasso.
It's interesting that in Mona Lisa Smile, the forces of evil are closed-minded and conservative. A much better movie, The Last Samurai, takes the opposite point of view. That movie mourns the loss of a way of life, and "progress" comes too soon and at too high a cost.
When I needed a break from Mona Lisa Smile, I pondered whether someone could make a movie about women's lib that mourned the loss of the old ways, that could portray their progress as coming at too high a cost.
Somehow I don't think it would work, but at least it was something to think about while the undemanding Mona Lisa Smile played on the screen before me.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
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| 3,286
|
\section{ Introduction}
Unusual magnetic behavior of helimagnet MnSi
\cite{unusual}, which triggered the suspicion, that the magnetic states in such
helimagnetic materials might be of topological origin
\cite{topological,top2,bogdanNature06,bogdanMnsi}, is confirmed as Skyrmions in quantum
Hall (QH)
\cite{QHexperim} and small angle neutron scattering (SANS) experiments \cite{nutronScattExp}.
These experiments, though made pioneering observations,
could give only indirect evidence for the existence of Skyrmion spin
textures, due to their confinement in
the momentum space. However, more recently, in a real space
experiment with Lorentz transmission electron microscopy (TEM), direct photographic evidence
of Skyrmion crystals was
obtained in a thin film of helimagnet Fe$_{0.5}$Co$_{0.5}$Si, on a plane perpendicular to
the applied magnetic field
\cite{LorentzExp}. Skyrmion crystals were found to be in a beautiful
hexagonal form, with the localized individual
Skyrmions serving as its constituent molecules, extended over lattice spacing
of 30 nm range.
For theoretical description of these fascinating experimental observations in helimagnets,
the accepted basic model is given by a ferromagnetic spin exchange
Hamiltonian in
combination with a Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction
\cite{bogdanMnsi,LorentzExp,heliModel,heliModelPRL10}. It is argued,
that the occurrence of topological solitons in helimagnets is due to the
competing forces between the ferromagnetic and the effective DM
interactions, where the ferromagnetic spin exchange
tends to align the neighboring spins parallel to each other, while
the DM spin-orbital interaction with its broken inversion symmetry,
orients them to be mutually perpendicular, resulting to a
helical order of topological origin .
Since the experimentally observed Skyrmions are found to have extended
nature,
slowly varying in comparison with the
lattice structure of the original magnetic crystals,
the long wavelength limit is justified and
at low energy and weak DM coupling we can consider
the continuum approximation. At this semiclassical limit an
intriguing topological property sets in, with a spatially dependent magnetization
as a unit vector, wrapping around a 2-sphere, while the 2d coordinate space,
due to the fixed orientation of the spins at space-infinities,
compactifies to another 2-sphere,
inducing a
sphere to sphere mapping.
The degree
of this mapping, counting the number of times
the Skyrmion
magnetic field sweeps the target sphere, when the coordinate space is
covered once, defines the integer valued topological charge $Q=N$
\cite{Skyrme}.
It is a remarkable fact, that at the continuum limit, the ferromagnetic
Hamiltonian itself, defined on a 2d plane,
allows exact Skyrmion solutions with arbitrary integer
charge $N $, which can be
linked to the holomorphic functions \cite {BP}. However, such solutions
exhibiting in general a noncircular symmetry, posses a scale invariance
property, which does not allow to fix the Skyrmion size and makes the
Skyrmions in a ferromagnetic model unphysical metastable states.
However, the addition of a DM type interaction with broken symmetry can
change this picture significantly by providing the necessary scale through
its coupling parameter and stabilizes the magnetic Skyrmions, that have been
observed in several recent experiments in different helimagnetic materials.
However,
at the theoretical level, the addition of the DM Hamiltonian
can not sustain the analytic solutions obtained in the original
ferromagnetic model and at the same time introduces
a high level of asymmetry to the resulting equations, due to
explicitly broken inversion symmetry in the DM interaction. Therefore,
the appearance of Skyrmion spin patterns with noncircular symmetry seems to
be more generic in such systems, in particular for describing the Skyrme
crystals.
However based on the experimental data, available so far,
in observing the magnetic Skyrmions in
helimagnets, any definitive statement about the
symmetry and isotropy of the individual Skyrmions located in the Skyrme
lattice seems to be difficult to make. In QH experiments the indirect evidence of
Skyrmions was obtained in the form of an unusual magnetic field giving no
details about the structure of the soliton. In
SANS experiment
, though the situation was improved with the detection of the hexagonal form of
Skyrme crystals through a 6-fold symmetry, any symmetry statement about the
individual Skyrme molecules was beyond the scope of this experiment.
Finally in
recent thin film Lorentz TEM experiment
images of extended Skyrme molecules inside hexagonal Skyrme crystals
were obtained in real space, revealing
much detailed structures of these objects appearing in a helimagnetic
material. However, even from this best
available data, one can not confirm with certainty
about the nature of symmetry and isotropy of the individual Skyrmions,
since the color-code of the images shows directional
asymmetry and color inhomogeneity (see Fig. 1e-f of \cite{LorentzExp}).
Therefore, for a clearer picture about the precise symmetry of the
Skyrmions and the exact directional orientations of the magnetic field lines
one has to look for further finer and precision experiments.
Nevertheless, at the theoretical level, most of the models tend to support
the symmetric form of the individual Skyrmions and their isotropy inside a
Skyrme crystals, neglecting the inter-Skyrmion interactions. For example,
in a numerical simulation by minimizing the discretized model Hamiltonian
using the Monte Carlo method,
circular symmetric Skyrme molecules forming a Skyrme crystal in symmetric
form have been obtained \cite {LorentzExp}.
Similarly, in the prevalent theoretical models \cite{bogdanMnsi,heliModelPRL10}
a circular symmetric ansatz is assumed for the solution of individual
Skyrmions. However, since the general nature of the governing
Euler equations are highly asymmetric, such a
symmetric assumption put strong restrictions on the
corresponding solutions, confining it
to the unit charge sector and imposing a fixed initial
phase shift,
which limits the spin pattern only to a particular
orientation ($D_n $ type) \cite{bogdanMnsi,heliModelPRL10}.
It is important to stress, that since the individual Skyrmions as
well as the Skyrme crystals in general should be solutions of the energy
minimizing equations, they should ideally be derived from the Euler
equations dictated by the governing helimagnetic model without restriction
of symmetry, orientation and charge.
However, no satisfactory theoretical proposal seems to have been offered
to this challenging problem of describing the hexagonal Skyrme crystal
structure with noncircular symmetry, as a solution of the underlying
equations with higher topological charges, which would induce nonlinear
interactions between the constituent Skyrme molecules. It is indeed a
difficult problem to solve the governing equations, representing highly
nonlinear coupled partial differential equations allowing no separation of
variables.
Current studies on the helimagnetic model avoid
this difficult problem by completely neglecting the inter-molecular interactions
between the Skyrmions, by assuming a circular cell approximation
\cite{bogdanMnsi,heliModelPRL10}, though
such a linear superposition of individual
solutions does not represent a solution
of the governing nonlinear equations. Moreover,
such a configuration as a equidistant collection of individual Skyrmions
can not be reproduced as a limiting case of a general solution
with a higher charge.
Other investigations on the Skyrme lattice in the helimagnetic model focus
usually on different other aspects like the
effect of current and temperature gradients on the rotating of Skyrme
lattice \cite{SKLrot},
pinning of Skyrmion through inhomogeneity of magnetic exchange
\cite{SKpin}, Skyrmion spin lattice coupling with electric dipole
\cite{SKLedipol} etc., leaving aside the basic problem of the
formation of Skyrme crystals as a topological solution.
Our aim here is to focus on the above posed problem of constructing
a Skyrme crystal as a solution of the helimagnetic equations. However, we
bypass the direct problem, which is hard to solve
and obtain the solutions with higher topological charges linked to the
Skyrme crystal, by looking first for the Skyrmions appearing in the pure
ferromagnetic model (FM)
and subject them subsequently, to the DM interaction perturbatively, by
assuming the coupling to be weak. This
stabilizes the solitons through DM coupling and goes beyond the
limitations of the earlier studies by allowing Skyrmion solutions with higher charges
and more general initial phase admitting
different types of orientations for the spin texture.
This would mean, however
that one has to deal
with noncircular symmetric fields without separation of variables, which
unlike earlier proposals, is a more difficult task to handle.
Nevertheless, this approach solves to some extend the
problem of formation of hexagonal Skyrme crystals within the helimagnetic model
with weak DM coupling,
by finding a perturbed Skyrmion solution with charge $Q=-7 $, and
without the usual circular cell approximation.
.
\\
\section { The Model}
The basic Helimagnetic model, as motivated above, is given by the
Hamiltonian \begin{eqnarray}
& & H= J \ H_{FM}+D \ H_{DM},
\label{Hheli} \\
\mbox {with} \ & & \ H_{FM}= \frac 1 2 \int d^2x (\nabla {\bf M})^2, \label{FM} \\
& & H_{DM} = \int d^2x({\bf M } \cdot [\nabla \times {\bf M}])
,\label{DM} \end{eqnarray}
where ${\bf M } $ with ${\bf M}^2=1 $ is the magnetization vector and $H_{FM} $,
$H_{DM}$ are the competing ferromagnetic and DM interactions,
respectively \cite{bogdanMnsi,LorentzExp,BakJensen}.
Since the magnetization, taking values on a 2-sphere is restricted to a 2d
plane, the system may be described
by two spherical angles $\beta (\rho,\alpha) $ and $\gamma (\rho,\alpha) $
defined through polar coordinates $ (\rho,\alpha) $ with the magnetization
components given as $M^1\pm i M^2= \sin \beta e^{ \pm i \gamma}, \
M^3=\cos \beta . $
The helimagnetic Hamiltonian (\ref{Hheli})
may be expressed through these angle variables for convenience as
\begin{eqnarray}
& & H_{FM}=\frac 1 2 \int d^2x((\nabla \beta )^2+\sin ^2 \beta (\nabla \gamma )^2),
\label{CFM} \\
& & H_{DM}= \int d^2x ( \sin (\gamma-\alpha)(\partial_\rho\beta-\frac 1 {2 \rho} \sin
2 \beta \ \partial_\alpha \gamma) - \cos (\gamma-\alpha)(\frac { \partial_\alpha\beta} \rho+\frac 1 {2 }
\sin 2 \beta \ \partial_\rho \gamma))
. \label{CDM}\end{eqnarray}
The associated topological charge takes the
explicit form
\begin{eqnarray}
Q= \frac {1}{ 4 \pi } \int d^2 x \sin \beta
|[{\nabla \beta } \times {\nabla \gamma } ]|
, \label{Qba}\end{eqnarray}
\subsection{The Euler equations}
Note that the energy minimizing Euler equations
for the fields $\beta $ and $
\gamma $, may be derived in the static case from the model
Hamiltonian (\ref {CFM}, \ref{CDM}) as
\begin{eqnarray}
&& \nabla^2\beta - \frac 1 2 \sin 2 \beta (\nabla \gamma)^2
+ 2 \epsilon M_\beta (\beta,\gamma) =0 , \ \ \ \ \epsilon= \frac D J \label{betaEq}
\end{eqnarray} for angle $\beta(\rho,\alpha) $ and
\begin{eqnarray}
&& \sin 2 \beta (\nabla\beta \cdot \nabla \gamma) +
\sin^ 2 \beta (\nabla^2 \gamma)+2 \epsilon M_\gamma
(\beta,\gamma)=0, \label{gammaEq}
\end{eqnarray}
and with respect to angle $\gamma(\rho,\alpha) $ , where
the additional DM terms are
\begin{eqnarray}
&& M_\beta (\beta,\gamma) \equiv
\ \sin^ 2 \beta( \partial_\rho \gamma \cos (\gamma-\alpha) + \frac {1} {\rho }
\partial_\alpha \gamma \sin (\gamma-\alpha)) \label{EqDMbeta}
\end{eqnarray} and \begin{eqnarray}
&& M_\gamma (\beta,\gamma) \equiv
- \ \sin^ 2 \beta( \partial_\rho \beta \cos (\gamma-\alpha)+ \frac {1} {\rho }
\partial_\alpha\beta \sin (\gamma-\alpha)
=0. \label{EqDMgamma}
\end{eqnarray}
Note that these equations for finding the field
configurations minimizing the Hamiltonian, represent
highly nonlinear
inhomogeneous coupled partial
differential equations in two variables and are difficult to solve in
general.
A simple possibility to overcome this difficulty, as adopted in most of the
earlier studies \cite{bogdanNature06,bogdanMnsi,heliModelPRL10}, is to focus on
an individual Skyrmion
with a circular symmetric ansatz
\begin{equation} \beta=\beta(\rho), \ \gamma =N \alpha +\alpha_0,
, \label{rhoalpha0} \end{equation} with initial
phase $\alpha_0 $, as an arbitrary constant and $N$ as an arbitrary integer.
Specific values of $\alpha_0 , $
represent precise crystallographic forms, describing the spin orientation in the
related magnetic pattern \cite{bogdanMnsi}. A closer look however reveals that
for the circular symmetric ansatz (\ref{rhoalpha0}) to work,
the equation (\ref {gammaEq}) for the angle
$\gamma $ must be zero, which due to
$\partial_\alpha \beta=0 ,\ \partial_\rho \gamma =0$
reduces to the vanishing of
$M_\gamma$
(\ref {EqDMgamma}) or in turn to the vanishing condition for the
term
$$ \ \sin^ 2 \beta \ \beta^{'} \cos ((N-1)\alpha+ \alpha_0)
\ . $$
Clearly it becomes zero (for $\beta^{'} \neq 0 $), when the cosine function vanishes
under the combined condition: $N=1 $ and
$\alpha_0=\pm \frac \pi 2 $. Therefore, for the validity of the symmetric ansatz
(\ref{rhoalpha0}) for the Skyrmions in helimagnets, one
gets a solution restricted only to unit
topological charge $Q\equiv N=1 $ and with fixed value for the initial phase
linked to $D_n $ type of magnetic pattern \cite{bogdanNature06,bogdanMnsi,heliModelPRL10}.
Therefore, though this is a convenient way
to achieve separation of variables in
a coupled nonlinear equation, it can not get generic Skyrmion solutions
with higher topological charges
$Q=N >1 $
and misses the possibility of finding other crystallographic forms for other
values of
$\alpha_0 $, involving noncircular symmetric solutions.
More importantly,
such a symmetric ansatz can not describe the Skyrmion lattice structure
having multiple centers and higher
topological charge, including the Skyrme
crystals in hexagonal form, as a solution of the full set of
governing equations (\ref{betaEq},\ref {gammaEq}). Nevertheless, a formal
insertion of such circular symmetric Skyrmions at each lattice site,
sometimes with
anisotropic terms
like $h \ M^3 , K \ (M^3)^2$ etc.
added to the helimagnetic
model (\ref{Hheli}), was proposed theoretically for
describing a Skyrme crystal \cite{bogdanMnsi}, which however
neglects completely the interaction between
the Skyrme molecules, under
circular cell approximation.
\section { The Approach}
Going
beyond the conventional circular cell
approximation, we intend to look for more general noncircular
symmetric solutions by considering interactions between the individual Skyrme
molecules,
consistent with the coupled Euler equations
(\ref{betaEq}-\ref{gammaEq}), minimizing the helimagnetic model.
However, since such asymmetric solutions are difficult to obtain in
general, we adopt a bypass route by considering the
deformation of Skyrmion
solutions of pure ferromagnetic model (\ref{FM}), by switching on
the DM interaction (\ref{DM}) perturbatively, by taking the
DM coupling $D$ weaker in comparison with the ferromagnetic exchange
coupling $J$ with
$\epsilon \equiv D/J $ as a small parameter.
The assumption of a
weak relative coupling $ D/J, $ however has gone already in
the justification of
the continuum approximation for the present
model (see e.g. \cite{LorentzExp}). Note, that this approach also brings in
the necessary scaling parameter for stabilizing the Skyrmions.
\subsection{Skyrmions in ferromagnetic model}
In the first step, we focus on the nonlinear Euler equations associated
with the ferromagnetic model alone, without the DM interaction and look for
the exact Skyrmions with higher topological charge, which in general would have
noncircular symmetry. In the next step, this exact solution is
subjected to the DM interaction perturbatively, where though the perturbing
fields do not allow separation of variables, the governing equations
become linear, allowing numerical solutions.
Therefore, we start with suitable solutions $\beta_0 (\rho,\alpha), \gamma_0
(\rho,\alpha)
$ for the ferromagnetic model (\ref{FM}) (or (\ref{CFM})), satisfying the
related Euler equations (\ref{betaEq}-\ref{gammaEq}), at $D=0 $.
It is remarkable, that the topological Skyrmions for this model
can be given by the celebrated exact solutions found way back by Belavin
and Polyakov (BP) \cite{BP}.
A deep theoretical concept and beautiful geometrical picture go into this
construction, where an important lower bound for the energy
(\ref{CFM}) is revealed through the topological charge $Q$
(\ref{Qba}):
$H_{FM}
\geq 4 \pi |Q| $. Note that due to the conservation of charge
the lower bound guarantees, that the finite energy topological solitons can
not decay into the vacuum or any other topological states. Interestingly,
the lower bound is saturated under the so called {\it self duality}
condition
\begin{equation} \partial_\rho \beta_0=\pm \frac 2 \rho \ \sin \beta_0 \partial_\alpha
\gamma_0
, \ \partial_\alpha \beta_0=\mp 2 \rho \ \sin \beta_0 \partial_\rho
\gamma_0
\label{Bog} \end{equation}
and since this is the minimizing
condition for the energy functional, the corresponding field
configuration also becomes a solution of the associated Euler
equations ((\ref{betaEq}-\ref{gammaEq}) at $D=0 $), which are
our current focus. Note, interestingly that these Euler equations
are actually solved
without solving them directly,
but by solving the self-duality condition and therefore,
for finding the Skyrmion solutions in pure ferromagnetic
model, one has to consider only the solution of (\ref{Bog}), which
remarkably can be solved exactly. Deep reason behind this intriguing fact is
that the relations (\ref{Bog}) for attaining the energy minimum represent the
well known Cauchy-Riemann (CR) condition (expressed in the polar
coordinates), required for the analyticity of the complex function $f(z), $
linked through the stereographic projection
\begin{equation}
f(z)= \frac {M^1+iM^2} {1+M^3} \equiv \tan {\frac {\beta_0} 2}e^{i\gamma_0}
.\label{stereo} \end{equation}
Consequently, as shown in \cite{BP}, any analytic function of the form
\begin{equation} f(z)= \frac {\prod_i(z-z_i)^{n_i} } {\prod_j(z-z_j)^{n_j}}, \ N=\sum_i
n_i-\sum_jn_j
, \label{BPsol} \end{equation}
would be an exact Skyrmion solution of the ferromagnetic model with topological charge $
Q= N$, allowing a scale invariance: $z \to \lambda z $.
Our strategy in constructing the Skyrmions for the Helimagnetic model, is
to take the
ferromagnetic soliton solutions (\ref{BPsol}) as the unperturbed Skyrmions $\beta_0,
\gamma_0 $ through mapping (\ref{stereo}), giving
the angle variables as inverse functions
\begin{equation} \beta = 2 \tan ^{-1} (|f |), \ \gamma= {\rm arg} f. \label{betagamma} \end{equation}
These are guaranteed to satisfy the self-duality (CR condition) (\ref{Bog}) and
consequently,
the Euler-equations (\ref{betaEq}-\ref{gammaEq}) for $D=0 $, as an exact
solution.
Therefore, for describing an individual Skyrmion we may consider the
simplest case with $Q=-1$,
obtained from (\ref{BPsol}) through a reduction $z_j=n_i=0, \ n_j =1 $
giving an exact solution $f(z)\equiv f_1(z_1=0)= \frac 1 z \equiv \frac 1 \rho e^{-i \alpha }
$, where scale transformations $\rho \to \rho_0 \rho , \alpha \to \alpha +\alpha_0$ are
allowed. This isolated Skyrmion of the ferromagnetic model,
linked to the magnetization component \begin{equation}
M^3=\cos \beta= \frac {1- | f_1|^2}
{1+| f_1|^2}= \frac {\rho^2- 1}
{\rho^2+ 1}, \label{f1} \end{equation} having a perfect circular symmetry is shown in Fig. 1a
in the graphical form.
For constructing Skyrmion lattice
in a ferromagnetic model, a naive way would be to insert the same
circular symmetric BP
Skyrmion with $Q=-1$, constructed above, at each Skyrme lattice site
on the 2d plane, separated uniformly from
its neighbors at a distance of $a_s $. This would
give the magnetization in the form
$ M^3=\cos \beta_0= \sum_j \frac {1-| f_1(z_j)|^2} {1+|
f_1(z_j)|^2}, $ neglecting the nonlinear interactions between the Skyrme
molecules, induced by the governing Euler equations.
Note, that a similar construction was adopted
for the Skyrme crystals, but for the
helimagnetic models, in most of the current studies assuming a circular
cell approximation.
However, unfortunately such a formal construction of Skyrme lattice using
superposition of individual Skyrme solitons is {\it not} a solution of the
energy minimizing equations dictated by the model Hamiltonian, both for
the pure ferromagnetic as well as for the helimagnetic models, since due to
nonlinearity of the governing equations the superposition principle of individual
solutions does not hold. Therefore any solution for the Skyrme crystal with higher charges
must satisfy the
energy minimizing Euler equations, where the
nonlinear interactions between the individual Skyrmions with unit
charge, sitting at each lattice site, can not be neglected.
For constructing such a Skyrme crystal solution,
we have to look therefore for Skyrmions with a higher topological charge,
which for the pure ferromagnetic model can be reduced
again from the exact BP solution, which naturally
can no longer exhibit circular symmetry. For the construction of a
possible solution for the
Skyrmion crystal in hexagonal form, within the ferromagnetic model,
we may consider an exact soliton
with topological charge $Q=-7 $, obtained from the BP solution (\ref{BPsol})
under certain reduction
of parameters $z_j, n_j, j=[1,7] $ etc., chosen suitably at seven
centers of the equidistant lattice sites, to form a hexagonal lattice with
equal sides $a_s. $ In explicit form this solution may be given simply by
\begin{equation} f_7^{-1 }(z)= \prod_{j=1}^7 {(z-z_j)}= - a_s^6 \rho e^{i \alpha }+\rho^7 e^{i 7 \alpha }
.\label{f7} \end{equation}
This exact solution
may be linked to the hexagonal Skyrme crystal
pattern for the angle
variables $ \beta_0, \gamma_0 $ through the magnetization
component \begin{equation} M^3=\cos \beta_0= \frac {1-| f_7|^2} {1+|
f_7|^2}, \ \mbox{and} \ \gamma_0= -{\rm arg } f_7(z), \label{Syrm7} \end{equation}
which is obviously noncircular symmetric and expressed through
BP solution (\ref{f7}), as graphically
represented in
Fig. 1b.
This topological soliton solution with higher charge describing the
hexagonal Skyrme crystal in a ferromagnetic model
is guaranteed to satisfy the required
energy minimizing equations, where parameter $a_s $ may serve as the Skyrme
lattice constant fixing the size of the
crystal. However this parameter remains arbitrary due to the scale invariance
$\rho \to \rho_0 \rho $ of the solution, which also makes the Skyrmion
to vanish at $\rho_0 \to 0, $
inducing the well known unphysical
metastable Skyrmionic states in a pure ferromagnetic model.
However, the additional DM interaction (\ref{DM}), which is included in the
helimagnetic model could stabilize the Skyrmion solutions by introducing the
required scaling in the system through coupling parameter $D$, as we will see below.
Note, that
though in Fig 1a an isolated Skyrmion with unit charge exhibits perfect
isotropy and circular symmetry, such individual symmetries no longer remain
intact in the Skyrme solution of crystalline form with higher charge $Q=-7 $, as
shown in Fig 1b, due to interactions between the Skyrme molecules induced
unavoidably by the underlying nonlinear equations.
This characteristic
behavior of the Skyrme crystals with higher charges exhibiting anisotropy
and noncircular symmetry, as obtained here in the
ferromagnetic model, is expected to remain prevalent also in the helimagnetic model
with the inclusion of an additional symmetry breaking DM term (\ref{DM}), at
least in the excited states.
This is the emphasis of our proposal in what follows.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\includegraphics
[width=6cm,height=4 cm]
{fig1a}
\quad \quad \quad
\includegraphics
[width=6.cm,height=4. cm]
{fig1b}
\caption{ Magnetization component $M^3=\cos \beta_0 $ in pure ferromagnetic model
(\ref{FM}) for a) individual Skyrmion with $Q=-1 $ and b) hexagonal Skyrmion
crystal with $Q=-7 $.
}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Skyrmions in helimagnetic model}
Our next step is to consider the helimagnetic model (\ref{Hheli}) by
switching on the DM interaction (\ref{CDM})
to the ferromagnetic model (\ref{CFM}) investigated above.
For finding the spin texture in this helimagnetic model described by
the Skyrmion solution, one has to find the energy minimizing configuration
given by the
the solutions of the associated Euler equations for the fields $\beta $ and $
\gamma $ derived from (\ref{CFM}-\ref{CDM}).
However, as discussed above, since these coupled highly nonlinear partial differential equations
(\ref{betaEq},\ref{gammaEq})
for the two fields involving both the polar coordinates without separation of
variables,
are difficult to solve in general for $D \neq 0 $, our strategy would be to treat the system
perturbatively by considering $ \epsilon=D/J, $ the relative coupling between
the DM and the ferromagnetic exchange interaction, as
a small parameter.
The
perturbative solution therefore
may be given by
\begin{equation} \beta (\rho,\alpha)=\beta_0 (\rho,\alpha)+ \epsilon \
\beta_1 (\rho,\alpha), \ \gamma (\rho,\alpha)=\gamma_0 (\rho,\alpha)+ \epsilon \
\gamma_1 (\rho,\alpha), \label{Pbetgam} \end{equation}
in the first order of approximation, where $\beta_0 (\rho,\alpha), \gamma_0 (\rho,\alpha)
$ are the unperturbed solutions induced by the ferromagnetic Hamiltonian
(\ref{CFM}), while $\beta_1 (\rho,\alpha), \gamma_1 (\rho,\alpha)
$ are the deformations suffered, when the DM interaction (\ref{CDM}) is switched on,
perturbatively. The parameter $D $ also serves as the scaling parameter, breaking the scale
invariance of the unperturbed
Skyrmions and thus providing the required stability to the soliton solutions.
Recall, that we have derived already the set of solutions
$\beta_0 , \gamma_0$ in the analytic form for both the individual Skyrmion
and the Skyrme crystal, as shown in Fig 1. Therefore, it remains now to
extract the deforming
solutions $\beta_1 , \gamma_1$. For this
we insert the perturbative ansatz (\ref{Pbetgam}) in the
full set of helimagnetic equations (\ref{betaEq},\ref{gammaEq}) and derive
the corresponding linear set of equations
in the first
order of approximation $O(\epsilon) $:
\begin{eqnarray} && \nabla^2\beta_1 - \sin 2 \beta_0 (\nabla \gamma_0 \cdot \nabla
\gamma_1)-\beta_1 \ \cos 2 \beta_0 (\nabla \gamma_0)^2
+ \frac 1 2 M_\beta (\beta_0,\gamma_0)=0 , \label{PertbetaEq} \\
&& \sin 2 \beta_0 (\nabla\beta_0 \cdot \nabla \gamma_1+\nabla\beta_1 \cdot \nabla
\gamma_0 + \beta_1 \nabla^2 \gamma_0) +\beta_1
\ \cos 2 \beta_0 (\nabla\beta_0 \cdot \nabla \gamma_0)+
\sin^ 2 \beta_0 (\nabla^2 \gamma_1)+ \frac 1 2 \ M_\gamma (\beta_0,\gamma_0)=0, \label{PertgammaEq}
\end{eqnarray}
where $ M_\beta (\beta_0,\gamma_0),
M_\gamma (\beta_0,\gamma_0) $ are as in (\ref{EqDMbeta}, \ref{EqDMgamma}).
However, due to the
anisotropic and symmetry breaking contribution of the DM interaction
the overall symmetry of the unperturbed Skyrmions gets broken generically,
even for the isolated Skyrmions and these coupled set of
equations, unlike in the pure ferromagnetic model, can not be solved
analytically. Nevertheless, the linearity of these equations allows numerical
solutions for the fields $\beta_1 , \gamma_1$ (see Supplementary material
for Mathematica 10 code). Adding now these perturbing
solutions for the DM interaction to the corresponding analytic solutions $\beta_0 , \gamma_0$
found above for the ferromagnetic model, which also stabilizes the
solutions,
we finally obtain the Skyrmions for the helimagnetic model in the form (\ref
{Pbetgam}) as shown in Fig. 2, for both isolated and crystal solutions.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\includegraphics
[width=6cm,height=4 cm]
{fig2a}
\quad \quad \quad
\includegraphics
[width=6.cm,height=4. cm]
{fig2b}
\caption{ Magnetization component $M^3=\cos \beta $ in helimagnetic model
(\ref{FM}-\ref{DM}) for a) individual Skyrmion with $Q=-1 $ and b) hexagonal Skyrmion
crystal with $Q=-7 $. These Skyrmion solutions are perturbations of
ferromagnetic Skyrmions obtained in Fig. 1 for weak DM coupling, with small parameter
$\epsilon=0.2$. }
\end{figure}
It is evident by comparing the Skyrmion solutions
for the Helimagnetic
model presented in Fig. 2 with those for the pure ferromagnetic model shown in Fig. 1, that
the inclusion of the symmetry breaking DM
interaction (\ref{DM}) deforms the
solutions and introduces further
anisotropy and noncircular symmetry to the
individual Skyrme molecules as well as to the Skyrme crystals appearing
in the helimagnet model. This result generalizes therefore the known circular
symmetric Skyrmions and Skyrmion crystals obtained in the helimagnetic model
to the asymmetric case.
\section {Concluding remarks}
Appearance of Skyrme crystals in the hexagonal form
has been observed experimentally in the magnetization
pattern in helimagnetic materials. However a full
theoretical description for the formation of crystalline structures
as a general topological Skyrmion
solution of the governing equations minimizing the model Hamiltonian, which is
difficult to achieve due to high asymmetry and nonlinearity inherent to
the system is not yet available in the literature.
Assuming weaker DM interaction relative to the ferromagnetic
exchange coupling, which is also a requirement for the
conventional continuum approximation, we present here such solutions
for Skyrme crystals with higher topological charge and for
individual Skyrmions with unit charge in the helimagnetic model
. Our
approach of perturbing and stabilizing the Skyrmions of the ferromagnetic model
with
the symmetry breaking DM interaction, bypasses the major difficulty of
nonlinearity and solves the energy minimizing equations
without assuming any separation of
variables or circular cell approximation
, for the first
time (see the Supplementary material).
Note that, though in recent experiments the evidence of
Skyrmion and Skyrme crystals was found, the details about the
circular symmetry or isotropy of Skyrmions in their individual state or when they
appear as interacting molecules in the Skyrme crystal are not much clear
(see color-code of experimental
images in \cite{LorentzExp})
Therefore, the theoretical possibility of asymmetric Skyrme
crystals found here, can not be ruled out
without verifying
in precision experiments, where deformation of symmetries and isotropy in the magnetic
pattern could be detected
in finer details.
To tune with the validity region of
the present
solutions obtained for low values of $\epsilon $, care should be taken
in choosing the helimagnetic materials, so that their spin-orbital
DM interaction is weaker in comparison with the ferromagnetic
spin exchange. Though the helimagnetic crystals
MnSi and Fe$_{1-x}$Co$_x$Si share similar magnetic
features, they differ significantly in their electronic structures, which
is likely to make the later system more suitable for investigating the nature
of Skyrmion lattices over a large temperature range, with the possibility of
revealing more refined structures.
The recent Lorentz TEM experiment \cite{LorentzExp}
might well be revisited and rescrutinized for detecting the possible symmetry breaking
in the observed magnetic pattern in Skyrme crystals,
in the light of the present result, at least in the excited states and in the
higher temperature range.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
}
| 8,343
|
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}
Software developers often rely on libraries, structured as functions or
classes, to save development time through reuse. When a library provides
the central driving event loop of a program, it may be better organized as a
\emph{framework}. Frameworks organize applications
via a mechanism known as \emph{inversion of control}~\cite{Jaspan11}:
The core logical
component of the framework calls project-specific code of the application, and only when required.
This mechanism requires applications conform to a
predefined architecture~\cite{Jaspan11} and interact with code through a defined
interface.
The main benefits of this approach are time saved through reuse
and from consistent application structure ---
the provided high-level application architecture, file organization, and standard application
control flow.
Our conjecture is that the aspects that differentiate framework programs from
sequential programs that use libraries
(the heavy
use of inversion of control, object protocols, and declarative artifacts) should present unique debugging challenges~\cite{Jaspan11}.
However, how these
factors influence a developer's debugging process is not well understood.
Improvements in understanding how these factors influence the debugging process
could lead to improved framework design, along with improved strategies and tools for
debugging.
We performed an exploratory study to understand how frameworks
help and hinder developers during the debugging process. To
improve our study's
external validity, we
investigated two frameworks with different use cases: Android, a mobile development framework, and
the Robotic Operating System (ROS), a robotics framework.
We created debugging tasks based on framework \emph{directives},
statements in framework documentation that specify testable assertions about
the framework's application programming interface (API) and
usually contain nontrivial, unexpected information (e.g.,
``[\lstinline{setArguments}] can only be called before the \lstinline{Fragment} is attached
to its \lstinline{Activity}'')~\cite{Dekel09}. We focused on directives because these
statements present general framework problems,
instead of application specific issues. We collected directives for
these frameworks and then created debugging tasks based on directive
violations (code that contravenes a directive). We then had participants
perform these debugging tasks and recorded their debugging
process.
We used a mixed-methods approach to guide our study and analysis,
borrowing techniques from case studies~\cite{Yin09},
constructivist grounded theory~\cite{Charmaz14},
and qualitative content analysis~\cite{schreier12}. We used this approach to
produce
a theory explaining which framework aspects help and hinder
developers in debugging framework misuses. We also investigated how
the presentation of directive violations to developers can affect the debugging
process.
We found that certain aspects of frameworks benefit developers by reducing the
number of mental steps developers need to achieve a goal, while other
aspects of frameworks present challenges (e.g., inversion of control causes
participants to misdiagnose possible method states).
Our key contributions are:
\begin{itemize}[labelwidth=0.7em, labelsep=0.6em, topsep=0ex, itemsep=0ex,
parsep=0ex]
\item Results from two studies of humans debugging various directive
violations taken from the Android \lstinline{Fragment} class, and the
Robotic Operating System (ROS).
\item An enumeration of the benefits and challenges in debugging
misuses of framework APIs.
\item A theory that explains the benefits and challenges in framework
debugging.
\end{itemize}
The rest of this paper is organized as follows.
We discuss the methodology behind our human studies and
theory creation in Section~\ref{sec:methodology}.
We present the results of our analysis of our study results in terms of the the
benefits and challenges of framework
debugging in Section~\ref{sec:theorySupport}. We present how directive
violation consequences affect debugging difficulty in
Section~\ref{sec:difficultyByConsequence}.
Section~\ref{sec:theory} presents the theory we produced from the study.
Section~\ref{sec:limitations} discusses the study's threats to validity.
Section~\ref{sec:relatedWork} discusses related work.
Section~\ref{sec:conclusion} concludes.
\section{Methodology}
\label{sec:methodology}
We focused on investigating the unique aspects of debugging framework API
misuse as
compared to debugging sequential programs, and used that knowledge to create a
theory of framework debugging.
We describe the philosophical
basis of our study in Section~\ref{sec:philosophicalBasis}.
Our source of data was human trials, conducted
with a case study
procedure, a methodical investigation into a
phenomenon where there may be more variables of interest than data
points~\cite{Yin09}. We chose this method of data collection to
observe and analyze the process participants took when addressing framework debugging
problems. To perform
human trials, we created debugging tasks. We describe the methodology
we used to select frameworks and create these tasks
in Section~\ref{sec:studyFrameworks} and
Section~\ref{sec:taskCreation}. This resulted in seven Android tasks
and three ROS tasks.
Once we created the tasks, we collected study participants and
conducted human trials, described in
Section~\ref{sec:taskMethodology}. We coded the
tasks using an iterative process for each framework. First, we coded the
interesting actions of the first few
participants. Then, we defined coding frames of the interesting actions using
qualitative content analysis, a
technique that condenses verbal or visual data into important
topics~\cite{schreier12}. After coding both case studies, we performed
theoretical sorting to condense
the coded data and other sources into a cohesive theory~\cite{Charmaz14}.
\subsection{Philosophical Basis}
\label{sec:philosophicalBasis}
We created our framework debugging theory via a mixed-method methodology consisting of
constructivist grounded theory~\cite{Charmaz14}, qualitative content
analysis~\cite{schreier12}, and case studies~\cite{Yin09}. Our first guiding
principle for our study approach is based in grounded theory:
the theory created by the investigation is grounded in the data, but
further investigations may be needed to verify the resulting
theory~\cite{Hoda2012Developing}. The study also has a philosophical basis in
constructivist grounded theory: the researcher influences the results and there may be
multiple correct theories for the same phenomenon due to different
perspectives~\cite{Charmaz14}.
We chose these philosophical bases for two reasons: (1) while an
exploratory study can provide enough insight for theory formation, further
controlled studies need to be conducted to verify any theory created from an
exploratory investigation and (2) while researchers should try to
remove as many biases as possible from an investigation, it is currently
impossible for a researcher to remove all unconscious biases, which may
influence the study results. We also took precautions to minimize the biases that could
arise from an in-depth literature review, such as trying to make the study
results match a similar study's results, as recommended by grounded theory~\cite{StolGrounded2016}.
Thus, we conducted a
minimal, initial literature review and later conducted a more
in-depth literature review after finishing the trials.
\subsection{Frameworks in the Study}
\label{sec:studyFrameworks}
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.40\textwidth]{fragmentExample.eps}
\caption[Fragment Caption]{\label{fig:fragmentPic}
An example of the \lstinline{Fragment} class taken from the Android development
documentation. This diagram demonstrates how the \lstinline{Fragment} class in used in an \lstinline{Activity}.}
\end{figure}
\paragraph{Definitions.}
\emph{Frameworks} provide a set of interfaces and classes that reduce the cost
to achieve a general goal~\cite{Larman}. Developers create applications to
achieve specific goals by extending frameworks, often by
extending abstract framework methods. The framework typically calls application code
through \emph{inversion of control}, a design in which
the core framework code, not the application-specific code, controls the data
and execution flow of an application~\cite{Jaspan11}. Frameworks usually achieve
inversion of control through extending abstract methods. Frameworks
commonly require applications to conform to a specified application
structure. Frameworks also commonly use \emph{object
protocols}, ordering constraints on calls to an object's
methods~\cite{Beckman11}, and \emph{declarative
artifacts}, non-source code files that contain configuration
information~\cite{Jaspan11}.
\paragraph{Framework Selection Process.}
We conducted our study using debugging tasks for two frameworks: Android
(version 5.0 Lollipop - API 21, specifically the \lstinline{Fragment} class),
and the Robotic Operating System (ROS) (Kinetic Kame).
Google's \emph{Android}~\cite{Android} provides a Java framework for developing
mobile applications. Android is a widely-used, mature framework and has been
released for over seven years. The Android \lstinline{Fragment} class
represents a reusable component of an Android application's user interface. A
picture of an Android \lstinline{Fragment} in an example Android application is
shown in Figure~\ref{fig:fragmentPic}, to illustrate its usage. We began with
the Android framework for three reasons: (1) it is widely-used and
well-established, (2) it makes heavy use of inversion of control and object
protocols, key features that differentiate frameworks from libraries, and (3)
multiple developers express difficulties with the framework, as demonstrated by
searching for StackOverflow\footnote{stackoveflow.com} questions.
In particular, we found that a
large portion of StackOverflow questions focused on the Android
\lstinline{Fragment} class, informing our
focus on that class in our study.
To improve the generalizability of our claims, we selected ROS as a second
framework for study. \emph{Robot Operating System}~\cite{ROS} (ROS) is a
framework for creating robotics applications, with a focus on the communication
between various robotic components. ROS applications are built as a collection
of nodes that communicate in an event driven model. ROS is also a mature
framework and has been released for over eight years. ROS is written in both C++
and Python. The ROS framework is both more domain specific and has a
significantly smaller developer base than Android.
Our criteria for the second framework was that it should
focus on a different domain than Android, and have a different
framework architecture. We decided on the ROS framework for four
reasons: (1) ROS is designed for robotic applications instead of mobile
applications,
(2) ROS uses an event based architecture instead of the tiered architecture of
Android, (3) ROS is written in C++ instead of Java, and (4) ROS has a
smaller user base, but still sufficient users that we could find experienced
participants for the study.
\subsection{Task Creation Methodology}
\label{sec:taskCreation}
We used violations of framework
directives to create the debugging tasks. Framework directives are testable, non-obvious statement
in a documentation source
about how to use the framework (e.g., ``\lstinline{setHasOptionsMenu(true)} must be
called to execute an
overridden \lstinline{onCreateOptionsMenu} method''). A directive violation is
a section of code or application that does not conform to the testable
statement.
We focused on
directive violations to improve the chances that our results will generalize,
because framework API misuse errors are not application specific.
Framework directives are also likely to provide situations where participants have
difficulty with a framework, due to the surprising nature of directives. The
process of extracting directives for both frameworks
consisted of one author extracting directives from the documentation
and another author double-checking the extracted directives, similar to the
coding process in prior work~\cite{StolGrounded2016}.
We first
collected 45 Android \lstinline{Fragment} directives from three official
documentation sources: (1) the \lstinline{Fragment} page in the developer's
guide,\footnote{developer.android.com/guide/components/fragments.html} (2) the
\lstinline{Fragment} API
page,\footnote{developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Fragment.html} and (3) the
\lstinline{Fragment} class's source code.
11 directives were from the fragment guide,
19 directives were from the \lstinline{Fragment} API page, and 15 were from the official
\lstinline{Fragment} code.
We
extracted directives from documentation statements and error messages in the
code, but only if the directives were testable and described a
non-obvious requirement of the framework.
To inform our task selection, we investigated
the consequences of
violating Android \lstinline{Fragment} directives and how those
violations were presented to developers.
We created violation scenarios through a multi-step
process: (1) we manually inspected the directives, (2) we created scenarios that
violated the directives, and (3) we manually confirmed the directive violation,
either with the scenario's output or through
print statements. We then categorized the directives
by the directive violation consequence --- The effect on the
application that the developer would see when that directive was violated.
To select tasks, we searched for StackOverflow questions that cover Android \lstinline{Fragment} directives
from
a wide range of violation consequence categories.
We found seven StackOverflow questions and used the questions to create seven tasks.
The seven tasks were created by taking an Android Lollipop sample
application\footnote{github.com/googlesamples/android-LNotifications} that
demonstrated the various notifications available in Android Lollipop and
changing the
application to encompass the scenarios mentioned in the StackOverflow
questions.
For the ROS framework, we extracted 28 directives from two sources: (1) the official ROS C++
documentation,\footnote{wiki.ros.org} and (2) ROS C++ source code.\footnote{docs.ros.org/api}
9 directives were from the documentation and 19 were from the source code.
Due to the relatively low number of online questions about ROS, we were unable
to collect ROS directive scenarios from StackOverflow. Instead, we choose three
directives that represented materially different cases, and manually created tasks for
each. We created the first and third task by modifying the TurtleSim
scenario,\footnote{http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UsingRxconsoleRoslaunch} a
two node configuration where a virtual turtle in one window moves and publishes the
movements so the virtual turtle in the other window mimics the movements. The
second task involved a simple, custom-built directory reading application.
In the rest of the paper, the Android tasks and participants will be
prefixed with a ``TA'' and ``PA'' respectively. The ROS tasks and participants
will be prefixed with a ``TR'' and ``PR'' respectively.
Table~\ref{table:tasks} lists the number of participants per task and
briefly explains the Android and ROS tasks.
\begin{table*}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{lrlll}
~Task & Count & Goal & Violated Directive & Result of Directive Violation \\
\midrule
\rule{0pt}{3ex}
TA1 & 5 &The participant must connect & Application components must &
Any attempt to access one of \\
& & user inputs to the output & have a unique ID to be & the components with the \\
& & message when input components & referenced individually.
& same ID returned the last \\
& &initially share the same ID. & & component added.\\
\rule{0pt}{3ex}
\noindent
TA2 & 6 &The participant must display the & The application should not & AndroidStudio displayed a \\
& & application start time on a & pass time data through & warning and recommend \\
& & tab without a warning. & the constructor. & a fix.\\
\rule{0pt}{3ex}
TA3 & 4 & The participant must make the & The framework only checks for \
& The \lstinline$OptionsMenu$ does not appear, \\
& & framework check for an & an \lstinline$OptionsMenu$ if the application & although
a \lstinline$OptionsMenu$ is defined. \\
& & updated \lstinline$OptionsMenu$. & calls
\lstinline$setHasOptionsMenu(true)$. & \\
\rule{0pt}{3ex}
TA4 & 5 & The participant must display the & The \lstinline$Fragment$ could only access & The application crashed \\
& & application's \lstinline$Activity$ (the entry & the \lstinline$Activity$
if the \lstinline$Activity$ was & with a notification that the \\
& & point for an Android application) & attached to the
\lstinline$Fragment$, and & \lstinline$Activity$ was not set. \\
& & title in a pop-up message on a& the \lstinline$Activity$ was not
attached. & \\
& & specific tab. & & \\
\rule{0pt}{3ex}
TA5 & 4 & The participant must fix a problem & A tab's arguments can only & The application crashed, stating \\
& & that occurs when the application & be set \emph{before} the tab is &
that arguments can only be\\
& & tries to change the color of a & accessed. & set before the tab has
started. \\
& & button on a tab when the tab& & \\
& & had been previously accessed.& & \\
\rule{0pt}{3ex}
TA6 & 3 & The participant must change a & Items should be added to
the & The \lstinline$OptionsMenu$ would not appear. \\
& & specified \lstinline$ContextMenu$ to an & \lstinline$OptionsMenu$ in the & \\
& & \lstinline$OptionsMenu$. & \lstinline$onCreateOptionsMenu$ method. & \\
\rule{0pt}{3ex}
TA7 & 5 & The participant must fix an & In the application's current state, & The application crashed with\\
& & incorrect \lstinline$inflate$ method call. & the last parameter of the \lstinline$inflate$ & a stack trace that pointed \\
& & & call must be \lstinline$false$. & towards core framework code. \\
\rule{0pt}{3ex}
TR1 & 8 & The participant must fix an & \lstinline$spinOnce()$
cannot be used when & A node in the application would \\
& & incorrect \lstinline$spinOnce()$ call. & the framework should perform &
quit unexpectedly without an \\
& & & the callback more than once. & error message. \\
\rule{0pt}{3ex}
TR2 & 8 & The participant must fix an & Local namespaces are not checked & The
parameter search returned \\
& & application node's parameter & if a global namespace is used & that the
parameter does not exist. \\
& & access. & in a parameter search. & \\
\rule{0pt}{3ex}
TR3 & 6 & The participant must fix an & An incorrect message type was & The application crashed with an \\
& & obsolete message type. & used for this version of ROS. & incorrect type
declaration error. \\
\rule{0pt}{1ex}
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{\label{table:tasks} Android and ROS tasks in the human trials. TA
tasks indicate Android tasks; TR, ROS tasks. ``Count'' shows number of
participants per task. ``Goal'' indicates task success
conditions. ``Violated Directive'' is a simplified explanation of
the violated directive motivating the task. ``Result of Directive Violation''
explains how the application presented errors to participants.}
\vspace{-0.5cm}
\end{table*}
\subsection{Human Trials Methodology}
\label{sec:taskMethodology}
After obtaining IRB approval, our human trial process started with a
pre-survey to document
participants' framework experience. We provided participants a Surface
Pro 3 tablet containing the tasks,
and we instructed them to
perform think-aloud debugging, vocalizing what they thought
as they went through the debugging process~\cite{Myers16}. We assigned a
task to each participant, and asked
them to fix the bug. We did not inform
participants of the directive violation in the task because we were interested in
also studying the fault localization process.
If participants finished a task and could stay for another 20 minutes, we asked
them to attempt another task. We initially assigned tasks randomly but later
selected tasks that the fewest participants had attempted, to provide a
relatively even task coverage.
For each task, we gave participants the maximum time allowed, but they were able
to quit at any time.
We allowed participants to search online for anything, including the inspiration
for the tasks, but we did not allow them to post questions.
While searching online, no participant found the inspiration for any of the
study's tasks. In addition to asking them to vocalize aloud their thoughts and
strategies during the tasks, we asked participants about their approach in
greater detail at the end of the study.
For the Android study, we collected a convenience sample of 15 participants. 11
of the participants had over 2 years of industrial Java or Android experience,
and 14 of the participants had more than a year of industrial Java
or Android experience. 2 participants were current developers and 13 were
graduate students. For the ROS study, we collected a convenience sample of
12 participants. 9 of the 12 participants preferred the C++ version of ROS
over the Python version. 2 of the participants had more than 2 years
of ROS experience and 5 of the participants had over a year of
experience. 3 of the participants were research staff, 8 of the participants
were graduate students, and 1 was an undergraduate student.
We made several procedure changes between the two case studies.
For Android, we gave participants time to learn the application before
attempting the tasks,
while we did not provide a learning period for the ROS tasks. We
made this change because we found that participants commonly spent the Android
learning period exploring sections of the application that were not relevant to
the tasks. We allowed each Android participant a maximum total study time of
three hours; because the ROS tasks required simple fixes, we set the maximum time in the ROS
sessions to one hour. In the Android study, we required participants
use the recommended Android Integrated Development
Environment (IDE), AndroidStudio, because it provides warnings for
directive violations. We did not require participants to use any particular
IDE for the ROS tasks, because ROS does not have a recommended IDE.
\section{Framework Debugging Benefits and Challenges}
\label{sec:theorySupport}
We first present the challenges that developers faced while debugging the tasks:
dynamic challenges
(Section~\ref{sec:dynamicChallenges}), static
challenges (Section~\ref{sec:staticChallenges}), and historical challenges
(Section~\ref{sec:evolutionaryChallenges}). Next, we present the benefits of
framework debugging: dynamic benefits
(Section~\ref{sec:dynamicBenefits}), static benefits
(Section~\ref{sec:staticBenefits}), and historical benefits
(Section~\ref{sec:evolutionaryBenefits}). For each category, we begin
with a brief
example and then elaborate on interesting cases. Because
the Android and ROS frameworks serve different purposes
(Section~\ref{sec:studyFrameworks}), certain benefits and challenges may have
only occurred in one framework.
\subsection{Dynamic Challenges}
\label{sec:dynamicChallenges}
Throughout the study, participants struggled to determine the order in which
a framework executes application code, which increased the difficulty of the
debugging process. Participants seem to prefer a cause and effect ordering.
However, framework code does not typically follow a sequential ordering, instead
executing application code only when needed. This requires code to be structured
as non-sequential event handlers. This can create uncertainty about
which parts of project-specific code are called and when, and which project
method will execute ``next.'' Object protocols exacerbate this issue by
requiring participants to understand which states various objects can be in when
the framework calls their code.
\looseness-1
\paragraph{Inversion of Control Issues.}
In framework programs, application-specific method execution order is not always
transparent to the application developer. This sometimes led participants to misunderstand
an application's control flow, increasing
the difficulty of the debugging task.
For example, in the ROS study, participants (PR18, PR20) assumed the framework
did not call a section of code, when instead a problem in that code segment
caused the application to terminate earlier than expected.
In this instance, the framework's inversion of
control led participants to misunderstand the application's behavior, causing
them to waste time while investigating the application.
Inversion of control made it difficult to understand when methods were called and to locate error messages,
and prevented intuitive fixes required modification of framework code.
In both Android and ROS, participants had difficulty understanding the
application control flow. In Android, two participants
(PA10, PA11) tried to
use the debugger to understand control flow, but struggled to do so.
Both participants stepped past a current method and were unable
to figure out how to step back into non-framework code. This led
participant PA10 to reach incorrect conclusions about which code executed in task TA7.
In ROS, while trying to understand how two nodes communicated, PR22 did not
realize that a third node linked two other nodes, because the nodes relied on
the framework to handle communication. Participant PR22 read four files before
understanding how the framework routed the nodes' communication.
Another participant
(PR23) made incorrect control flow deductions due to the way ROS redirects and filters
statements printed to standard output. Participant PR26 mentioned uncertainty
about how to modify a method because of the states the
application
could be in when that method was called.
Inversion of control also made localizing errors difficult.
In Android, one participant (PA5) searched for an error message
thrown by the application, but could not find it in the project. The search failed
because the error message was
generated from core framework code, not project code.
Some problems stemmed from participants' uncertainty about the
hidden ordering of critical framework activity between events.
When participants (PA4, PA12) saw the \lstinline{getActivity} call
returned \lstinline{NULL},
they questioned whether the framework had incorrectly constructed its own
reference to the parent \lstinline{Activity}.
In fact, \lstinline{getActivity} was called in
an event that occurred before the framework had attached the
\lstinline{Activity} to the
\lstinline{Fragment}.
\paragraph{Object Protocols.}
Object protocols are object states that dictate how an object can be used. An
example of object protocols in Android are lifecycles: state transitions
between starting, active, and stopping for components.
Participants experienced challenges with object protocols (e.g.,
accessing values before they were set). Object protocols are explained and diagrammed explicitly in the
documentation, but implemented indirectly in the framework code, and invisible
to non-framework code, which likely led to increased difficulty with object
protocols. Object protocols were more prevalent in the Android
tasks, and thus we observed how object protocols produced framework debugging
challenges in the Android study.
Object protocol issues in tasks TA4 and
TA5 significantly contributed to the amount of time those tasks took (see
Section~\ref{sec:difficultyByConsequence}).
Most participants assumed the application had
performed an invalid action, rather than an invalid action in a given state.
Object protocol misunderstandings also led participants to incorrectly conclude that certain values were
available for application use. Three participants (PA4, PA6, PA11) wrote code
to access variables storing
participant-selected times before the participant could have selected those times and
were then confused when the accessed times
did not match the time they selected in testing.
Participants (PA6, PA10) were confused about the circumstances in which they needed to
commit and finalize
a \lstinline{Fragment} transaction (as opposed to the cases in which
transactions were automatically committed).
\subsection{Static Challenges}
\label{sec:staticChallenges}
While the static structure of frameworks helped developers in the debugging
process, further discussed in Section~\ref{sec:staticBenefits}, the static structure
also presented multiple challenges to participants.
Participants commonly struggled to understand
the separation between static structure and dynamic changes,
determine the effects of the
application's static configuration, and use that knowledge to solve problems.
This led to uncertainty about whether errors should be addressed
by modifying static files, or via a dynamic solution.
Declarative artifacts are non-source code files or the application environment
~\cite{Jaspan11}, such as the XML layout specifications in Android or the XML
launch file in ROS. An example of a problem with declarative artifacts is when
participants tried to add a menu using a declarative artifact in a framework that
required menus to be added dynamically.
Even though there were no errors in the declarative artifacts in
the Android tasks, multiple participants investigated declarative
artifacts to see if they were the source of an error.
For Android tasks TA3 and TA6, participants created
\lstinline{OptionsMenu}s.
Many participants (PA13, PA14, PA15) looked through the Android
layout editor for
an \lstinline{OptionsMenu} or tried to add an \lstinline{OptionsMenu} to a XML file,
before realizing that it must be added dynamically. Another
participant (PA9) investigated the \texttt{strings.xml} file after
an online answer suggested that the problem may lie in an undefined icon title.
Participant PA10 remembered that a specific theme could cause errors
and checked if the
theme caused the error.
In ROS, participants had difficulty understanding how source files map
to executable components, partially because ROS executables
consist of various components (Nodes, Services, and Topics) that do not map
directly to source.
ROS also does not provide an easy or well-known way to find source code
corresponding to a given component.
\begin{comment}
Some participants attempted to use build files, \texttt{CMakeLists.txt} and the ROS
launch file, to understand source structure. These files were not
designed to be readable, and were not easy to use for this purpose.
Multiple participants (PR16, PR22, PR25, PR26, PR27) used the ROS
launch file and \texttt{CMakeLists.txt} as
a table of contents, using them to determine application components, how they
interact, and locate source files of components.
While participants used the declarative artifacts to navigate and understand
the application, the artifacts did not completely relieve participant confusion.
\end{comment}
Participant PR16 struggled to understand how the publisher and
subscriber methods in the C++ files integrated with the data
redirections in the launch file.
Other participants (PR17, PR18, PR20, PR22, PR25, PR27) faced
similar difficulties
understanding how the application remapped data among the components.
In one case, Participant PR17 had difficulty finding a source file after
diagnosing the problem: ``I am looking for source code for
[this node]\ldots~Unfortunately ROS is trying to isolate me from the file system, which I dislike,
because it cannot isolate me fully.'' 16 minutes into the task, Participant PR17 exclaimed ``This
is ridiculous, I can't even find the code that I am supposed to be debugging!''
Participant PR17 eventually used \texttt{grep} to find a node,
more than half an hour into the task.
\subsection{Historical Challenges}
\label{sec:evolutionaryChallenges}
Framework changes over time
can increase the difficulty of debugging framework errors. Participants must both
identify gaps in their current understanding and determine
if previous solutions still apply.
For example, participants may find a possible answer for a problem online but may reject
answers that appear out-of-date.
\paragraph{Legacy Challenges.}
Previous versions of both Android and ROS created issues for several participants.
In Android, one participant (PA9) questioned whether a feature should be implemented
in a backwards-compatible way, later discovering that the application was not
configured to work with backwards-compatible components. A few participants
(PA8, PA9, PA14)
avoided online answers older than two years because
they assumed the answers would no longer apply.
Other participants (PA1, PA15) mentioned they were familiar with
Android a couple years ago, but there had been many changes to
the framework since they were proficient with it.
Some ROS participants incorrectly diagnosed the obsolete
message type in task TR2 as correct because they had used it
previously. Participant PR21 recognized that the message type caused an
issue, searched
the message type online, and found its official documentation, not realizing
that the documentation was for an older ROS version. This was a problem because
the documentation indicated that the file was using the
message type correctly.
The participant investigated four other possible error sources before
realizing that a different message type was needed.
\paragraph{Past Experience.}
While past experience was often helpful, one participant in the Android study (PA10) misdiagnosed
an error message due to previous experience.
This caused the participant to conclude to ``not trust your experience.''
\subsection{Dynamic Benefits}
\label{sec:dynamicBenefits}
Throughout the study, participants commonly used the framework to perform
actions that would have been much more difficult to recreate
without the help of the framework. When faced with a task, almost all
participants tried to implement the framework method of performing the action
(although PA1, PA3, PA5, PA8, PA11, implemented custom solutions for certain
tasks, such as implementing a custom message passing solution in TA1). For
example, PA6 in TA1 correctly used the \lstinline{FindFragmentById} method to access user
input, instead of writing code to pipe the data through the application. This shows
that developers notice the benefits that framework methods provide in application
development.
\subsection{Static Benefits}
\label{sec:staticBenefits}
\looseness-1
Study participants found the static organization of the framework helpful
when trying to gain an overview of the application, which helped them
find files of interest more easily than through unstructured search.
In ROS, participants used the launch files as a way to start exploring the
application. For example, participant PR27 looked through the ROS launch files to
understand which nodes are involved in the application. Participant PR26
mentioned that the participant likes to use launch files to get an overview of
the application. Multiple participants (PR17, PR18, PR19, PR22, PR26, PR27) used the
launch files as a way to start the debugging process. In Android, participants
used the structure of Android application to quickly find resource files and
test case files. For example, PA8 was able to quickly look up the correct
options menu layout file when writing the required options menu code.
Multiple participants in the Android study (PA1, PA2, PA3, PA6, PA8, PA9, PA10,
PA11, PA13, PA14, PA15) benefited from being able to easily look up application files
to answer questions participants were investigating.
\subsection{Historical Benefits}
\label{sec:evolutionaryBenefits}
Participants often found that past experience was helpful, such as
when they were able to correctly diagnose a ROS
error simply by looking at the failing section of code.
Multiple ROS participants (PR17, PR21, PR26, PR27, PR28) were able to diagnose an
error and suggest a working alternative based on past experience. While
working on task TR2, participant PR28 noticed the error in the code and
said, ``I think the fact that there's a beginning slash means that instead of
looking under this node's namespace it's gonna look under the global namespace
[where] this parameter doesn't exist.'' The participant was correct.
Detailed knowledge of a framework, built up by through experience,
can help mitigate barriers frameworks impose.
Other participants (PR18, PR22, PR26, PR27) stated that past experience shaped
their general ROS debugging strategy. One participant remembered to set framework
environment variables, attributing past environment
problems.
Another participant (PR26) always used \texttt{grep} to find calls to a function
modified over the course of a debugging systems, to guard against unforeseen
side effects, a problem they had faced in the past.
\section{Error Presentation and Debugging Difficulty}
\label{sec:difficultyByConsequence}
We further investigated the relationships between the way errors are presented
to developers and developer debugging success.
We performed an initial
investigation into the consequences of violating Android \lstinline{Fragment}
directives, where we grouped the consequences into categories. Due to the
limited nature of the investigation, we do not make claims that the categories will
generalize. However, the results are useful as an initial investigation into
the correlation between debugging challenges and error presentation.
We explain the consequence categories (Section~\ref{sec:consequenceCategorization})
and discuss how consequences influenced participant success in the Android and
ROS tasks
(Section~\ref{sec:consequenceDifficulty}).
\subsection{Directive Categorization By Consequence}
\label{sec:consequenceCategorization}
\begin{table}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{lr}
Directive Violation Consequence & Count \\
\midrule
AndroidStudio Warning & 3 \\
Compiler Error & 3 \\
Crash With Reference To Directive & 19 \\
Crash Without Reference To Directive & 2 \\
Expected Action Did Not Occur & 9 \\
No Obvious Effect & 5 \\
Wrong Value Returned & 2 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{\label{table:directiveCategorization}The consequence of
violating 41 fragment directives. Count is the number of directives in the
category. One directive violation may produce
multiple consequences but each consequence is mutually exclusive.}
\vspace{-0.5cm}
\end{table}
The consequences of violating 41 Android \lstinline{Fragment} directives are shown in
Table~\ref{table:directiveCategorization} and elaborated below.
\vspace{1ex}
\noindent\textbf{AndroidStudio Warning.}
While the application still compiled with these directive violations,
if these
directives are violated, AndroidStudio (the recommend Android Integrated
Development Environment) marks the location in code with a
serious warning, and sometimes recommends a possible fix. One example of a
directive in this
category is that classes that subclass the \lstinline{Fragment} class must have a public
no-argument constructor. An application will compile if the class
subclassing \lstinline{Fragment} lacks an empty constructor, but
AndroidStudio displays a warning in the class's source file.
\vspace{1ex}
\noindent\textbf{Compiler Error.}
When these directives were violated, the framework threw a compiler error,
preventing the application from compiling.
This consequence occurred when invalid semantics produced a directive violation.
One example is the case when the documentation
specified that a method could not be overridden. The compiler prevented a
developer from overriding this method because the method was declared
with the final modifier in the parent class.
\vspace{1ex}
\noindent\textbf{Crash With Reference To Directive.}
When these directives were violated, the application crashed with an
exception that notified the user of the directive violation either directly
or indirectly. One example of this category is, ``\lstinline{getActivity()} should not be
called when the \lstinline{Fragment} is not attached to the
\lstinline{Activity}''. If this directive was violated, the application
crashed with a null return from \lstinline{getActivity()}.
This category contains a high
number of directives because all the directives found in the \lstinline{Fragment}
class's code were of this type.
\vspace{1ex}
\noindent\textbf{Crash Without Reference To Directive.}
When these directives were violated, the application crashed with an exception
that did not notify the developer that a directive was violated, usually with an
error pointing to where the application crashed instead of the location where
the application needed to be fixed.
Violations in this category occur when a more general exception message is thrown, or
violating the directive puts the application into an invalid state and the
invalid state is caught in a later line. One example in this category is when
the result of the \lstinline{inflate} method is used as the return result for
\lstinline{onCreateView}, the last parameter to the \lstinline{inflate} method
call must be \lstinline{false}. If this directive was violated, the application
would crash with a stack trace that pointed to internal framework code and not
the \lstinline{inflate} line.
\vspace{1ex}
\noindent\textbf{Expected Action Did Not Occur.}
When these directives were violated, the framework did not execute
the intended effect of the relevant section of
code. The effect did not occur either because violating the directive caused
the control flow to
change or the semantics were changed. For example, one directive states
that an application will only execute the \lstinline{Fragment}'s
\lstinline{onCreateOptionsMenu} method
if the \lstinline{Fragment} calls \lstinline{hasOptionsMenu(true)} in the
\lstinline{onCreate} method. If the
\lstinline{hasOptionsMenu(true)} call is removed, the \lstinline{OptionsMenu} will not appear,
even if the \lstinline{Fragment} overrides
\lstinline{onCreateOptionsMenu}.
\vspace{1ex}
\noindent\textbf{No Obvious Effect}
When these directives were violated, the framework correctly performed the
intended action of the associated code segment without crashing the application.
One example of this category is a directive that states that if a
\lstinline{Fragment} does not have a user interface (UI), then the
\lstinline{Fragment} should be accessed by \lstinline{findFragmentByTag()}, but
the \lstinline{Fragment} without a UI could be accessed by \lstinline{findFragmentById()}
without noticeable consequences.
\vspace{1ex}
\noindent\textbf{Wrong Value Returned.}
When these directives were violated, the application did not crash, but a
reference to a part of the application had been lost or was used incorrectly
Any attempt to use the lost or incorrect reference returned a wrong value. For
example, when a developer dynamically added a UI element, the developer must
assign a unique tag to the added UI element. If the added UI element does not
use a unique tag, the new tag overrides the matching tag of a previous the UI
element. The previous UI element is now unreachable through framework supported
methods.
Violating certain directives can produce multiple consequences
(e.g., a violation can produce an AndroidStudio
warning and crash with reference to the directive), but each consequence is
mutually exclusive (the same consequence could not be categorized in multiple
categories - an application crash cannot be both classified as crash with
reference to the directive and crash without reference to the directive). We
found that one directive could be violated in two different ways and produced
three possible consequences. Two other directives could be violated in two
ways, each with different consequences.
\begin{comment}
For example, the directive
``\emph{The \lstinline{Fragment} being instantiated must have some kind of unique identifier
so that it can be reassociated with a previous instance if the parent activity
needs to be destroyed are recreated,}'' has at least three violation
consequences.
The directive can be violated in multiple ways because
a \lstinline{Fragment} can be instantiated statically or dynamically, both instantiation
methods produced different consequences, and the static instantiation process
produced two consequences.
If the \lstinline{Fragment} with a redundant ID was added statically in a declarative artifact,
then AndroidStudio produced a warning, which listed the error. If the declarative
artifact was not changed and the application was started, then the framework
caused the application to crash with a reference to the directive. However, if the
\lstinline{Fragment} was added dynamically with a redundant ID, the framework would overwrite
the ID reference for the other \lstinline{Fragment} with the same ID, causing
any attempt to access the first \lstinline{Fragment} using the
\lstinline{Fragment}'s ID to return the wrong value.
We found that violating two other
directives produce at least two consequences. Both of these directives had
the same two consequences depending on how they were violated: ``no obvious
effect'' and ``expected action did not occur.''
\end{comment}
\subsection{Difficulty By Consequence}
\label{sec:consequenceDifficulty}
\begin{table*}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{llrrrl}
Violation & Time & Sessions & Sessions & Success & \\
Consequence & (Mean) & Completed & Attempted & Rate (\%) & Tasks\\
\midrule
1. Android: Wrong Value Returned & 51 min & 4 & 5 & 80 & TA1\\
2. Android: Crash With Reference To Directive & 47 min & 3 & 9 & 33 & TA4, TA5\\
3. Android: Expected Action Did Not Occur & 28 min & 4 & 8 & 50 & TA3, TA6\\
4. Android: AndroidStudio Warning & 23 min & 6 & 6 & 100 & TA2\\
5. Android: Crash Without Reference To Directive & 19 min & 4 & 5 & 80 & TA7\\
6. ROS: Expected Action Did Not Occur & 49 min & 5 & 8 & 63 & TR1\\
7. ROS: Wrong Value Returned & 36 min & 5 & 8 & 63 & TR2\\
8. ROS: Compiler Error & 25 min & 6 & 6 & 100 & TR3\\
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{\label{table:times} The mean time on task and completion rate of tasks
with a given consequence. Time on task includes failed attempts.
}
\end{table*}
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{taskTimings.eps}
\caption{A box-and-whisker plot of the time participants spent on
tasks. Time results include failed attempts.}
\label{fig:taskBoxAndWhisker}
\vspace{-0.5cm}
\end{figure}
\begin{comment}
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{violationTimings.eps}
\caption{A box-and-whisker plot of the time participants spent on violation
consequences in the study. The x axis numbers correspond to the numbers in
Table~\ref{table:times}.
Time results include failed attempts. This graph provides insight into the
time distributions that participants spent on each violation consequence.}
\label{fig:consequenceBoxAndWhisker}
\end{figure}
\end{comment}
We analyzed participant results from both the Android and ROS tasks using the consequence
categories. Table~\ref{table:times} shows the categorization of each task and
the time spent and participant success rate for each category.
Figure~\ref{fig:taskBoxAndWhisker} shows a box-and-whisker plot of the
participant's time spent on the tasks in the study,
providing further insight on the time range for each task.
We found that there was a significant difference in the mean time to complete
tasks (ranging from 19 to 51 minutes) and the success rate on tasks (ranging from 33\% to
100\%) of difference consequences.
We found that participants struggled to address directive violations that resulted in
a ``wrong value returned'' consequence (tasks TA1 and TR2).
Although four out of five attempts were successful in the Android task, the
attempts took longer than all other consequences (mean: 51 minutes).
This may also be due to the fact
that participants had to both find a way to uniquely access each value and find
a way to pass them at the appropriate point in the object
protocol. In the case of the ROS task (TR2), where the participant only had to remove an
incorrectly placed slash in a search string,
the fix was faster but still time consuming (mean: 36 minutes). This task
was a moderately difficult ROS directive violation.
In the Android study, participants had the lowest completion rate when
the application crashed with reference to the violated directive (tasks TA4 and
TA5).
For example,
in task TA5, when the participant tried to illegally set the arguments for an
already active fragment, the application crashed with the run time error
``\lstinline{Fragment} Already Active.''
Only three (of nine) participants successfully addressed such
violations, and the mean time taken for these attempts (47 minutes) was much
longer than all other directive violation consequences (with the
exception of the
``wrong value returned'' consequence).
One reason for this difficulty is that all directives (excluding directives
taken from the
\lstinline{Fragment} source code) that crashed with a reference to the directive
involved object
protocols. Although participants were able to find answers on the
object protocol in online questions, these answers did not directly apply to the
task situation. Instead, participants had to gain a basic understanding of the
object protocols used in the application before participant knew
when and how to perform the recommended actions.
While participants in the Android study were much quicker when an expected
action did not occur (TA3 and TA6), the ROS participants found this violation
consequence to be the most difficult (TR1).
Likely due to the lack of object protocol issues, the Android participants spent
a mean of 28 minutes on these tasks and had a higher success rate
on them (six out of seven attempts successful).
The ROS participants spent the most time on this task (45 minutes) and tied for
the lowest success rate. While the fix for TR1 only involved changing one
method call, the participants likely had a more difficult time because
participants had difficulty deducing the fault location from the way the error manifested. In TR1,
the main functionally of the application behaved incorrectly, while only
a single feature of the Android application behaved incorrectly in the Android
tasks.
Participants in the Android study focused on the section of the
application that handled the missing feature, while participants in the ROS study
had to consider the many possible reasons for failure.
The third-fastest (25 minutes) violation consequence was the compiler error task
(task TR3). Participants in this task were the fastest (25 minutes) and were the most
successful (100\% completion) for the ROS tasks.
The second-fastest set of attempts (23 minutes) addressed directive violations
that displayed a warning that provided a
possible solution (task TA2). Participants were able to quickly solve the
problem that caused the warning but still had to spend time implementing the
solution correctly. All 6 attempts at the
task were successful, tied for the highest completion rate of directive violation
consequences.
Participants completed task TA7, in which the application crashed without
reference to the directive (task TA7), more quickly than any other task. As the
error message was largely inscrutable, most participants searched online for the
error after only a brief period investigating the code. An online search
yielded a quick solution: the task required adding a new parameter to the
inflate method, an easy-to-implement fix based on the online answer. This
directive violation consequence was fixed the fastest, on average (19 minutes),
and 4 of 5 attempts were successful.
The consequence of violating a directive appears to influence
how long it takes to debug the error as well as how likely a developer is to
succeed in doing so over a short debugging session.
Overall, we observe that
it appears important not only to notify developers of directive violations
but also to help fix them explicitly.
Often participants knew that certain directives were violated, such as in the
crash with reference to the directive tasks, but they
did not know how to fix the error. Participants found this frustrating,
with one participant stating \emph{``Why don't
they tell me the right thing to use? They tell me it is going to cause a problem
but they don't tell me what the alternative is.''}
\section{Theory}
\label{sec:theory}
After analyzing the benefits and challenges of frameworks in our study, we condensed those
aspects into a theory that provides insight
into the framework debugging process. This theory presents the benefits and
challenges of framework debugging in terms of cognitive steps, the number
of mental tasks that a participant must use to achieve a goal.
In this section, we first present the theory created from the human trial
results (Section~\ref{sec:theoryDescription}). We then discuss our evaluation of
the theory (Section~\ref{sec:theoryEvaluation}).
\subsection{Theory Description}
\label{sec:theoryDescription}
When compared to debugging sequential programs, aspects of the framework
application debugging process reduce the number of cognitive steps required
to achieve certain goals, and increase the cognitive steps required to achieve
others.
When developers need to find a resource, such as an XML configuration
file, the structure of frameworks
keeps the number of steps required to find the resource to a minimum. Frameworks can increase the cognitive steps required to debug and fix an error
when participants must understand how to fix an error that has dependencies on
object protocols. A developer's cognitive load also increases when inversion of
control increases the difficulty in determining the relevant control flows, and
when participants have misconceptions about what the framework is doing outside
application-specific code.
This theory leads to two predictions. The first is that when
debugging framework problems, developers will require fewer steps to do
tasks that involve navigating to files placed in standard framework locations.
Developers will have more difficulty with inversion of
control or object protocol issues. The second prediction from this
theory is that, when debugging, it will normally be more costly to investigate
framework code to understand the details of how the code works than library code.
This is due to the fact that frameworks are generally
larger than libraries and commonly involve interactions between more components.
This complexity increases the time required to understand portions of a
framework, and increases the chance that participants will investigate an aspect
of the framework that does not apply to the current problem.
\subsection{Theory Evaluation}
\label{sec:theoryEvaluation}
Constructivist grounded theory studies can be evaluated along four
criteria~\cite{Charmaz14}. The first criterion is \emph{credibility}, which
addresses whether the study has collected enough data to merit its claims. This
criterion was addressed through our selection of frameworks and tasks, which
cover two diverse frameworks with diverse debugging scenarios. Having
multiple participants perform each task reduced the risk that our analysis focuses
on anomalous behavior. We attempted to
improve the realism of our scenarios by recreating scenarios from
StackOverflow for the Android tasks.
The second criterion is \emph{originality}, which addresses whether a theory offers
new insights. While previous studies have investigated what differentiates
framework programming from other types of programming~\cite{Johnson92} and the
learning issues associated with frameworks~\cite{Ko2004Six}, no previous study
has investigated how framework aspects affect the debugging process. The
third criterion is \emph{resonance}, or whether the theory makes sense to people in
the associated circumstances. To evaluate this criterion, we contacted six participants
after finalizing the theory and asked them if the theory reflected their
experiences and if the theory provided deeper insights. All six of the
participants said that the theory reflected their experiences, although one
participant mentioned that the object protocol issues are likely more task
dependent, and not necessarily framework dependent. Two of the six
participants said that the theory provided deeper insights into the application
debugging process for framework API errors than they had initially.
The fourth criterion is \emph{usefulness}, which concerns whether the theory provides
interpretations that people can use or build upon. This theory could be useful to
framework debugging tool designers because the theory can help designers focus
on the challenging aspects of framework debugging. The theory could also be
used to guide novices who are debugging frameworks by focusing them on questions that can
be more easily answered than questions that are more
difficult to answer.
\section{Threats to Validity}
\label{sec:limitations}
\paragraph{Threats to external validity.} We attempt to mitigate the risk that
our theory will fail to
generalize to other frameworks or languages by
investigating two very different frameworks and a wide range of
framework debugging problems.
As stated earlier, our categorization of framework directives by violation consequence
may not generalize (e.g., other frameworks may not issue formal warnings),
and it may be incomplete; in particular, we did not
consider potential non-functional violation effects, such as degraded performance.
Our constructed tasks may not represent real-world debugging tasks.
This concern was reduced by basing the Android
tasks on StackOverflow questions. Additionally, participants were new
to the code in each task, possibly leading to unrealistic problems with code familiarity.
We sought to reduce this threat by providing Android
participants with
a learning period, but we note that, for example, one participant mentioned that
if the task was encountered in everyday development, it would be preferable
to spend a day reading documentation before
tackling it. As such, time limitations may have influenced our
results. Finally, the
participants in the study may not represent the population of framework users.
We attempted to address this limitation by
recruiting participants with experience with the framework: 14 of the
Android study participants had over a year of industrial Android or Java
experience and 7 of the ROS participants had over a year of experience with the
framework.
\paragraph{Threats to internal validity.}
Since this study was exploratory and qualitative, the focus was not on internal
validity. Exploratory studies allow for the
investigation of a wide array of problems but do not support definitive
cause-effect conclusions. Participants could freely decide, in a low-risk
situation, when to quit a task. Participants were also asked to think-aloud,
and prompted to do so by the researcher.
These prompts may have altered the route a participant
would have taken absent the prompt. Additionally,
the think-aloud aspect of the study may affect how long participants took to
solve the tasks. We believe that this affected tasks roughly equally,
such that tasks which took significantly longer than the others are
likely to have taken longer in a non-think-aloud context. Finally, some participants
mentioned they would have been more comfortable if the researcher were not
watching, and if they were able to use their preferred IDE,
operating system, or laptop. These irritants may have caused
participants to take different routes than they would have in their preferred
environment.
\section{Related Work}
\label{sec:relatedWork}
In this section, we discuss related work in framework investigations, directive
studies, debugging papers, theories of debugging, and grounded theory projects in
software engineering.
\paragraph{Frameworks.}
One of the closest studies to ours investigated the learning barriers
participants face in framework scenarios~\cite{Ko2004Six}, finding some similar
challenges to those we identified, such as coordination barriers, or
difficulties related to using the correct parts of a framework to achieve
framework programming goals. However, this study focused on general learning
barriers and the relationships among the barriers, instead of focusing on
framework problems. Our work also covers the benefits of framework debugging
and focuses on framework directive scenarios. Other prior work has created
formal specifications for framework plugins~\cite{Jaspan09ECOOP} and
investigated the use of declarative artifacts with static
analysis~\cite{Jaspan09RAOOL}. Another study found that survey respondents
believed they needed to understand the design intent of a framework to use it
effectively~\cite{Robillard09}. Researchers have used
StackOverflow,\footnote{stackoverflow.com} a popular question-and-answer
website, to investigate framework problems~\cite{Wang13}. Other works have
investigated patterns that appear in framework
development~\cite{Johnson92,Fairbanks06}. To the best of our knowledge, none of
this prior work specifically addresses debugging.
\paragraph{Directives.}
To the best of our knowledge, prior work on directives has not investigated the
challenges developers face when debugging them. Early work
investigated how directive knowledge helps developers during coding tasks, and
developed a directive classification scheme based on the topic of the directive
(such as a protocol directive or a performance
directive)~\cite{Dekel09,DekelThesis}. An alternative mechanism for directive
classification focuses on the level of code involved (method,
subclassing, states, etc.)~\cite{Monperrus2012What}. Others have
mined subclassing directives~\cite{Bruch2010Mining}, and fixed
directives in documentation after analyzing how methods were used in source code\cite{Zhou2017Analyzing}.
\paragraph{Debugging and debugging theories.}
Previous work has found that developers incorporate scent
finding~\cite{Lawrance13} and ask dataflow questions while debugging
generally~\cite{LaToza10}; The ability to easily answer dataflow questions can
significantly reduce the time required in debugging~\cite{Ko2008Debugging}.
Others have found that developers encounter design decisions in the bug fix
process, such as when to fix incorrect data passed between multiple
components~\cite{MurphyHill15}. Others have explored the debugging of machine
learning programs~\cite{Kulesza10}. Finally, other researchers have
investigated the challenges of end-user (non-developer) debugging scenarios, and
found that understanding features and testing ideas were important parts of the
process~\cite{Kissinger2006Supporting}. None of this previous work specifically
focuses on the problems of debugging framework applications.
Prior debugging theories do not capture the unique problems encountered while
debugging frameworks, and thus may only apply to framework debugging at a high
level. Debugging has been modeled as a trial-and-error process of hypothesis
generation~\cite{Gould75}. An alternative theory models debugging as a four
stage troubleshooting process: understanding, testing, locating, and fixing;
however this work dealt with programs less than 15 lines long, implying the
``understanding'' stage involved code many orders of magnitude smaller than a
typical modern framework~\cite{Katz87}.
More recent work has characterized debugging as a cyclical process of
gathering and integrating information. One theory describes the process as three
sensemaking loops: the bug-fix sensemaking loop, the environment sensemaking
loop, and the common sense topics and/or domain sensemaking
loop~\cite{Grigoreanu12}. Another theory models the information gathering
process as searching, collecting, and relating information~\cite{Ko06}. The
information gathering process of debugging has also been portrayed as various
fact related actions, such as finding and proposing~\cite{LaToza07}.
\paragraph{Grounded Theory in Software Engineering.}
Multiple papers have covered how to present grounded theory papers in software
engineering~\cite{Adolph2008Methodological,Stol2016Grounded,Coleman2007Using,
Hoda2011Grounded}. There are also various software engineering papers that use grounded theory,
such as a theory of the problems developers encounter when moving to a new
software project~\cite{Dagenais2010Moving}, self-organization in an agile
development process~\cite{Hoda2012Developing}, and how communication in an agile
process affects development teams~\cite{Whitworth2007Social}. None of these
studies have investigated framework debugging, but they provide support for
the use of grounded theory in understanding phenomena in a software engineering context.
\section{Conclusions}
\label{sec:conclusion}
We have presented the results from human trials on framework directive
violation debugging scenarios, and a theory of the benefits and
challenges of framework debugging. The theory states that certain aspects of the
framework reduce the cognitive steps required by the debugging process, such as
the static structure of framework applications, which help
developers determine where to find needed files. The theory also states that
certain aspects of a framework can increase the number of cognitive steps for developers during
debugging, such as the challenges produced by the
inversion of control. In creating this theory, we looked
into the difficulty of solving various directive violations by consequence and
found that assisting developers with directive violations is more complex than
simplify notifying them of the directive violation in question.
While we believe we have provided sufficient support to justify the creation of a theory,
further work will be necessary to verify it. This theory provides the
basis for future testable hypotheses, such as investigating framework code often is more
time-consuming than investigating library code while debugging. These
hypotheses can be explored in future studies.
\section{Acknowledgments}
This will be added to a later version of the paper.
\newpage
\bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
}
| 2,447
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Afterlife | Conditional Immortality
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You are here: Home / Church History / Soul Sleep of the Swiss Brethren
Soul Sleep of the Swiss Brethren
January 18, 2015 By Lerman 1 Comment
During the period of Martin Luther's challenges to the church, a somewhat parallel yet independent course of reform was taking place in Zurich. This Swiss Reformation led by Ulrich Zwingli was just as convinced as Luther that Scripture should take precedence over traditions, but how that worked itself out was very different. Both were strongly committed to 'Sola Scriptura' and both began to question some long standing practices. Zwingli had a freer hand in Zurich than did Luther, and wanted to implemented changes slowly in full view of Council. He thought he should preach only as much as the church was ready to absorb, but a group of young radicals, most notably led by Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz and George Blaurock, pressured for immediate compliance to scripture. We will look at only one aspect of this reformation movement; that of Soul Sleep.
While Luther boldly stated that "the notion of the soul's immortality and endless monstrosities belongs on the Roman dunghill of decretals;"1 the Zurich Brethren never clutched the idea of soul sleep so tightly. They did in fact hold to soul sleep for the intermediate state between death and resurrection, but they didn't consider the matter a priority.
John L Ruth describes a scene where Zwingli and the radicals are deliberating on ecclesiastical matters: "In general, the trend throughout the day is to declare the mass unscriptural. But Conrad, who is eager to see just how serious the assembly is about carrying out the scriptural teaching, is disturbed when he finds they are about to move on to another topic – purgatory."2
While the afterlife was opened before the floor for discussion, Grebel's reaction to the agenda is indicative of the group; purgatory wasn't of first importance. They were focused on other matters.
Philip Schaff explains:"The two ideas of a pure church of believers and of the baptism of believers were the fundamental articles of the Anabaptist creed. On other points there was great variety and confusion of opinions. Some believed in the sleep of the soul between death and resurrection…"3
Private conferences between the radicals and officials turned into debates, and debates into public disputations. Shortly after what history records as 'the second disputation', Zurich Council proclaimed the matter closed and ordered a stop to further agitations.
The next evening as they met to decide their course of action at Felix Manz's house, George Blaurock asked Grebel to baptise him. Blaurock followed up by baptising Grebel, Manz and the others. Their course was set, they were declaring autonomy. With church and state virtually indivisible, and pastors being paid by the city, tithes and taxes confused, separating oneself from this authority was tantamount to treason.
As the original Swiss Brethren grew in numbers and their influence spread, their teachings began to appear in letters and circulars. The Brethren didn't major on personal eschatology, their focus was on living a 'new life' in Christ and how that looked for them, but views on the afterlife were also being reshaped as a result. The doctrine of soul sleep was soon seen as particularly Brethren. Supplied with a copy of a since lost Grebel tract and the Schleitheim Confession, Zwingli published a lengthy "Refutation of Anabaptist Tricks"4
Zwingli addresses the Brethren's views on the intermediate state in his appendix:
"The Catabaptists teach that the dead sleep, both body and soul, until the day of judgement, because they do not know that 'sleeping' is used by the Hebrews for 'dying'. Then they do not consider that the soul is a spirit, which, so far from being able to sleep or die, is nothing but the animating principle of all that breathes, whether that gross and sensation-possessing spirit that quickens and raises up the body, or that celestial spirit that sojourns in the body. That celestial spirit then that we call soul the Greeks call entelecheia (i.e. actuality): this is so lively, enduring, strong, tenacious and vigilant a substance that its nature forbids the absence of action or existence."5
Grebel didn't live to see the Refutation, nor his character referred to as "a shade, in mocking allusion to the doctrine of psychopannychism"6 having recently died of plague. Manz however, was undaunted. Imprisoned, he penned a hymn still in use today, in which we see views consistent with soul sleep implied:
Mit Lust so will ich singen
"I will sing with gladness!
My heart rejoices in God who made me wise enough to escape eternal death!"
Or, an alternate translation offers; "that I from death depart. Which lasting ever, hath no end"7
"And I praise you Christ from heaven who turns away my grief – you whom God sent for my example and light, to call me into your kingdom before my end.
There (in the Kingdom of Christ) I will be joyful with him forever, and love him from the heart.
I love his righteousness that guides all who seek life – here as well as there.
Righteousness lets itself be scorned as well as praised.
But without it nothing survives."8
Felix Manz was martyred shortly afterwards. He was bound and drowned in the river that flows through Zurich. With Grebel dead, Manz martyred and Blaurock beaten and driven from town, the burden of leadership fell to Michael Sattler during the height of persecution. Sattler had been the lead author of the Schleitheim Confession and, in turn, also faced trial as a radical. He was accused, among other things, "of having despised and condemned the mother of God and the saints." This was the same charge brought against Blaurock earlier; that he "disallowed of invoking or worshipping the mother of Christ."
In Sattler's case, as he and others in his company stood trial, they were read the list of accusations against them and were told that: "Fifthly, they have despised and condemned the mother of God and the saints"9 To which Sattler replied as the group's spokesman" We have not condemned the mother of God and the saints; for the mother of Christ is to be blessed among all women; for to her was accorded the favour of giving birth to the Saviour of the whole world. But that she is a mediatress and advocatess, of this the scriptures know nothing; Paul said to Timothy: Christ is our Mediator and Advocate with God. As regards the saints; we say that we who live and believe are the saints; which I prove by the epistles of Paul to the Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians; and in other places where he always writes: To the beloved saints. Hence we that believe are the saints; but those who have died in faith we regard as the blessed."10
Concerning the Virgin Mary, author and historian C. Arnold Snyder further explains that; "Sattler grants that she has "given birth to God"- but adds "according to the flesh" – but Mary cannot intercede for us since she awaits judgement. Only Jesus can intercede for us with the Father, likewise, the saints are to be honoured as "blessed" but the true saints are those who are living in obedience. Sattler's reply brings out several interesting points. Important are Sattler's assertions that Mary and the saints cannot intercede, since they are not yet ascended, and that Christ alone can intercede for us. This assertion destroys the rationale on which rested the entire edifice of Catholic devotion to the Blessed Virgin and on which rested also indulgences, prayers for the dead, and appeals to the saints, which had formed such an important part of Sattler's life as a monk. It appears that Sattler came to hold the doctrine of psychopannychism, or sleep of the soul, rather than the traditional Catholic view. Catholic theology taught that on death, souls proceed directly to heaven, hell, or purgatory, according to the merits of each individual. This meant that the church universal included the living and the dead as active members. The Blessed Virgin and the saints could be entreated through prayer intercede for the living and the dead, and further, the suffering of those in purgatory could be alleviated by acts of penance done specifically on their behalf. Thus Michael Sattler's statement that all mortals, no matter how holy, do not arrive in heaven prior to judgement and the resurrection undermines a central rationale for the penitential system and takes away one of the primary 'works' traditionally done by monks, the intercession for the dead."11
Michael Sattler was burned at the stake that same year. Even without central governing church and no unifying systematic theology the Swiss Brethren still managed to exert influence to a larger area. The Swiss and South German Brethren, armed with the Schleitheim Confession martyred by Sattler's blood, began conflicting with William Farel in Neuchâtel, prompting Farel to urge John Calvin to publish his first book Psychopannychia.12
Calvin's book is clear as to whom it is written against: "I am referring to the nefarious herd of Anabaptists, from whose fountain this noxious stream did, as I observed, first flow." It is also just as clear on its subject: "Our controversy, then, relapses to The Human Soul. Some, while admitting it to have real existence, imagine that it sleeps in a state of insensibility from Death to The Judgement-day, when it will awake from its sleep; while others will sooner admit anything than its real existence, maintaining that it is merely a vital power which is derived from arterial spirit on the action of the lungs, and being unable to exist without body, perishes along with the body, and vanishes away and becomes evanescent till the period when the whole man shall be raised again."13
Calvin's harsh pen was the mildest form of opposition the Anabaptists faced.
Another Anabaptist rose to prominence; Menno Simons in the Netherlands. Under Menno the Anabaptists circled the wagons and unified their theology somewhat. A more systematic theology was formed and while soul sleep wasn't further developed, it did survive. Menno wasn't given to speculate on the nature of the soul, as we can see in a pastoral letter he wrote to comfort the faithful: "Therefore we ought not to dread death so. It is but to cease from sin and enter into a better life. Nor should we sorrow about friends who have fallen asleep in God, as they who do not look for a reward of the saints." Unconcerned about setting clear timelines, Menno reassures believers that they "shall rest in peace" and be "summoned to the eternal, holy Sabbath." Their "souls are in lasting rest and peace in the Paradise of grace" under the throne of God "waiting henceforth until the number of their brethren be complete."14
This type of soul-vagueness prompted Nancey Murphy to write, "Anabaptist writers never made this (intermediate state) a part of their teachings, and many argued for soul sleep, which could mean either the unconsciousness of a surviving soul or death pure and simple."15
Given time to breathe and think, the Mennonites authored the Dordtrecht Confession which builds from, and expands on, Schleitheim. Within Dordtrecht we still see a plastic period of time between death and judgement but a period of time none the less, for all to be gathered and judged on that fateful 'last day':
"Finally, concerning the resurrection of the dead, we confess with the mouth, and believe with the heart, according to Scripture, that in the last day all men who shall have died, and fallen asleep, shall be awakened and quickened, and shall rise again, through the incomprehensible power of God; and that they, together with those who then will still be alive, and who shall be changed in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound of the last trump, shall be placed before the judgment seat of Christ, and the good be separated from the wicked; that then everyone shall receive in his own body according to that he hath done, whether it be good or evil; and that the good or pious, as the blessed, shall be taken up with Christ, and shall enter into life eternal, and obtain that joy, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man, to reign and triumph with Christ forever and ever."16
This belief survived over time and ocean on into North America. The Mennonite Confession of Faith begins by anchoring themselves to their European past. In its introduction it asserts that:
"Statements of what Mennonites believe have been among us from earliest beginnings. A group of Anabaptists, forerunners of Mennonites, wrote the Schleitheim Articles. Since then, Mennonite groups have produced numerous statements of faith. The Mennonite Church, organized in North America by several regional conferences of Swiss-South German background, has recognized a number of confessions: the Schleitheim Articles, the Dordrecht Confession, the Christian Fundamentals, and the Mennonite Confession of Faith."17
Article 24 is of particular interest to us, in that it says:
"We believe that, just as God raised Jesus from the dead, we also will be raised from the dead. At Christ's glorious coming again for judgment, the dead will come out of their graves–those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation. The righteous will rise to eternal life with God, and the unrighteous to hell and separation from God. Thus, God will bring justice to the persecuted and will confirm the victory over sin, evil, and death itself."18
On the surface this appears to be the most defined statement on the nature of the soul we have seen up to now; but in true Swiss Brethren or Michael Sattler fashion, and in keeping with Menno Simons, a commentary is added to article 24, which creates a certain amount of obfuscation, but also ends with a great deal of hope:
"For some, the idea of God's final judgment is problematic, because it seems to emphasize God's wrath at the expense of God's love and mercy. God's loving patience is so great that God will not coerce anyone into covenant relationship, but will allow those who reject it to remain separated from God. Moreover, God's justice means that unrepentant evildoers will not go unpunished. The New Testament says much about the resurrection. It speaks much less frequently and clearly about the state of persons between the time of their deaths and the resurrection. Yet, we who are in Christ are assured that not even death can separate us from the love of God"19
With this parting thought, that the Bible says much on resurrection and little on our personal intermediate state, and that those in Christ are indivisible from God's love, we will close where we began, with the last stanza of Felix Manz's hymn penned so long ago in prison and still sung today by Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish congregations:
"I will stay with Christ,
With this I will close
But take note, all Godly souls!
We should not neglect to study Adam's fall
He took the serpent's advice, disobeyed God, and death came upon him
So it will be with those that withstand Christ, those that set their affections on worldly lusts and do not know the love of God
Now this is the end of my song
I will stay with Christ who knows my earthly distress!"20
More Church History Articles
A brief tour of Reformed Conditionalism
The legacy of Millerism
Conditional Immortality in the 19th Century
Assertion of all the articles of M Luther condemned by the latest Bull of Leo X, article 27 [↩]
John L. Ruth, Conrad Grebel: Son of Zurich [↩]
Philip Schaff, Modern Christianity, The Swiss Reformation [↩]
William R. Estep, The Anabaptist Story [↩]
Ulrich Zwingli, Refutation Against the Tricks of the Anabaptists [↩]
George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation 3rd edition [↩]
John J. Overholt [↩]
Ausbund 6, Mit Lust so will ich singen [↩]
Thieleman J. van Braght, Martyr's Mirror [↩]
C. Arnold Snyder, The Life and Thought of Michael Sattler [↩]
Neal Blough, Calvin and the Anabaptists, Evangelical Theology [↩]
John Calvin, Psychopannychia [↩]
John C. Wagner, The Complete Writings of Menno Simons [↩]
N. Murphy, Anabaptist Science and Epistemology [↩]
Article 18, Of the Resurrection of the Dead, and Last Judgement [↩]
Mennonite Confession of Faith, 1963 [↩]
Article 24, The Reign of God [↩]
Commentary to Article 24 [↩]
Lerman is a theologically curious guy from the pews, who admits conditionalism has had a simplifying effect. He is married to his high school sweetheart and they have a son and a daughter. He resides in Canada.
More Posts(11)
Filed Under: Church History
Soul Sleep of the Swiss Brethren (Part 2) - Afterlife says:
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Copyright © 2021 CIANZ · Kitchen Table Web Design
|
{
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| 9,969
|
Q: How do we assert the JSON response field type (if it's String or int)? How do we assert the JSON response field type?
{
"Data" : [
"Id" : 1,
"Name" : "ABC"
]
}
Is there any way to validate that ID should contain an int and Name should be a String? I don't want to validate the values.
A: Overview
You are asking how to check the JSON document structure.
JSON document validation against a JSON schema (JSON schema validation) is a way to perform such check.
Introduction
Let's consider the following versions as the current versions:
*
*REST Assured: 5.1.1.
*JUnit: 5.8.2.
Solution
REST Assured supports JSON schema validation.
*
*Usage: Examples: JSON Schema validation · rest-assured/rest-assured Wiki.
*JsonSchemaValidator (json-schema-validator 5.1.1 API).
Draft example unit test
The unit test class contain two tests: successful and failing.
The failing test fails with the following message:
java.lang.AssertionError: 1 expectation failed.
Response body doesn't match expectation.
Expected: The content to match the given JSON schema.
error: instance type (object) does not match any allowed primitive type (allowed: ["string"])
level: "error"
schema: {"loadingURI":"file:/<the-project-path>/target/test-classes/schema.json#","pointer":"/properties/Data/items/0/properties/Name"}
instance: {"pointer":"/Data/0/Name"}
domain: "validation"
keyword: "type"
found: "object"
expected: ["string"]
Actual: {
"Data": [
{
"Id": 1,
"Name": {
"FirstName": "First",
"LastName": "Last"
}
}
]
}
Maven project (pom.xml)
<properties>
<restassured.version>5.1.1</restassured.version>
</properties>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.junit.jupiter</groupId>
<artifactId>junit-jupiter-api</artifactId>
<version>5.8.2</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.rest-assured</groupId>
<artifactId>rest-assured</artifactId>
<version>${restassured.version}</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.rest-assured</groupId>
<artifactId>json-schema-validator</artifactId>
<version>${restassured.version}</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.github.tomakehurst</groupId>
<artifactId>wiremock-jre8</artifactId>
<version>2.33.2</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
JSON schema (src/test/resources/schema.json)
{
"$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-04/schema#",
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"Data": {
"type": "array",
"items": [
{
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"Id": {
"type": "integer"
},
"Name": {
"type": "string"
}
},
"required": [
"Id",
"Name"
]
}
]
}
},
"required": [
"Data"
]
}
Test data (src/test/resources/__files/data.json)
{
"Data": [
{
"Id": 1,
"Name": "ABC"
}
]
}
Test data (src/test/resources/__files/data-invalid.json)
{
"Data": [
{
"Id": 1,
"Name": {
"FirstName": "First",
"LastName": "Last"
}
}
]
}
Unit test class (src/test/java/info/brunov/stackoverflow/question72903880/DataServiceTest.java)
package info.brunov.stackoverflow.question72903880;
import com.github.tomakehurst.wiremock.WireMockServer;
import com.github.tomakehurst.wiremock.client.WireMock;
import com.github.tomakehurst.wiremock.core.WireMockConfiguration;
import io.restassured.RestAssured;
import io.restassured.builder.RequestSpecBuilder;
import io.restassured.filter.log.LogDetail;
import io.restassured.module.jsv.JsonSchemaValidator;
import io.restassured.specification.RequestSpecification;
import org.junit.jupiter.api.AfterEach;
import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test;
public final class DataServiceTest {
private final WireMockServer server;
private final RequestSpecification requestSpecification;
public DataServiceTest() {
server = new WireMockServer(
WireMockConfiguration.wireMockConfig().dynamicPort()
);
server.stubFor(
WireMock.get("/data")
.willReturn(
WireMock.aResponse().withBodyFile("data.json")
)
);
server.stubFor(
WireMock.get("/data-invalid")
.willReturn(
WireMock.aResponse().withBodyFile("data-invalid.json")
)
);
server.start();
final RequestSpecBuilder requestSpecBuilder = new RequestSpecBuilder();
requestSpecBuilder.setPort(server.port());
requestSpecification = requestSpecBuilder.build();
}
@AfterEach
void tearDown() {
server.stop();
}
@Test
public void getData_responseConformsSchema_success() {
RestAssured.given()
.spec(requestSpecification)
.get("/data")
.then()
.log().ifValidationFails(LogDetail.ALL)
.assertThat()
.statusCode(200)
.body(JsonSchemaValidator.matchesJsonSchemaInClasspath("schema.json"));
}
// NOTE: Deliberately failing test.
@Test
public void getInvalidData_responseConformSchema_fail() {
RestAssured.given()
.spec(requestSpecification)
.get("/data-invalid")
.then()
.log().ifValidationFails(LogDetail.ALL)
.assertThat()
.statusCode(200)
.body(JsonSchemaValidator.matchesJsonSchemaInClasspath("schema.json"));
}
}
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
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| 1,076
|
{"url":"https:\/\/cs.stackexchange.com\/tags\/linked-lists\/new","text":"# Tag Info\n\nIn this case, k can vary from 1 to n. 1 We might be interested in finding 1st from Beginning and 1st from End. Time Complexities of these are respectively $O(1)$ and $O(n)$. OR n We might be interested in finding nth Element from Beginning (Last Element of Linked List) and nth Element from End (First Element of Linked List) Time Complexities of these ...","date":"2022-01-22 18:50:27","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.5410973429679871, \"perplexity\": 796.2379653484988}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2022-05\/segments\/1642320303868.98\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20220122164421-20220122194421-00233.warc.gz\"}"}
| null | null |
DIY, Southern, Alternative, Country Club, Desert Wedding, Loft, Tented, Beach Wedding Photos
A Minimal, Modern Wedding at the Greenhouse Loft in Chicago
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"The Market at Grelen's natural beauty and serenity was the genesis of our design process," Anna Blazier (27 and a graduate student at the Uni...
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A Whimsical Circus Wedding at Inn at the Old Silk Mill in Fredericksburg, Virginia
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An Urban, Bohemian Wedding at a Private Event Space in Nashville, Tennessee
Angela Rhodes (32 and a practice manager/jewelry designer) and Cameron Goedde (33 and in marketing) planned their wedding celebration around t...
An Elegant, Southern Wedding at Mountain Brook Club in Birmingham, Alabama
The Deep South played more of a role than just the setting of Keeley Patterson (25 and an auditor) Graham Tayloe's (35 and a recreational land...
A Vintage-Chic Industrial Wedding at the Loft on Pine in Long Beach, California
Michelle McCreary (36 and a photographer) and Daley Hake (27 and a photographer) were coworkers and friends for about tw...
A Laid-Back, Rustic Farm Wedding at a Private Residence in Fort Collins, Colorado
Both Carrie Burger (36 and a graphic designer) and Tyler Weady (28 and an event producer) work for a brewery, so a friend's hop farm seemed li...
A Casual, Bohemian Garden Party at a Private Residence in Del Mar, California
Amy Biller (28 and works in public relations and marketing) had always wanted to get married at her family's friend's gorgeous estate in Del M...
|
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| 5,288
|
# Werner Herzog
A Guide for the Perplexed
_Conversations with_
Paul Cronin
# Contents
1. Title Page
2. [Foreword
by Harmony Korine ](9780571259786_preface.html#Preface2)
3. [Visionary Vehemence
by Paul Cronin](9780571259786_other_01.html#Other1)
4. Epigraph
5. [1
The Shower Curtain
_A Lost Western, Herakles, Game in the Sand, The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz_ __](9780571259786_chapter_01.html#Chapter1)
6. [2
Blasphemy and Mirages
_Signs of Life, Last Words, Precautions Against Fanatics, The Flying Doctors of East Africa, Fata Morgana, Even Dwarfs Started Small_ ](9780571259786_chapter_02.html#Chapter2)
7. [3
Adequate Imagery
_Handicapped Future, Land of Silence and Darkness, Aguirre, the Wrath of God_](9780571259786_chapter_03.html#Chapter3)
8. [4
Athletics and Aesthetics
_The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, No One Will Play with Me, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Heart of Glass_](9780571259786_chapter_04.html#Chapter4)
9. [5
Legitimacy
_How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck..., Stroszek, La Soufrière, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Woyzeck_](9780571259786_chapter_05.html#Chapter5)
10. [6
Defying Gravity
_God's Angry Man, Huie's Sermon, Fitzcarraldo, Ballad of the Little Soldier, The Dark Glow of the Mountains_ __ ](9780571259786_chapter_06.html#Chapter6)
11. [7
Going Rogue ](9780571259786_chapter_07.html#Chapter7)
12. [8
Reveries and Imagination
_Where the Green Ants Dream, Cobra Verde, Les Français vus par... Les Gauloises, Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun, Echoes from a Sombre Empire, The Eccentric Private Theatre of the Maharaja of Udaipur, Scream of Stone_ ](9780571259786_chapter_08.html#Chapter8)
13. [9
Fact and Truth
_Lessons of Darkness, Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia, The Transformation of the World into Music, Death for Five Voices, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Wings of Hope_](9780571259786_chapter_09.html#Chapter9)
14. [10
Fervour and Woe
_My Best Fiend, The Lord and the Laden, Pilgrimage, Invincible, Ten Thousand Years Older, Wheel of Time, The White Diamond_ ](9780571259786_chapter_10.html#Chapter10)
15. [11
Blowing the Fuses
_Grizzly Man, The Wild Blue Yonder, Rescue Dawn, Encounters at the End of the World, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans_ ](9780571259786_chapter_11.html#Chapter11)
16. [12
The Song of Life
_La Bohème, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, Ode to the Dawn of Man, Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life, On Death Row, From One Second to the Next_](9780571259786_chapter_12.html#Chapter12)
17. [Ten Poems
by Werner Herzog ](9780571259786_chapter_13.html#Chapter13)
18. [Thinking about Germany
by Werner Herzog ](9780571259786_chapter_34.html#Chapter35)
19. [The Minnesota Declaration
by Werner Herzog](9780571259786_chapter_35.html#Chapter36)
20. [Shooting on the Lam
by Herbert Golder ](9780571259786_chapter_36.html#Chapter37)
21. [Afterword
by Lawrence Krauss ](9780571259786_chapter_37.html#Chapter38)
22. Bibliographic Essay
23. Filmography and Opera Stagings
24. Index
25. Photographs
26. Acknowledgements
27. About the Author
28. By the Same Author
29. Copyright
# [Foreword
by Harmony Korine ](9780571259786_tableofcontents.html)
werner herzog hates chickens. this is a fact. this is a consistent theme throughout his films. it is clear to me that he hates chickens, and this is one of the reasons why he has always been my favorite film director. i too hate chickens. the first time i saw even dwarfs started small i knew i wanted to make films. i had only experienced this once before, when as a boy i watched a w. c. fields movie marathon next to a man dying of emphysema. i could not imagine what type of human being could come up with such insane ideas. i could not understand how these dwarfs could laugh so intensely throughout the film. after getting to know the great man it is obvious where he gets his ideas. he gets them from a deep place where formal logic and academic thinking need not exist. he is a pure artist and maniac and there will never be another one like herzog. he has invented his own cinematic universe where out of chaos and detritus come moments of pure poetry and the deepest enlightenment. herzog's influence cannot be denied. he is a true icon of cinema. he is a foot soldier. he is not a chicken.
# [Visionary Vehemence
Ten Thoughts about Werner Herzog ](9780571259786_tableofcontents.html)
"Life is about oneself against the world."
Paul Bowles
"Assiduity is the sin against the holy spirit.
Only ideas won by walking have any value."
Nietzsche
"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."
William Faulkner
"The only way to stop smoking is to stop smoking."
Werner Herzog
I met Werner Herzog for the first time in the plush sitting room of a stylish central London hotel. We spent a couple of hours circling each other, in discussion about collaboration on an interview book. I returned the following morning, to continue our chat over breakfast. Would Herzog go for the idea? "All things considered," he said slowly but firmly, before carefully placing his buttered toast onto his plate, pausing for half a minute, taking an unhurried mouthful of coffee, and looking me squarely in the eye, "it's best I co-operate with you." A sigh of relief. "But there is one thing I want to do while I'm in town this week."
"Anything."
"I want to see Arsenal play."
The next day I enter new territory, wander down some dark alley, and scalp a handful of tickets. A week later I am in a pub in Upton Park drinking Guinness with Werner and Lena, his wife, having just seen West Ham play the Gunners (I don't remember who won). "Number 26 is a very intelligent player," says Werner. "Who is he?" This is not a question I am able to answer, so Werner turns to the portly, slightly inebriated gentleman and his mates standing next to us, and asks again. "That's Joe Cole," we are told. "One of the best there is. Only eighteen years old." "Yes," says Werner. "He really knows how to use the space around him, even when he doesn't have the ball. He'll be playing for England soon." Which goes to show that Werner's understanding of football runs just as deep as that of all things cinematic: not long after this match Joe Cole was, indeed, playing for the national team.* A few weeks later, one bright early morning, Werner and I are sitting in the living room of his modest, airy Los Angeles home, tucked away in the Hollywood Hills, watching Bayern Munich play AC Milan on television. It's a crucial match for both. Tension is high. Werner chain-smokes nervously and we snack on Doritos. Munich equalise with the last touch of the game. It bodes well for the first of our conversations that will become this book.
It isn't easy to say if the following – the closest we'll get to a Herzog autobiography – does Werner's life and work justice. I have often thought about how this book might read if I had interviewed him every couple of years from the start of his career (practically speaking, not possible, since I wasn't born until about a decade in). How differently would Werner appear on paper? Memory being what it is, would these pages be filled exclusively with anecdotes about filming amidst this or that landscape rather than, as many usefully do, focusing on perennial ideas and principles? Does the distance that time has given Herzog from much of his work (it's more than fifty years, sixty films and a handful of books since _A Lost Western_ ) make for a more contemplative overview?
I can definitively say two things. First, Werner's memory is a good one. His most conspicuous acting job, and one of his most recent, was in the 2012 Tom Cruise shoot-'em-up _Jack Reacher,_ filmed in Pittsburgh. One afternoon during production, Werner rented a car and took the time to drive several miles out into the nearby countryside where, fifty years earlier, he spent a few months. Despite not having been in the city since the early sixties, and though it involved a complicated route from downtown, he immediately found the house he was looking for. "I recognised it all," says Werner, "to the point where I was struck by a new configuration of concrete stairs that curved down to the garage." Herb Golder, professor of classics at Boston University and trusted confidant on several Herzog films, recalls a production meeting for _Wings of Hope_ at a hotel in Lima. "Werner drew from memory a map of the territory that pertained to the story, an area of the densest jungle imaginable, which he hadn't seen in twenty-seven years, including the crash site and the Pachitea tributary, snaking off to the Sungaro and Shebonya, feeding the Yuyapichis. When we compared Werner's map with an actual map the next day, we discovered that his reconstruction of the topography was almost perfect. I still have that sketched map of his, and look at it now and again, as I consider it a blueprint of the feeling for landscape and sense of space necessary for great filmmaking."
Second, a complete understanding of the irrepressible Werner Herzog is only possible if one has (a) regularly climbed inside his head to see exactly where his ideas come from, then observed him at close quarters as he makes a number of consecutive films (fiction and non-fiction); and (b) stood in his garden, _Weissbier_ in hand, watching him, aproned-up, frying a lamb chop on the barbecue, or supping with him and his wife Lena on her Siberian mushroom soup as Fats Domino, their corpulent cat, roams. Regret to inform I have done only one of these things, and have yet to meet anyone who has experienced both, which leads to my own verdict on _A Guide for the Perplexed:_ it's the best we've got.
Whenever Werner Herzog deploys his abilities, we can expect the unexpected, a matchless, coruscating take, those lapidary turns of phrase. The interview presented here attempts to capture his exaltation of the landscapes, objects, books, art, poetry, music, literature, cinema, ideas and people that surround us, alongside his own pastimes, convictions and judgements, with "agitation of mind" as shorthand for what this book hopefully delivers. While Hölderlin transmuted the world around him into words, Herzog has consistently transformed his experiences into sounds and images. It is, however, incidental that the subject of this book is an indispensable man of cinema. More important for our purposes is that he is an edifying and transformative conversationalist.
## 1 INTUITION
Over the years this book – the first iteration of which appeared in 2002, as _Herzog on Herzog_ – seems to have contributed in a small way to the construction of Werner's public persona, and has become something of an eccentric self-help volume. People tell me how weighty, invigorating and (Herzog dislikes the word, feeling it makes him sound "too much like a preacher") inspirational they find it. One fellow called the book "scripture," while _Newsweek_ raved, calling it "a required text for every film school in the country." We do, of course, have plenty to learn from Werner about cinema. A lifetime of filmmaking means that when it comes to the logistical battles of production, he is able to point out in which directions lie the paths of least resistance, to show us how best to minimise our weaknesses and play to our strengths. But you won't learn much about focal lengths, lighting and story structure from these pages. Werner's explication of film grammar, for example, doesn't involve details of film stock, shot size and editing techniques, rather a pithy commentary on why cowboys never eat pasta. Nor does what follows include intricate theoretical analysis that might inspire the ever-increasing number of academics aiming their eyes and brains at Herzog's work. Werner has always resisted interpretation (Hölderlin: "Man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he reflects"), and from the start I knew better than to ask. Instead, with clarity and elegance, he describes his process, making clear that any competent investigation of his films has to be rooted in an understanding of how and where they were made, under what conditions, and by whom.
During one of our final sessions together when preparing this book, Werner called my attention to several paragraphs, all of which were comprised of material where (presumably during moments of weakness) he offered up vague explanations of his films. As we worked through the manuscript, Werner intuitively zeroed in on these lines and – as if they threatened to contaminate the entire book – trimmed. So uninvolved is he in what his films and the characters that populate them might "mean" that when Herb Golder once showed him a full-length published study of his work, Werner quickly deposited the book into the nearest dustbin, announcing, "This has nothing to do with me." On his shelves sit a host of art books (Hieronymus Bosch, John Martin, Albrecht Altdorfer), alongside select texts by the small number of authors important to him (Hölderlin, Kleist, Kuhlmann, Montaigne, Thucydides, Virgil), plus twenty volumes of the _Oxford English Dictionary_ and Anderson/Dibble's multi-volume edition of the _Codex Florentino_. He has copies of some of his own books. He has none of the books about his work.
Werner told me he once met a champion ski jumper from Norway who one season beat all his adversaries. "He was also an architecture student and the following year wrote his thesis on the construction of ski ramps. He thought so much about those damned things that during the next season he lost every competition he entered." For Herzog, the moment such meditation enters the equation, when he delves too deep and starts explaining himself, imbalance sets in and creativity is forced aside, or at least clouds over. As far as he is concerned, cinema – like music – is more deeply connected to imagination than pure reason, and though indubitably respectful of the rationalists of the world, unadulterated intuition is a brighter guiding light for Werner than analysis will ever be. In other words, the new film always takes precedence over talking about old work. "Interviews make very little sense," he said in 1979. "They are not helpful, either to the audience or to myself. I prefer audiences that take a very straight, clear, open look at what they see on the screen." I am sometimes asked by colloquium organisers if Werner would attend were they to assemble a round table to discuss his films and praise him for past glories. There's a slim chance, I say, so long as he isn't working that day.
## 2 PERSEVERANCE
Although his place in film history is assured, Werner's work has always been a by-product of his furious "extra-cinematic" inquisitiveness and infatuations. He has forever been nourished by a wondrously eclectic range of interests that might have propelled him equally in the direction of mathematics, philology, archaeology, history, cookery, ant wrangling (see page 260), football or (as the Afterword by Lawrence Krauss suggests) science. The fact that it's cinema the multifarious Herzog has involved himself with is, to a certain extent, irrelevant to our tale, one of dedication, passion and determination. This book is the story of one man's constant and (almost) always triumphant confrontation with a profound sense of duty to unburden himself, and for that reason alone it's worth our attention.
Werner's work ethic and drive, impressive decades ago, remain formidable, and his ability to maintain creative integrity and generate new ideas is exhilarating. There is a wonderful moment in _Conquest of the Useless,_ the published version of his journal, written – Walser-like – in microscopic script during production on _Fitzcarraldo_. While playing in an imaginary football match in Lima, Werner struggles to distinguish between players on his team and his competitors. When the referee refuses to halt play so one side can exchange its jerseys for those of a less confusing colour, Werner concludes that "the only hope of winning the game would be if I did it all by myself... I would have to take on the entire field myself, including my own team." When it comes to his films, this energy is perpetually generated by, as he calls them, "home invaders," those ideas that steal inside his head, to be wrestled to the ground in the form of a screenplay, film or book. Herzog's filmmaking has never given him consolation as such. It's a blessing and a burden. He never has to worry about whether a good idea for the next film will reveal itself because, like it or not, the throb is there long before the one at hand is complete. When Herzog writes that the image of a steamship moving up the side of a mountain seized hold of him with such power it was like "the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass," we presume there isn't a project he has involved himself with over the past fifty years that has taken hold with any less urgency. As David Mamet has written, "Those with 'something to fall back on' invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no alternative see the world differently."
Nearly fifteen years ago, when I started work on this project, Werner hadn't attained the godlike status the world now accords him. For the past twenty years he has lived on the West Coast of the United States, most recently a few miles from Hollywood, where he is his own master. While some folks wait bleary-eyed for calls from their agent, Werner rarely picks up for his own ("For decades I didn't even have an agent and even today don't really need one"), and has forever preferred the company of farmers, mechanics, carpenters and vintners to filmmakers. In California he is free from European rigidity, even if he still feels a powerful intellectual and emotive connection to his homeland. In 1982, a year before her death, Herzog's mentor Lotte Eisner wrote that Werner is
German in the best sense of the word. German as Walther von der Vogelweide and his love poem "Under the Lime Tree." German as the austere, fine statues of the Naumburg cathedral, as the Bamberg horseman. German as Heine's poem of longing "In a Foreign Land." As Brecht's "Ballad of the Drowned Young Girl." As Barlach's audacious wood statues, which the Third Reich sought to destroy. And as Lehmbruck's "Kneeling Woman."
Today, studio executives adventurous enough to try and entice Werner into more conventional enterprises show up at his door, though the issue, as Anthony Lane has written, "is one not of Herzog selling out but of Hollywood wanting to buy in." Werner's comrade Tom Luddy, co-founder of the Telluride Film Festival (where the Werner Herzog Theater opened in 2013), describes him as a "pop icon." Having outlived countless trends, Herzog has moved into the primary currents and is celebrated worldwide, as he suggested would happen. "I think people will get acquainted to my kind of films," he said in 1982. Werner feels no shame in admitting that the respect of those he respects somehow keeps him going, or, at least, temporarily lessens the burden. But his belief in his abilities has never seriously wavered, which means details of the peaks and troughs of his career – which essentially speak to his treatment at the hands of professional reviewers and the ticket-buying public – are barely touched on throughout the pages of this book. Herzog pays little attention to the chorus. And why should he? It isn't antagonism he feels towards such folk so much as indifference. His ferocious need to make films and write books will forever trump everything, regardless of the obstacles.
By offering up the background to each of his films and how they were made, Herzog offers details of form, structure and – indirectly – meaning. As he articulates his techniques, ideas and principles in the conversations that follow, his way of looking at the world is made clear. His "credo," as he puts it, "is the films themselves and my ability to make them." Truffaut once explained that making a film is like taking a boat out to sea, the director at the helm, forever attempting to avoid shipwreck (in his Hitchcock book he describes the process as a "maze of snares"). Being tossed about on the waves is the very nature of filmmaking, a state of affairs only an amateur would whine about. ("I'm not into the culture of complaint," Herzog says. To his fictional son in _julien donkey-boy:_ "A winner doesn't shiver." Physicist Lawrence Krauss: the universe doesn't exist to make us happy.) In short: you're always asking to be sunk. Or, per Herzog, who describes himself as a product of his cumulative humiliations and defeats, filmmaking "causes pain." In discussing the day-to-day experiences and hard graft of the cinema practitioner, in stressing how vital it is for each of us to follow our own particular channel, in acknowledging that the name of the game is faith, not money, _A Guide for the Perplexed_ furnishes the reader with an oblique ground plan to help navigate the rocks and manage the daily calamities.
Not coincidentally, these are the same ideas that underpin and flicker steadily throughout the three days of Herzog's extemporizing at his irreverent and sporadically executed three-day Rogue Film School. Nietzsche tells us that "All writing is useless that is not a stimulus to activity." Similarly, Herzog declaims that his ultimate aim with Rogue is to be useful rather than explicitly didactic, something I suspect he succeeds in, much to the delight of all those youthful, awestruck participants. His rousing description of the filmmaker and how he needs to move through the world, confronted at every turn by obstructions, paints him as an ingenious, brazen, indefatigable problem-solver, with forgery and lock-picking as metaphor. "This man has no ticket," says Molly in the opening minutes of _Fitzcarraldo_ , as she and Brian crash into the lobby of the opera house in Manaus after having rowed for two days and two nights from Iquitos. Yet, insists Molly, Fitzcarraldo has a moral right to enter the auditorium, see his hero Caruso in the flesh, and hear him sing. In this spirit, Herzog believes, the natural order would be disrupted if a misdemeanour didn't occasionally intrude into the life of a working filmmaker. To help jump the hurdles, he suggests, purloin that which is absolutely necessary. It has always been Werner's own particular long-term survival strategy.
Over the Rogue weekend, as Herzog responds to his audience, telling story after story from memory, a repository filled with decades of filmmaking tales, this idea becomes ever clearer. I find in my handwritten notes, taken at Rogue in June 2010, the following: "Raphael talks about some rule he broke when filming at Chernobyl. Werner exclaims: 'That was a very fine and Rogue attitude.'" It might all have something to do with the exquisite Herzog line recorded by Alan Greenberg on the set of _Heart of Glass:_ "There is work to be done, and we will do it well. Outside we will look like gangsters. On the inside we will wear the gowns of priests." What I can decisively say is that Herzog and the Rogue participants I met have been mutually forgiving of each other, considering the former is wholeheartedly dismissive of traditional film schools, and the latter a self-selected group which, if truly Herzogian in temperament, would gently throw the offer of a place at film school back in their hero's face.
Rogue – where the emphasis is more on surveying one's own "inner landscapes" than anything else – is a strong stimulant, the pedagogic equivalent of being doused with ice water. It affirms that Herzog's stupendous curiosity and love of the world, his explorations into uncharted territory across the planet, his insatiability for inquiry and investigation, his voracious appetite and intensity of belief, his attraction to chaos in its many iterations, have never been stronger. With his makeshift film school, a summation of many years' work, Werner has seized hold of ideas that appear in interviews stretching back forty years, acknowledged their contemporary relevance, then recalibrated and brushed them down. By doing so, he has left behind previous incarnations. The stalwart of New German Cinema has long been displaced. The accused of any number of _Fitzcarraldo_ controversies is in the past. The director of five features with Klaus Kinski (the last one made more than a quarter of a century ago) is more or less gone. What remains is the resourceful, optimistic filmmaker, still going strong, shepherding us into action, showing us how to outwit the evil forces, leading by example. "I have fortified myself with enough philosophy to cope with anything that's been thrown at me over the years," says Herzog. "I always manage to wrestle something from the situation, no matter what."
## 3 WANDERLUST
Werner's fine-tuned sympathies are those of a thoughtful, exacting and studious polyglot poet who, when translating his work and that of others, is aware of the delicate nuances of one word over another, not just in German, but also English and other languages, including ancient Greek. Herbert Achternbusch has written that Herzog has an "addiction to words," and Werner himself wonders in this book whether "I might be a better writer than I am a filmmaker." This is the same Werner Herzog who, during a 1988 public conversation at the National Film Theatre in London, spontaneously told his audience, after rejecting the more ludicrous claims about the production of _Fitzcarraldo_ , "If you don't believe me, we can go out into the street and fight it out. I have no proof but my physical body." Werner's approach to everything is that of a fearless pioneer, an intrepid seeker who, as he explained in a 1982 interview, doesn't "want to live in a world where there are no lions anymore." At the age of seventy he remains extraordinarily agile, and gallops rather than strolls. All things tactile and corporeal are pre-eminent. His engagement with the world is experiential, not ideological. For Herzog, film is athletics, not aesthetics. (Cameraman Ed Lachman: "What is strongest is the content of the images, not a formalistic attitude about what an image is.")
Never has Herzog lived vicariously through others. The sedentary life has never been for him. Ready to pack his bag at any moment, he usually doesn't know where he will be next month. A joy of geographical inquiry has forever characterised his existence, even before he ever picked up a camera. This is something the Germans have a word for: _Fernweh_ , which could be translated as "a yearning for distant lands." (Herzog may be right in claiming to be the only person to have filmed on all seven continents.) Remote peoples and faraway places, however inhospitable, are a crucial source of inspiration, and there is no reason to doubt Werner when he says that if a one-way journey of exceptional exploration were offered, if the opportunity arose to leave the stratosphere and go in search of untainted images, he would jump at the chance. With his ability to sniff out the lyrical and extraordinary, which is usually there for all to see ("We thank NASA for its sense of poetry," Werner tells us at the end of _The Wild Blue Yonder,_ perhaps laying to rest once and for all the notion that irony is beyond him), the visceral experiences are imbibed, after which the stories, characters and scenarios take shape, and the images pour out with an exactitude and urgency that make Herzog more a transcriber than an author per se. The scripts – often unconventional in format, part of Werner's quest to establish a new form of literature – are prepared only for the purpose of fund-raising. Their author has never needed them to realise his ideas. Wrote Wagner of his process: "The detailed musical treatment is more of a calm and considered finishing-off job, which the moment of real creation has preceded."
The legend is that in his travels, the never-tentative Herzog seeks the strongest currents and most treacherous waters ("That slope may look insignificant," says Fitzcarraldo, "but it's going to be my destiny"). His long-time cameraman Peter Zeitlinger insists that "Werner never takes the paved road, always the dirt track," adding that he has, "probably from mid-puberty, been trying very hard to die a grand, poetic death." According to Zak Penn, who has directed Herzog as an actor in two films, "Werner fulfils the important role of a physical adventurer. We live vicariously through him, wishing we had his courage and nerve. He's a paragon, a mythic hero." (Pauline Kael's description: a "metaphysical Tarzan.") It's up for debate whether the unflappable Herzog is being truthful when insisting he is no reckless risk-taker, but what we can be certain of is that he seeks what Robert Walser called a "very small patch of existence," a non-hierarchical and self-governed land without profanity, absolutism, servility, mendacity, sorcery, demagoguery, dogma, ossification and unnecessary rules and regulations, devoid of repressive political manipulation and slavery, free from rampant, gratuitous commodification, welcoming of poets and contrarians, with a minimum of bureaucracy, where self-determination, inquiry and pluralism can flourish, and a secular community is offered the chance to thrive under its own humane guidelines. "To be honest," he told me last year, "I wish I didn't have to travel so much these days, but if you want to make a film in Antarctica, you have to get on an aeroplane."
## 4 IMAGINATION
Werner offers counsel at his Rogue Film School, but I can't imagine he himself has ever asked anyone for advice. Errol Morris has spoken of a line from an interview with Gabriel García Márquez, who, after having read Kafka's _Metamorphosis_ for the first time, said to himself, "I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that." It was the same line Errol muttered to himself upon exiting the Pacific Film Archive, having just seen Werner's _Fata Morgana_ for the first time. We know what he means. In his 1977 review of _La Soufrière_ , Amos Vogel described Herzog as "the most important director now working in Germany. One of the great film talents of our time, not even at the peak of his creative life, Herzog is a person who will not compromise, who deliberately remains 'unclassifiable,' hence attacked by those who must classify." Perhaps this is why Herzog's films, even those made forty years ago, don't appear to have aged one bit.
The stories in this book and Herzog's improvising at Rogue make clear that he has chased his deepest fascinations since his earliest days. Some films might have been adapted from literary sources or inspired by real-life events, but with their unique view of the world every one is created _ex nihilo_ , predicated on his singular imagination. At a point in his career when many would have run out of ideas – a moment when accolades and retrospectives are flowing thick and fast – Werner has in the recent past become a beacon of hope for neophytes everywhere, looked upon by many as someone who has forever risen unblinkingly to the challenge. "I encourage myself, since nobody else encourages me," he wrote in 1974.
After working closely with a number of filmmakers – big and small, famous and unknown, living and dead – I feel confident in telling people there's no point in comparing Herzog to anyone. It isn't that he's a non-conformist, responding to his surroundings and actively setting himself apart. He just naturally is apart, which makes it foolish for anyone to try to emulate him. Rogue – where the concept is all his, where he maintains full control – is the result of his avoidance of institutions of any kind. While he isn't unhappy, throughout this book, to ally himself to a small number of people with whose centuries-old work he feels a vigorous concordance, Herzog really is his own startlingly original man, and his repeated insistence that his films can't be categorised as part of the Romantic tradition reflect his disregard for any club that might have him as a member. For Herzog, there was never a question of film school or an apprenticeship. Instead, he burst upon us, fifty years ago, almost fully formed as a filmmaker, ready to share his personal fantasies at any cost. Werner is one of those few figures who have created a body of work worthy of sustained investigation, yet one so disassociated from the world of cinema around him – so "cut off from every web of film history," as Hans Schifferle has written – that knowledge of such things might actually get in the way of appreciating his films.
## 5 STORYTELLING
At the Opéra Bastille in Paris, during dress rehearsals for Herzog's 1993 production of _The Flying Dutchman,_ the electronics malfunctioned. "The mammoth iceberg was drifting towards the orchestra pit and sometimes we couldn't even open the curtain," says Werner. "It turned out that all these problems were triggered by a special kind of signal, a taxi call frequency. If a cab drove past the opera house, this state-of-the-art computer equipment went haywire. I insisted we use more primitive techniques instead. Anything else was dangerously inadequate." For Herzog, analogue will almost always win out over digital. Although he has an abiding passion for every stage of the filmmaking process and is happy to experiment with the latest piece of equipment, technology has never been Werner's thing. He is a primeval sophisticate of great erudition who yearns nostalgically for a pre-literate, pre-electric (or postliterate and post-electric) existence, where the primitive wisdom of the uninstructed and those able to memorise stories and poems, then recite them free of all props, predominates.
## 6 THE HOLY FOOL
There are few filmmakers who don't tell stories of people in trouble, struggling to overcome obstacles, humiliated, wracked with anxiety and confusion, adrift, at odds with the world, called upon to fight against adversaries. The outsider and rebel is a dramatic trope that stretches back to the beginnings of storytelling. But Herzog's protagonists – extremists all – are of a particular persuasion. Amos Vogel wrote that the Holy Fool inhabits the films, the figure who "dares more than any human should, and who is therefore – and this is why Herzog is drawn to him – closer to possible sources of deeper truth though not necessarily capable of reaching them." In his monograph on Herzog's _Nosferatu,_ S. S. Prawer suggests there are two characters ubiquitous in Werner's world: "outsiders in a society where they can never feel at home, and which in the end destroys them; and rebels who try, by violent means, to realise what their lives refuse them, but also ultimately fail." The wide and colourful variety of these individuals, the sheer number in both his documentaries and fictions – represented always with empathy and compassion – make clear that they all somehow reflect their creator's innermost enthusiasms. It is never incongruous to see Herzog on screen, responding and interacting.
Some of these figures (Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Walter Steiner, Reinhold Messner, Francisco Manoel, Graham Dorrington, brazen all) seek overwhelming challenges, while others (Fini Straubinger, Adolph Ratzka, Kaspar Hauser, the premature baby of _Stroszek_ , the anguished Woyzeck, Michael Goldsmith, Jared Talbert, the victims of _From One Second to the Next_ ) have burdens thrust upon them. We are repeatedly confronted with dispossessed outcasts and eccentrics, estranged loners, struggling overreachers and underdogs who live _in extremis_ , at the limits of experience, isolated and fraught with problems of communication and assimilation, railing against sometimes stifling social conventions, often foolhardy and spirited enough to embark on undertakings they know are futile, thus providing a series of vivid definitions of the human condition, alongside some level of insight into the society, even the entire historical era, in which they live. "The existential dimension of his characters always seems to take precedence over any social issue against which they might revolt or from which they might suffer," writes Thomas Elsaesser.
The titular strongman hero of the ironic _Herakles_ – who takes on the twelve labours, assuming tasks he can't possibly succeed in – is the quintessential Herzog anti-hero. To clean the Augean stables he has to empty out an enormous garbage dump, while resisting the Stymphalian birds means being confronted by the might of the United States Air Force. Stroszek, from _Signs of Life,_ is caught in a hermetically sealed circle of repetition and inevitability, unable to break out except by force of sheer violence. He extends himself far beyond his means, pushing his limits and exceeding his own capabilities. The failure of his titanic struggle is preordained, but in the face of overwhelming oppression Stroszek never stops trying anyway. It isn't unlike the other Stroszek – played by Bruno S. a few years later – who finds himself standing in the freezing cold as his repossessed mobile home is loaded onto a truck and driven away. Stroszek wants to rob a bank, but it's closed, so he holds up the local barbershop instead. ("I think it's the saddest robbery I have ever seen on screen," Werner says.) The little people of _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ know it makes no sense to rebel against bourgeois table manners, that this is a lost cause, but they do it anyway. The delusional Aguirre – searching for something (El Dorado) that doesn't even exist – defies nature to such an extent that nature inevitably hits back. His was a suicidal mission from the start. _Fitzcarraldo_ – a film that retains a powerful hold on audiences more than three decades after it was released – is a projection of Herzog's almost unattainable fantasies, though he had no choice but to ensure that reality caught up with the imaginary events swarming through his mind. The most poignant moment in _Invincible_ is the return of Zishe Breitbart to the shtetl where he grew up, desperately warning his fellow villagers of the impending Nazi threat ("We have to get strong. We shall need a thousand Samsons"). To abdicate ambition and cast aside unrealised hopes and dreams means to encounter a heavier burden. "Even a defeat is better than nothing at all," says the voiceover during the final seconds of _The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz_.
Listen, in the opening minutes of _Handicapped Future,_ to the gloriously optimistic wheelchair-bound young girl who ran out of things to dream about at the age of five and wants nothing more than to walk, visit America, and meet the Indians of her favourite western. Consider the dignified Aborigines in _Where the Green Ants Dream,_ with their moral claim to ancient lands, up against the deranged officialdom of the white man's courts. Watch Reinhold Messner weeping at the thought of telling his mother her other son is dead. All are in some form a representation: the benign minds of Fini and Vladimir Kokol; the chronic back pain of the Bad Lieutenant; the maniacal fury of Gene Scott, ecstatic frenzy of Brooklyn preacher Huie Rogers and murderous impulses of Carlo Gesualdo; Bokassa in Bangui feasting from his vast refrigerators, and death-row inmates chatting behind the bulletproof glass windows of Texas prisons; flying into the abyss with Steiner, and frolicking with Timothy Treadwell and the bears of Alaska; inside the comforting cockpit with Dieter Dengler, and struggling through the terrorising jungle with Juliane Koepcke; standing over the only person left on a deserted island about to explode, and swimming under the dream-like Ross Ice Shelf; sweeping over speechless children amidst the oblivion of post-war Kuwait, and listening to melancholic ballads sung by young Miskito Indians in Nicaragua; encountering the inhabitants of the undulating dunes of the Sahara and the cast of characters at the inaccessible McMurdo Station, then moving down into a cave adorned with immaculately preserved Palaeolithic art and up to the vertiginous Cerro Torre; bearing witness to the authority of exiled film historian Lotte Eisner and the self-reliant, snowbound hunters of Siberia; marvelling at those seeking some form of religious salvation, be they fervent pilgrims, half a million peripatetic Buddhists, or figures crawling on ice in search of a lost city.
There is also Herzog's own implacable autodidactic nature and knowledge that the entire world is on offer should we be able to muster the requisite excitement; his never-ending _Bildung_ (self-improvement, personal transformation), refusal to sing in public, and mythical final moments, walking – alone and unbound – until no road is left; his attempts to nurture a community on the fringes of Germany's most important film festival, to create a utopia in South America, to construct a modern-day atelier, brimming with collaborating artisans, where communal working methods can blossom far from the commercial excesses of Hollywood. Consider also a perfect football match while walking across mountains of sugar beet from Munich to Paris (see _Of Walking in Ice_ ); the excesses of African slavery; the hypnotic state of a doomed, archaic society; a plague-ridden city rejoicing in its disintegration; a small-scale, close-knit and well-functioning film crew; imbecilic aliens who land on Earth and get nothing right; travelling on foot to pull together a divided nation (and, en route, saving a young Albert Einstein from choking); space exploration; the ability to fly. Herzog seeks nothing but freedom. Reinhild Steingröver tells us that both nature and culture are presented in Herzog's work as "inescapably hostile realms." Werner can do nothing but try to elude the potential menace nonetheless.
## 7 SURVIVAL
Werner lives a life of austerity, asceticism, authenticity. In an interview recorded more than thirty-five years after Herzog made his first film, his friend and collaborator Florian Fricke said: "Werner Herzog is one of the few friends that are very famous and have, regardless of their fame, not changed at all. He is in no way different from the way I knew him twenty-five years ago. He still drinks his beer from the bottle." (I have taken a number of subway rides with Werner in New York after a taxi ride was deemed extravagant.) Herzog has always had respect for audiences, aware that the admirers of his films have for years put food on the table, insisting he doesn't lead the life of an "artist," claiming instead the title of "soldier" or "craftsman." Debatable perhaps, but probably something we can live with. After all, as Walter Gropius told us nearly a century ago, "The artist is an exalted craftsman." What is certain is that while both German states of the second half of the twentieth century might have been "crassly materialistic" (as Günter Grass once described them), Werner never has been. He recognised at an early age that money would never get him what he wanted (though it might someday become, he said in 1976, "a concomitant of my work") and has long since chosen the hands-on existence of someone whose living space is manifestly conjoined with his professional life. Happy to integrate himself into mainstream film culture whenever the right opportunity arises – whether it be working with Twentieth Century Fox on _Nosferatu_ or, as a director for hire, thirty years later, on _Bad Lieutenant_ – there have been no major deviations in Werner's life. When the abyss stares up at him, Werner looks fixedly back, then moves on. "A comedy with Eddie Murphy," he says, "would be my way of pulling back from the edge."
## 8 RELIGION
Herzog is a humanist, a materialist awe-inspired by scientific exploration and progress, disdainful of the supernatural, but with an appreciation more profound than most of the ethereal, of what Christopher Hitchens would describe as "the numinous, the transcendent or – at its best – the ecstatic." Organised religion plays no part in Werner's life. But the divine and the sacred and the ineffable always have.
## 9 POLITICS
Politics are rarely mentioned explicitly in _A Guide for the Perplexed,_ but unpack Werner's thoughts about (a) "the lack of adequate imagery" as an incalculable danger to society, and (b) our failure to lob grenades into television stations, and it becomes difficult to divorce these two issues from their wider context. Both ideas reflect Amos Vogel's work as an historian, author and curator, the belief that most of the images around us, suffused with commercialism, are worn out and pernicious in their banality, that television chokes off and impoverishes (" _Es verbloedet die ganze Welt"_ ). Both are intertwined with the animosity felt by some towards those diabolical bureaucrats who – with robust corporate backing – reap vast fortunes via the time-wasting, conformist, escapist sounds and pictures with which they regularly assault the world. Both could be dubbed "political" ideas, as per Orwell's definition: "Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after." To paraphrase Orwell, the deprivations of cinema have political and economic causes, and are not due simply to the "bad influence" of individual filmmakers. When "civilization is decadent," the images it reflects "must inevitably share in the general collapse." We are, all of us, in this day and age, at the mercy of overwhelming and impersonal historical, economic and environmental forces, so it's unlikely that the tide of stagnant cinema will ever be beaten back. There are, fortunately, some willing to confront the corrupted, debased, stale, adulterated, ready-made and cliché-ridden images that surround us. The actions of an enlightened individual or vanguard few, ready to kick back no matter what the odds, those striving for the ideal, can inspire regeneration. Werner has long recognised that he can't change the world through his films, but he can help us better understand certain things.
Although ideology is always handled in Herzog's films and interviews with, as he might describe it, "a pair of pliers," even if the timeless – not the topical – is what he has always been consumed by, and though his "visionary" stance means his work is "unmediated by historical or socio-political concerns" (as Eric Rentschler writes), it could never be argued that Herzog is an apolitical figure. Werner's anti-despotic verve, for example, is active indeed and given the right circumstances would surely define his very existence. He once told me – without a hint of bluster or bravado – that he would never bear witness to a regime like the Third Reich on home soil for the simple reason that he would stand and fight, surely dying in the process. In an unpublished recording of a conversation with Amos Vogel from 1970, Werner suggested an important lesson needed to be learnt by those in charge, and that he hoped the United States would "lose the war in Vietnam." Referencing events at the Cannes and Oberhausen Film Festivals, in an article written for a German film magazine in 1968 – a politically and socially convulsive year for many countries around the world – Herzog wrote that
In a climate of radical political activities, it becomes impossible to communicate anything based on a personal decision, because any pronouncement is reduced to fit a lopsided friend-or-foe construct...
The lesson I have learned from the events at Oberhausen and Cannes is that a filmmaker cannot and must not keep his films out of the political debate. For such a standpoint, the situation in the field of cultural politics has become far too serious. In these times of upheaval it is no longer possible to try and rescue one's film and shelter it in the safe corner of neutrality. A filmmaker can no longer remain neutral, nor can he make the excuse that it is really everybody else who has turned his film into a political statement.
The politicising of film, however, is fraught with dangers. This is to say that as soon as a crucial political moment is reached, what is expected of a film is automatically reduced. Film can no longer develop its full potential with regard to content and style because everybody's interest will be focused on some palpable results to be gleaned from it. Instead of gaining an awareness of issues and developing questions, people will – according to the film's political stance – primarily read or even force arguments out of it. That is why I have always sought to declare _Signs of Life_ apolitical, though the film has as its theme an individual's radical rebellion.†
Jean-Pierre Melville wrote that a filmmaker "must be a witness to his times." Werner is just that, though he has always observed and participated on his own terms. For him, poetry and abstraction will naturally overwhelm the prosaic nature of commonplace politics. Never hesitant to ridicule the more wrongheaded political activity of the 1968 era, Herzog suggests that today, should the zealous _soixante-huitards_ take a look at the abstract _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ – with its pint-sized insurgents and their disorganised, fragmented, misplaced, futile but still respectable revolutionary fervour – "they might see a more truthful representation of what happened in 1968 than in most other films."
## 10 ACCOUNTANCY
"When he was in school," Herzog's mother once explained, "Werner never learnt anything. He never read the books he was supposed to read, he never studied, he never knew what he was supposed to know, it seemed. But in reality, Werner always knew everything. His senses were remarkable. If he heard the slightest sound, ten years later he would remember it precisely, he would talk about it, and maybe use it some way. But he is absolutely unable to explain anything. He knows, he sees, he understands, but he cannot explain. That is not his nature. Everything goes into him. If it comes out, it comes out transformed." I once spoke to Herzog about the techniques behind his more stylised documentaries. If everything were explained, he said, "the charm of fabrication would disappear. I have no problem being a magician who doesn't let his audience in on how his tricks are done." Although we find in the pages below plenty of examples of this mischievous sleight of hand – Werner's creative, often ingenious methods of unmasking, of liberating "truth" from its submerged depths, of showing us what we could not otherwise perceive – there are presumably many more we will never know about.
How important, Herzog asks in his essay "On the Absolute, the Sublime and Ecstatic Truth," is the factual? "Of course, we can't disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which truth emerges." Reality has always been too obscure and unknowable for Werner to tackle head on. Mere facts – the "accountant's truth" – have a shameful sterility about them, which is why he constantly plays with such things. He knows we respond more intensely to poetry than reportage and actuality, that the poet is able to articulate a more intensified, condensed, elevated and mysterious truth, that the artist is – wrote Amos Vogel – the "conscience and prophet of man." Last year Dr Graham Dorrington, who was closely involved in the production of _The White Diamond_ and appears as a central character in the film, wrote to me. "What is and was always clear to me is that Werner was never making a strict documentary. It was a film, carefully crafted with deliberate and remarkable style. What still amazes me is that gullible viewers (who wrote to me), or even some critics, assume that _The White Diamond_ is a documentary that attempts to portray factual truth. That is why I don't think my exposition of such truths is necessarily useful, i.e., I have accepted any necessary misrepresentation (or distortion), in the same way that a portrait by (say) Picasso, Jan van Eyck or Hieronymus Bosch is not a photographic likeness of anyone." (Abbas Kiarostami's version: "Every filmmaker has his own interpretation of reality, which makes every filmmaker a liar. But these lies serve to express a kind of profound human truth." Even simpler, from Fellini: "Fiction may have a greater truth than everyday, obvious reality.")
Dorrington's comments lead to thoughts about a concept that appears throughout this book, most emphatically in Chapter 9. Werner's attack on what he calls "cinéma-vérité" requires an elaboration. He frequently uses the term – always disparagingly – and it lies at the heart of his Minnesota Declaration (see p. 476), so it is worth introducing three interlocking ideas. First, film theory, in its many renderings, has never been Werner's thing, and he readily admits to a lack of interest in cinephilia, so there is no good reason why he would know the differences between _cinéma-vérité_ and Direct Cinema. The former evolved in the fifties in France and necessarily involved a level of intrusion by filmmakers – who had no compunction about making clear their presence – in whatever was being recorded. The latter is a form of non-fiction cinema that emerged not long afterwards in North America, whereby inconspicuous and unobtrusive cameramen were more or less forbidden to interfere with the supposed actuality they were faced with, where events were not to be altered for the sake of the film (no voiceover, no re-enactments, nothing staged, etc.). In simplified terms, it's the difference between instigating something and capturing it by chance. Worth pondering is the notion that Werner's criticisms of _cinéma-vérité_ ("a malady, an endless reproduction of facts") make more sense when aimed at Direct Cinema. _Vérité_ filmmakers, wrote James Blue in 1965, "intervene, probe, interview, provoke situations that might suddenly reveal something. There is an attempt to obtain from the subject a kind of creative participation." In other words, more or less what Herzog does with what he calls his "manipulations." He even hails _Les maîtres fous,_ by pre-eminent _vérité_ practitioner Jean Rouch – who always brought some layer of calculated artifice to his work – as one of his favourite films. For Rouch, the camera was a catalyst, "an incredible stimulant for the observed as well as the observer."
Second, when it comes to this kind of non-fiction filmmaking, the word "truth" is a red herring, and always has been. If the poetry of Direct Cinema (or _cinéma-vérité_ , or whatever you choose to call it) seems to appear by passing chance, it is an affirmation of the filmmakers' artfulness. Direct Cinema – albeit often sociologically framed, in the tradition of reportage – was masterfully, deliberately produced in such a way as to penetrate what Werner would name the "deeper truth." Even when the cameramen filmed quotidian reality, their work was anything but the fly's view from the wall. There was always an active point of view, though all to the good if people believed this was "reality" up there on the screen. The best of the classic Direct Cinema films, if a touch less imaginative and "ecstatic," if occasionally populated by characters more humdrum than Herzog's and usually not quite so rehearsed, are no less truthful. The virtuosos of all forms of documentary cinema seek to draw audiences' attention to particular details (through camerawork and editing, as they subjectively reorder material to meet the demands of the film), rarely claiming objectivity or outright truth. They don't deny having interpreted events around them in varying degrees when they deem it necessary by exercising control, projecting themselves, creating a structure, imposing a "theme," all without compromising the integrity of the footage. "We express ourselves in an indirect fashion by expressing ourselves through what we find to be interesting around ourselves," explained Direct Cinema cameraman Al Maysles in 1971. If Emerson was right when he told us that "Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures," on closer examination there isn't much of a philosophical divide between Werner's "ecstatic" filmmaking and the foundational works of Direct Cinema, whose directors left a somewhat lighter mark on their end result – one not so fanciful or glaringly apparent – than Werner does on his.
Third, Herzog's Minnesota Declaration isn't to be taken as gospel. It's more a provocation than anything else. He knows full well there is no such thing as absolute transparency in non-fiction cinema, that a truly neutral image doesn't exist, that only the surveillance cameras record objectively and impassively. The point is that Werner doesn't dismiss _vérité_ out of hand so much as use it as what Guido Vitiello describes as "a rhetorical device for establishing his own poetics by contrast." For Herzog, it is an instrument of combat that allows him to position himself and define his approach within a sea of verisimilitude-obsessed bilge. (He isn't alone here. " _Cinéma-vérité_ " is a term of convenience that lacks any nuance and doesn't begin to speak to the variety of film practices it encapsulates.) For Werner, that collection of twelve aphorisms, first articulated in 1999 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis before an enthusiastic audience, remains a way of mobilising support against the meretricious product being pumped out in every direction, those heinous crimes – indiscreet reality shows, pious and "unflinching" save-the-world rants, dreary talking heads, pseudo-anthropological didacticisms, sanctimonious and pre-digested feel-good weep fests ("the impossible triumph of the human spirit"), tawdry reconstructions, noxious filler between television commercials and/or film-festival parties (David Mamet calls it "the cheetah overpowering the same old antelope") – committed in _cinéma-vérité'_ s name by those preoccupied more with facts than "truth," for whom veracity is obtainable only through the most conventional means. You other filmmakers out there, willing to do the hard work, Herzog admonishes, don't turn a blind eye. Push back.
Considering that on the opening and closing pages of this book we are told he doesn't consider filmmaking a "real profession" and looks upon his job "with great suspicion," Werner has weathered the past fifty years with grace and skill. I respect him – recalcitrant by nature, an unyielding opponent of sacred cows – in equal measure for his individuality, grace, candour, fortitude, natural authority, apparent effortlessness, discipline, tolerance, joyousness, single-mindedness, adaptability, plain-spokenness, unpretentiousness, practical sensibility and what Lotte Eisner called "visionary vehemence." There is no complacency, self-pity, torpor, abstruseness and diffidence in Herzog's world. Hats off to the uncompromising Werner also for the fact that it's a point of pride for him that he has no office, personal assistant or secretary, that his inbox always runneth over, that he does it all himself. He has always been out there working hard, with the required confidence, even if the eyes of the entire crowd were fixed on players at the other end of the pitch. I applaud his thoughts on conceptual art, the preponderance of indiscretion, bicycle helmets and hand sanitizers, his acceptance of the personal sacrifice that filmmaking necessarily involves, his (misplaced) fear of outliving his welcome as a filmmaker, his deep love of Bavaria, his dismay at how too many of us seek insulation from adversity. He's good company too, these days happy with himself. Werner is stoical, but also sentimental. Bruce Chatwin's description is on the button: "immensely tough, yet vulnerable, affectionate and remote, austere and sensual."
Herzog would never dream of displaying the multitude of awards accumulated over the years proudly on his mantelpiece. He knows the value of the never-ending search for novelty, even if he is someone who will sit in silence for as long as it takes, who appreciates the peace and quiet of home life, of "an easy chair with a cup of tea," who deletes unlistened-to phone messages when there are too many to handle ("Everything of importance eventually reaches me anyway"). He is principled too, a man of his word. In 1984, cameraman Ed Lachman said that "Werner once told me that if he said he'd be at a certain place on a certain street and on a certain day in 1990, he'd be there." Admiration also flows in the direction of Herzog for moving so effortlessly between fiction and non-fiction, and as the entrepreneurial film producer for having maintained financial control of almost the entirety of his body of work. Herzog the _kinosoldat_ is unshakable, forceful but not strident, able to withstand it all, bowing only when he chooses to. While at work on this book, Werner explained he wanted something done a particular way. I suggested to him that "the publisher doesn't usually do that." He absorbed what I told him, paused, then said softly, "I'm not interested in how things are usually done. I want it done _this_ way."
I thank Werner for his time on _A Guide for the Perplexed,_ which inevitably means less to him than any one of his films. "As someone who has given literally thousands of interviews over the years, as well as filmed many conversations for my own films," he told me, "it has been forever clear to me that journalists who rely on tape recorders inevitably get the story wrong, but those who sit, listening carefully, writing down the odd word, taking in the bigger picture, have a better chance of getting the story right." I do have hours of recordings that document some of my time with Herzog, but he is nonetheless tolerant of this book, even if he feels – probably correctly – that its tone sometimes fails to capture his true self with enough precision. "Too verbose," was the frequent charge Werner laid on the book. He immediately knew what was important. The chat-show-like elements – the boring, flippant, vague bits – were removed, a blade taken to the overwritten passages, certain "overcooked" ideas, those where Werner "endlessly pontificated," scaled back.
Years ago, shortly before publication of the first edition, as Werner ploughed through a rough draft, he actually made it quite clear he had regretted ever agreeing to co-operate. This is, after all, someone who by his own admission lives with as little introspection as possible, who would rather embark on a thorough exploration of the world's jungles, deserts, fields, cities and mountains than look inside. ("Oceans have always eluded me, both in life and in my films, even if I can appreciate them and even if I feel I understand men of the sea.") Fortunately, Werner considered this second edition respectable enough to give considerable time to, including twelve intense days as we refined the manuscript together, working through it line by line, reaching for the thesaurus, chuckling at the possibilities, reading entire chapters out loud to each other. I particularly appreciated the moment when, before one of our final meetings, Werner opted out of pain relief during a trip to the dentist so he could be clear-headed during an afternoon session.
I am often asked how I met Werner, so please permit an aside, concerned with how I came to edit this book, which is itself a representation of the themes it expounds. If _A Guide for the Perplexed_ is a roundabout treatise on how to spark dormant curiosities we never knew we had, immobilise evil forces forever raining down on the filmmaking process, neutralise the surrounding stupidity, clear the decks, wrench from the deepest recesses the requisite courage, flush away all obstacles (internal as well as physical), reclaim dignity (or, at least, adjust to there being none), accept the hardships, stomach the dejection and angst, counteract the self-doubt, brush yourself off after the kicks and slaps, and just get down to work, then it's the best example in my life. Time spent on work you believe in is never wasted.
I first became aware of Herzog at a screening of _The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner_ and _La Soufrière_ at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. I was about sixteen years old and remember feeling that these were some of the most intriguing films I had yet encountered. My interest in Herzog was sealed when (sitting behind Susan Sontag and Wallace Shawn) I saw _Lessons of Darkness_ at the Film Forum in downtown New York. Years later I found myself up against a wall, so wrote a hubris-packed letter to Walter Donohue – who still handles film books at Faber and Faber – explaining I had something to offer. At the time I was assisting Ray Carney with his _Cassavetes on Cassavetes,_ doing research in European archives and offering French translations, so had minor credentials and a flimsy connection to Faber. Walter called me, explaining that his second-in-command was about to leave for the Cannes Film Festival, and suggesting I spend unpaid time at the Faber office and see the operation from the inside. Less than a week later I was in the office of the man who might give the go-ahead to the one book I knew I wanted to do and felt the world needed to read. (There was a gaping and – as far as I could determine – inexplicable gap on bookshop shelves between Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock.) I turn to that other Herzog – Mr Bellow's – for as concise an explanation as possible of my reasoning behind what has turned into years of work: I was (and remain) "overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify." And to put it all in one place.
After a week of answering phones amidst the stimulating, sedate atmosphere of Faber's Queen Square office, I asked Walter why _Herzog on Herzog_ didn't exist. It seemed a natural fit in their interview-book series. Walter told me he had received various proposals over the years but hadn't liked the approaches they had taken, suggesting they had been too academically orientated. I asked if I could do the book. Walter told me to put my ideas down on paper and he would take them to the editorial board. Word soon came down: move ahead with the project. Now all I had to do was persuade Herzog. I went home, wrote a short letter and faxed it to his office in Munich. A week later a reply arrived: "I have never circled around my own work. I do not like to do self-scrutiny. I do look into the mirror in order to shave without cutting myself, but I do not know the color of my eyes. I do not want to assist in a book on me. There will be no _Herzog on Herzog_." I reached for my original letter, which turned out to be overly formal and uptight. My next one, considerably longer, laid out, in simple, emotive terms, who I was and why this was a worthy project, adding that I felt the final result would surely find an appreciative audience. A few days later a fax arrived. "Thank you very much for your good letter which puts you as a person in a new and different perspective," Werner wrote. "I will be in London in September. This seems to be the best opportunity to meet and talk things over."
I tell you all this, dear reader, because – at the risk of sounding like a cheap self-help guru – it's worth sticking to your guns, pursuing what you want, taking that leap of faith. I could easily have junked the entire project after receiving that first fax, but instead stuck with it. Werner is the first person I ever interviewed, but for some reason I felt I could make it work. The result is, I believe, the straight dope, a volume of uncluttered prose, not unlike Herzog's films. "My stories are never deeply complicated and intellectual," he explains. "Children everywhere can understand them."
Nothing is imprecise in Herzog's world. The characters in his films might occupy liminal positions, but Werner – an intensely instinctive filmmaker – never does. He does nothing by half. In the poetic _Conquest of the Useless_ , we find this: "If I were to die, I would be doing nothing but dying." He frequently took me to task when it came to my working methods, insisting it was all becoming stale ("When will the book be ready? Do the five-day version. It needs life! Leave the gaps in it, leave it porous. Shake the structure out and write it. Let's get the motherfucker over and done with") and accusing me of being an "endless fiddler" (guilty as charged). The line from Preston Sturges's _Unfaithfully Yours_ was written about him: "If you ever want anything done, always ask the busy man. The others never have time."
There is lucidity in this book, there is a wonderful stubbornness and iron determination, there is conviction, compulsion and some obstinacy, there is a crystal-clear understanding of priorities, there is perhaps hyperbole. It is all apodictically (one of Werner's favourite words) not stale. Even if it probably contains a few benign contradictions, I have great confidence in this book, which is the result of someone exercising his daunting powers of storytelling. _A Guide for the Perplexed_ is, as Herb Golder once told me, "Werner on everything, from outer space to our inner lives." A friend of mine describes it as "a truly passionate encounter, like an absorbing conversation that you stumble across in the back room of a party, where real ideas and personalities are being laid bare, away from all the noise and pretentious prattle in the kitchen." While sleepless nights and being mired in duplicity (Going Rogue) became the norm over the years, a creeping and burdensome sense of responsibility caught up with me. The decade-long chase – which invited persuasive trips to Sachrang, Neuschwanstein and Skellig – provided a hearty, rewarding challenge. Fortunately it's been that long, as things are only now starting to make sense. The immersion has confirmed two things: first, exploring Herzog's body of work has served as an object lesson in how lifeless and superficial the interpretive/theoretical approach too often is, how so many resort to the pointless rehash. Second, it's downhill from here for me. As someone who on occasion interviews people of cinema, Werner is the top of the pile. The raw material doesn't get any better.
Since the first version of this book appeared, a desire emerged to make it a thing in itself, not just commentary. As such, its contents have been rewritten/augmented with – wrote Moses Maimonides of his similarly titled tome – "great exactness and exceeding precision, and with care to avoid failing to explain any obscure point." The interview here has been consciously inflected in certain ways, carefully pushed in various directions, coloured with specific ideas. Everything in its proper place. Structure, rhythm and tempo were painstakingly imposed upon the Herzog in these pages, after the fact, with Werner's words edited into single, often lengthy responses to prompts and questions that were, for the most part, written afterwards. ("You should let the readers know this. I sound so talkative in the book, but I'm really not that garrulous.") Take this portrait of an individual, this carefully calibrated provocation, with the caution it deserves. This official version is no less of a construct than any of the multitude of Herzogs that populate cyberspace and elsewhere, those complementing and competing "doppelgängers," as Werner calls them. There was no other way of presenting this much material so efficiently.
The notion of "perplexity" has been vaguely appropriated from Maimonides – Jewish philosopher, physician, mathematician, astronomer and mystic. Writing in the twelfth century, Maimonides addressed his tome to those respectful of science but struggling to balance that knowledge with a devotion to divine law, metaphysical beliefs and "profound mysteries." Within his book, wrote Maimonides, are solutions to the big issue of his age: the problem of religion, which is "a source of anxiety to all intelligent men." Werner's attempts to address more contemporary concerns and answer the sharp questions that today hang in the air are documented below. How, for example, to put food on the table when a desire for self-expression is so overwhelming? Is individuality possible in such a homogenised world? Can the requisite tenacity and steadfastness be mustered when confrontations with unfavourable odds inevitably occur? How exactly do you hypnotise a chicken? By chronicling so clearly his own liberation from the impediments and strictures of our culture; by showing how to transcend the bankrupt world into which we are sinking, one choked with anti-intellectualism, cynicism, consumerism, fear, cowardice, vulgarity, extremism, laziness and narcissism; by articulating an untrammelled and distilled commentary on life and cinema, Herzog – our persistent, knowing and sceptical guide, his anarchic streak glowing – offers tough-love wisdom to bewildered doubters everywhere, those intimidated by the uncontrollable waves of information washing over humanity, caught in the violent seas of indifference that this godless, technology-ridden, semi-literate age has wrought.
Werner's thoughts in his _Guide for the Perplexed_ are part of a decades-long outpouring, a response to the clarion call, to the fervent requests for guidance. He presents us with his personal ethos, talks of himself and his work, and by so doing – by laying bare his pragmatism and righteousness – offers support and reinforcement, assisting each of us in the construction of our own personalised bastion. Herzog the wayfarer is a dynamic and open-minded chaperone on the path, accessible to all. He is the honest showman providing us with something like an instruction manual, with tools for living, a much-needed shot in the arm, a map to the resting point. To paraphrase Maimonides: those readers who have not studied cinema will still derive profit from many a chapter, but those who attempt creative and imaginative endeavours of any kind will surely derive benefit from every chapter. How greatly will he rejoice! How agreeably will these words strike his ears! Let the truth and right by which you are apparently the loser be preferable to you to the falsehood and wrong by which you are apparently the gainer.
The conversations in _A Guide to the Perplexed_ take a chronological approach, with each film – from _A Lost Western_ (1957) to _From One Second to the Next_ (2013) – discussed in turn. Interjections have been kept to a minimum (there was never any "systematic questionnaire" or "long list of intricate questions" brought to bear, to quote Truffaut on his work with Hitchcock), and are presented as stepping stones more than anything else. (Wanting to listen to your own voice can be a deadly trait in an interviewer.) Conscious of the fact that there are few people who have seen every Herzog film, the interview is presented in such a way that even when the reader hasn't seen the work under discussion, there will still hopefully be something immediate and tangible to appreciate.
Towards the end of this volume, readers will find a selection (made, initially, by me) of images drawn primarily from Herzog's archive at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, new translations of his poetry (originally published in 1978), a journal written in 1982 during his walk around Germany, the legendary "The Minnesota Declaration" from 1999, and Herb Golder's "Shooting on the Lam" (extracted and edited from an unpublished book-length manuscript), from which we learn that filmmakers with an intellect are able to fortify, educate and invigorate in ways that institutionalised theorists and academics, in thrall to obfuscating sensibilities, can only dream about. This essay – which says more in a few pages than most pieces about Herzog's films fail to say in a hundred – serves as a bulwark against theoretical utterances about the films.
Take it with a pinch of salt and don't be one of those who ignore the self-mockery and humour Werner's films and interviews are full of (one reason to search out some of the many readily available recordings of him). How best to transcribe the following with the playfully sardonic tone with which it was told? "I once had a public discussion with the diminutive Agnès Varda, who seemed to take offence at my postulation that a filmmaker, rather than having this or that quality, should be able to clear his or her own height. She didn't like that very much." Herb Golder recalls the production of _Wings of Hope_ and _My Best Fiend:_ "I remember a particularly gruesome species of tree we often encountered in the Amazon whose entire trunk was covered in thorns the size of small spikes." Remarked Werner: "Let the tree-huggers try this one."
This book is dedicated to the memory of a true _mensch_ , Werner's friend ("The Last Lion") and mine too, a man who lived for great purpose, restless and always on guard, able to perceive the enemy and explain it to us, forever in search of fresh forms of visual expression, who urged us to keep our eyes on and minds alert to the complexities and banalities exploding around us, eternally willing to offer support to anyone seeking to heighten awareness and extend the borders of the possible, who inspired and galvanised generations of filmmakers and cineastes, who never made inferences from insufficient data, who – with creativity and rectitude – sought unfailingly to mould public taste and facilitate a shift in consciousness, who favoured knowledge over information: Amos Vogel, "one of the most profound connoisseurs of the cinema, endowed with an unerring instinct for new talents," as Werner once wrote of his mentor. I miss his resilience, being able to peruse his bounteous library, hearing the clicks of those five-drawer filing cabinets and exploring the wonders within, and the strolls through Washington Square Park with my surrogate grandfather. Long may his ideas burn through society, dissolving what needs to be eradicated, devoured by those agitated rogues in search of adequate imagery who refuse to avert their eyes.
Now be a man and quit that moody brooding.
Paul Cronin
New York
February 2014
* Herzog's favourite British player of all time: Bobby Charlton, "a genius who brought football back to its basic simplicity." Glenn Hoddle – "an earthquake in a stadium" – comes a close second.
† Translated by Martina Lauster. From "Mit den Wölfen Heulen" (see Bibliography, p. 496).
Facing the stark alternative to see a book on me compiled from dusty interviews with all the wild distortions and lies, or collaborating – I choose the much worse option: to collaborate.
Werner Herzog
Los Angeles
February 2002
# The Shower Curtain
_Before we start, can you offer any general insights for your readers so they might sleep easier at night?_
Let me say this, something for human beings everywhere, whether they be filmmakers or otherwise. I can answer your question only by quoting hotel mogul Conrad Hilton, who was once asked what he would like to pass on to posterity. "Whenever you take a shower," he said, "always make sure the curtain is inside the tub." I sit here and recommend the same. Never forget the shower curtain.
_When did you realise that filmmaking was something you were going to spend your life doing?_
From the moment I could think independently. Unlike most people, I didn't have the privilege to choose my profession. I didn't even ask myself whether I could do it, I just pushed on with things. This became clear to me within a few dramatic months at the age of fourteen, when I began to travel on foot and converted to the Catholic faith. It was my first real escape from home life. My father – a militant atheist – was furious, though my mother seemed to think I did it only because the local priest played football. I was fascinated by the historical tradition of Catholicism and its attention to ritual, and intrigued about how so much Bavarian folklore was rooted in religion. The Calvinistic rigour and austerity of Christianity never attracted me; I was always drawn to its more exuberant and baroque elements. If I had grown up in the north of Germany, where almost everyone was Protestant, perhaps I would have been more interested in that denomination instead.
I wanted to go to Albania, which at the time was a mysterious country closed off to the rest of the world and controlled with an iron fist by hardcore Maoists who wouldn't allow anyone in. I went instead, by foot, as far as the Adriatic, keeping close to the Albanian/Yugoslavian frontier, maybe a couple of hundred feet at most; I never dared try and enter Albania. On several occasions I travelled by foot to northern Germany and a couple of times got caught out, in the freezing cold, several miles from the nearest town. I was always able to open up one of the nearby holiday chalets using the few lock-picking tools I had with me, and eventually became quite adept at getting into these places without leaving a trace. They were often full of excellent wines, and I would sometimes finish a crossword puzzle. Before leaving I would make the bed and clean up like a good Boy Scout, even leaving a thank-you note. One time I was asleep when suddenly the house was full of light and I heard voices downstairs. I climbed out of the window and leapt onto the garage roof, where a family was unloading their car. Everything in the garage stopped when I thumped down, and I heard a woman's voice say, "That must be the cat." In such weather conditions, taking shelter in these homes was a natural right, and if the police had discovered me I'm sure all they would have done was give me a mug of hot tea. I would never pay for the wine, though, and from there it was a small step into filmmaking, which to this day I have problems seeing as a real profession.
_What do you mean, "a real profession"?_
I don't take myself too seriously, and at my age should probably find more dignified work than filmmaking. At the same time, cinema has made a stronger impression upon us than any other form of imagery ever invented. Films contain the most intensive chronicle of the human condition, just as painting used to have such high standing. Most people wouldn't be able to name the most important Dutch writers of the seventeenth century, but they know several Dutch artists of that period. Just as during the high Middle Ages architecture had some kind of privileged status, in years to come we will look to cinema as the most coherent representation of society, of our achievements and failures, in the twentieth century.
_Talk more about this period of organised religion._
Many adolescents of that age have instances of momentous decision-making, when something explodes with energy inside of them, though perhaps not with the intensity I experienced. There was a dramatic condensation of everything in my life at the time and a need to connect to something sublime, but my interest in religion dissipated and dwindled away fairly quickly. I left it behind without even noticing, after which came a period of radical disinterest in God – a feeling that might still be with me. I remember feeling furious at the nonsensical nature of the universe and its flaws that seem to have been built into the fabric of things from the very start, at the fact that every one of the creatures who live in the jungles and oceans and mountains of the world don't care about us one bit. Religion is clearly an important part of our inner being. It offers consolation to many people and has a certain value to the human race, so I would never dismiss it out of hand, and having been baptised – which according to the dogma of the Catholic Church is an indelible mark on my soul – I will always be a Catholic. But ever since my close encounter with organised religion I have known it isn't for me, though to this day there is something of a religious echo in my work. The scientific basis of reality will always be more important. There should never be an ideology standing between us and our understanding of the planet. The facts are facts.
I should note here my admiration for the early Christian Stylites, who would perch atop a pillar, stubbornly refusing to come down for years. It's the ultimate form of exile and solitude. There were cases of two of them screaming from pillar to pillar, each accusing the other of being a heretic. Sometimes I envy people able to find consolation in religion.
_What do you mean by "sublime"?_
Start with its Latin origin: _sublimus_ , meaning uplifted, lofty or elevated. A door has a threshold down below and a raised lintel, the horizontal support overhead. It is elevated above us as we walk through the door. It is beyond us and outside us and larger than us, yet not wholly abstract or foreign.
_Do you believe in God?_
"I cannot imagine that God created everything out of nothing," says Kaspar Hauser. If he does exist, I'm content to think of God as being as foolish, confused, contradictory and disorientated as man. As for the Devil, I believe in stupidity, which is as bad as it gets.
_You travel constantly._
It isn't easy to explain why I shoot films so far from home, but I do know that a healthy imagination needs space; the great works of cinema weren't made while standing at the kitchen sink. For me, every film is a ticket into the world and the business of living. What I'm looking for is an unspoilt, humane spot for man to exist, an area worthy of human beings where a dignified life can be led, something alluded to in my films. In _Fitzcarraldo_ , Huerequeque recounts that the forest natives have been wandering for three hundred years, one generation after another, in search of a place where there is neither sorrow nor pain. For Ingmar Bergman, the starting point of a film seems to be the human face, usually that of a woman. For me, it's a physical landscape, whether a real or imaginary or hallucinatory one. I know that by staying in one place I'll never find what I'm looking for. The search is unremitting. In _Incident at Loch Ness_ you see my wife – who is from Siberia – and me sitting quietly. It's a Russian custom. Before you go on a trip, after all the running around and packing, stop for a moment so you leave from a point of complete stillness. It makes for a safe and pleasant journey.
Even before officially leaving school in Germany, I spent a few months in Manchester because my first real girlfriend had moved to the city, where she was studying English. I followed a few weeks later with a little money, and bought a run-down house in the slums of the city together with a handful of people from Bengal and Nigeria. I paid my share and had a room, where I lived with my girlfriend. It was one of those nineteenth-century terrace houses; the backyard was strewn with debris and garbage, and the house was full of mice. Manchester is where I picked up a lot of English, on the streets talking to the locals. I didn't have a job, and one time, out of curiosity, joined my girlfriend in class. The chubby teacher made every student repeat – in unison, ten times – a single sentence, which to this day is engraved on my mind: "He mumbled and grumbled because he was troubled." At that point I fled.
In 1961, at the age of nineteen, after my final school exams, I met some people transporting used trucks from Munich down to Athens and the island of Crete. I invested what little money I had in a share of one of these vehicles, and made some cash by joining a small convoy. From Crete I took a boat to Alexandria in Egypt, with the intention of travelling to the former Belgian Congo. I never made it, which I'm eternally glad about. I later learnt that of those who had reached the eastern Congolese provinces at the time, almost all perished. Congo had just won its independence, and the deepest anarchy and darkest violence immediately set in. Every trace of civilisation disappeared, every form of organisation and security was gone, and there was a return to tribalism and cannibalism. I'm fascinated by the notion of civilisation as a thin layer of ice resting upon a deep ocean of darkness and chaos, and by observing Africa hoped to better understand the origins of Nazism in Germany, how it could have happened that the country lost every trace of civilisation in the course of only a few years. To all appearances Germany was a civilised, stable nation, with a great tradition in many fields – philosophy, mathematics, literature and music – when suddenly, during the era of the Third Reich, everything overwhelmingly dangerous in the country was brought out into the open. Strange that at the centre of Europe is a nation that, deep in its heart, is still barbarian.
_Where did you go after Alexandria?_
Along the Nile to Sudan, but on the way to Juba, not far from eastern Congo, I became very sick. I knew to survive I had to get back home as quickly as possible, and luckily made it up to Aswan, where the dam was still under construction. The Russians had built the concrete foundations, and there were German engineers working on the electrical intestines. I don't know how long it was after I took refuge in a tool shed that I was discovered. I had a serious fever and have only blurred recollections, though I do recall endlessly sorting out my small number of possessions and placing them carefully into my duffel bag, as if I were putting my affairs in order. I was hallucinating about being eaten by a shark, and when I awoke discovered that rats had bitten me on my elbow and armpit. Apparently they wanted to use the wool from my sweater for a nest, because when I stretched out I discovered a huge hole. One rat bit me on the cheek before scurrying away into a corner. The wound didn't heal for many weeks. I still have the scar.
Eventually I made it back to Germany, where I made my first couple of films. Once in a while I showed up at Munich University, where I was supposed to be studying history and literature, but I can't claim to have been very serious about it all; I maintained my student status mainly because it enabled me to buy inexpensive train tickets. I did, however, very much appreciate listening to one professor, Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, who taught German literature and had an extraordinarily lively intelligence. I was immediately aware of the precision with which she applied certain ideas to these texts. Her classes – where she spoke about writers like Georg Büchner – were so demanding that I was rarely able to follow them for very long. She told me about the time she travelled to the Black Forest and met with Heidegger, to whom she wanted to pose a series of detailed and intricate philosophical questions, but all Heidegger wanted to do was walk with her through the forest and discuss mushrooms. Although I was only in my first year as an undergraduate, Professor Strohschneider-Kohrs invited me into a postgraduate seminar, and suggested I do a doctorate under her supervision, but she moved to Bochum University and I would have had to follow her there. The truth is, I hadn't the faintest idea what I would have done with a doctorate. Anyway, I've always been more interested in teaching myself. If I want to explore something, I never think about attending a class; I do the reading on my own or seek out experts for conversations. Everything we're forced to learn at school we quickly forget, but the things we set out to learn ourselves – to quench a thirst – are never forgotten, and inevitably become an important part of our existence.
_How did your parents react to your plans to become a filmmaker?_
We should speak primarily of my mother because my father was rarely around. I never knew him very well, and he played only a small role in my childhood.
My mother, Elizabeth, was a biologist with a doctorate who had studied with Karl von Frisch. She and my father met when they were both students at university in Vienna. My paternal grandfather's house was full of books, but we weren't there very often; I never really explored his library and didn't grow up in a particularly intellectual household. Raising three boys on her own in West Germany and having been somewhat left behind by the _Wirtschaftswunder_ ["economic miracle"] because her Austrian qualifications weren't recognised, my mother was obliged to become a very down-to-earth and practical woman. For a time she worked as a cleaning lady, and to this day, at any moment if needed, I would have no problem sweeping streets to earn a crust. My mother – who divorced my father in 1948 – remains the most courageous and adventurous person I have ever met. At the age of seventy she started to learn Turkish because she had friends in Munich who spoke very little German, and even took trips to eastern Anatolia.
When it came to filmmaking, she took a sensible approach, trying to give me a realistic idea of what I was getting myself into and what might be a wise move. She explained what was going on economically in West Germany, and in her letters asked me to think carefully about my future. "It's too bad we never talked about it in detail," she wrote. But my mother was always supportive and never tried to guide or coach me into a career or profession. She wouldn't know where I was when I ran away and disappeared for weeks at a time, but sensing I would be gone for a while, realising I was one of those who shouldn't be kept in school indefinitely, she would immediately write a letter to my school saying I had pneumonia. I always felt a stranger there because, compared to my classmates, I had other goals and interests. I distrusted the textbooks given to us, and when it came to mathematics questioned the solutions offered to basic formulae. Wasn't it possible that someone would eventually come up with a different way of doing things? Though teaching is undoubtedly a noble profession, I never felt comfortable in school and have never trusted teachers. In fact, I hated school with such intensity that I hatched a plan to burn the place to the ground one night, though never followed through with it. When I think back, perhaps the one important thing I got from school was during history class, when we often read primary sources, not textbooks. To this day I wouldn't trust a book on a particular subject written long after the events in question. I still have on a bookshelf my childhood copy of _The Odyssey,_ in ancient Greek, full of scribbled pencil annotations.
In August 1961, my mother sent me two letters – on consecutive days – that I received when I was on Crete. In them she wrote that my father was anxious to dissuade me from becoming a film director. Before leaving Munich I apparently made some pronouncements that upon my return I was going to do just that. At the age of about fourteen I started writing screenplays and submitting proposals to producers and television stations. In her letters, my mother tried to convince me to return to Germany from Crete so I could start an apprenticeship in a photographer's lab, which she thought would be a good prospect for me. For her, the rush was on; I had to get back by September so as not to miss another year. She had spoken to an employment expert who told her filmmaking was a difficult profession to break into and that because I had only high-school exams I should start in a lab; he said this would be the basis of becoming an assistant director in a film company. I clearly had something else in mind and couldn't be persuaded. A few years later my mother set about assembling every article, review and interview about my films she could find, and pasted everything into a series of huge scrapbooks that for years sat on a bottom shelf, collecting dust, in my Munich office. It was partly because she was proud, but also because she could see I was never going to collect such things myself. She told me I might need them one day.
German women of my mother's generation were grandiose. In 1945, at the end of the war, they rolled up their sleeves, cleared away the rubble and began rebuilding. My mother was no exception; she always guided us children by setting a good example. One day my brother and I bought a motorcycle, and after a series of minor accidents – at least one a week – she casually stubbed out her cigarette and said, "I think you should get rid of your motorcycle because I just got rid of my last cigarette." The following week we sold it, and though she had smoked for many years, my mother never smoked again. For a short time in the early days she thought the Nazis were a force for good in Germany, perhaps because she had grown up in Vienna, born into a military family of nationalists from Croatia – a country with a strong tradition of fighting for its identity – and in her youth had been political herself. Two of her relatives were apparently involved in the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in Marseilles in 1934, and she was briefly in prison herself before the war. In 1933, the year Hitler assumed power, many people were deeply connected to their sense of national identity, probably more than they are today, and this impetus for independence occasionally morphed into support for fascism. My paternal grandmother was different. Although I never discussed politics with her, it was obvious she didn't care for Hitler at all. She thought he was a buffoon, that there was something not quite right about him.
Dietrich, my father, was of French Huguenot descent, also with a PhD in biology. He had fought in the war, though I don't think he ever saw combat, and was held captive in France for nearly two years. He was a walking encyclopaedia and could speak several languages, including Japanese and some Arabic, but was forever trying to dodge his responsibilities. He refused ever to involve himself in even the slightest productive work and would often talk about a vast, universal scientific theory he was working on. He maintained that one day it would be finished, though we all knew he hadn't written a thing. His insistence that it had to be completed conveniently meant he could avoid getting a real job to earn a living and support his family, so it was forever up to my mother to take charge and look after everyone. One time, while he was ranting about this mammoth text, I touched his shoulder and said, "But you haven't written anything." He looked at me and somehow acknowledged I was right, but five minutes later was raving about his non-existent book again. It took years for my father to be convinced of the catastrophic impact the Nazi regime had on Germany, though I think for him it was partly a question of cultural supremacy. Lots of English words entered the language after the war thanks to the American Forces Network radio. American culture became a major part of German life, but my father looked back to seemingly better times. Over the years I have learnt from his deficiencies, about how not to be a father. Even at the time I knew it was a blessing he wasn't around when I was growing up.
_You came of age during the reconstruction of post-war Germany._
A couple of days after I was born, in September 1942, the house next door to us in Munich was destroyed by a bomb and our place was damaged. We were lucky to get out alive. Apparently my mother found me in my cradle, covered with debris and glass shards, but unhurt. She moved my older brother and me out of the city to Sachrang, a small, remote mountain village less than a mile from the German–Austrian border, about an hour's drive from Munich and surrounded by forests, like something out of a fairy tale. We stayed there for the next eleven years before moving back to Munich. The Kaisergebirge in the Austrian Tyrol and around Sachrang were one of the last pockets of resistance in Germany at the end of the war. At that time the Werewolves – the fanatical SS troops of the Third Reich who led the last-gasp resistance against the Allies – were on the run and passed through the village, hiding their weapons and uniforms under the farmers' hay before grabbing civilians' clothes and taking refuge in the mountains. One night a man sat in front of a raging fire at the creek behind our house, his eyes and face reflecting the flames. I was aware of the dividing line between Germany and Austria because my mother would often take my brother and me across to Wildbichl in Austria; she used the two of us to help smuggle back home various things not so easily found on our side of the border. She would use sand to clean the pans and dishes, so one time for her birthday my brother and I filled a large sack with sand from a nearby riverbed and gave it to her as a gift. It took us nearly a day to carry it back to the house because it was so heavy. I don't remember ever seeing her so happy.
Parsifal is a character I understand because as a child I had no knowledge of the outside world; we were totally disconnected. On our way to school in the village we had to cross a forest that I was convinced was haunted by witches. Even today, when I pass this spot, I still get the feeling there is something eerie about it. Sachrang was such an isolated place at the time that I didn't know what a banana was until I was twelve, and I didn't make my first telephone call until the age of seventeen. A car was an absolute sensation; we would all sprint after it just to look at the thing, and there is still something exciting to me about watching hundreds of vehicles swishing around on a system of interconnected freeways. I have always felt most comfortable in remote mountains, and part of me has never really adjusted to modern technology; I jump whenever the telephone rings. Our house had no running water or proper mattresses, so my mother would stuff dried ferns into a linen bag for us to lie on; she sewed all our clothes from the thickest material she could find. During the winter months I would awaken to find a layer of ice on my blanket. The outside toilet was frequently covered in snowdrifts, and there was so much snow blocking the front door we had to climb out of the window. Sometimes we went to school on skis. During the summer we children went without shoes for months, wearing nothing but lederhosen.
We were always full of imagination, constantly inventing our own toys. I remember the feeling of flying through the air on the swing attached to the huge tree behind our house. The guns and arms caches we found – remnants of the SS soldiers – became things to play with, and one time we blew up a small sewage pipe with some explosives. I was part of the local gang of about a dozen children, including one girl who we all respected because she was so tough. Together as a group we invented a kind of flat arrow made from beech wood. I didn't know anything about aeronautics but somehow figured out how to make it fly some distance; I would throw this thing with a whip-like action, which made it sail through the air more than 400 feet. After lunch my mother would send my brother and me outside no matter how cold it was – summer or winter – and wouldn't let us back in for several hours. She thought it was good for our constitution. I spent a lot of time alone when I was young, and developed a strong sense of self-reliance.
Everyone thinks growing up in the ruins of the destroyed German cities must have been a terrible experience, and no doubt for parents who lost everything it was, but for us children it was glorious, the most marvellous of times. Munich wasn't as badly destroyed as some other cities in Germany, though there were huge gaps where once had been buildings. Truckloads of debris, headed to the outskirts of the city, where vast mountains of rubble piled up, would pass by our apartment window. We children took over whole bombed-out blocks and discovered the most amazing things in cellars strewn with rubble. The remnants of buildings and factories were our playgrounds where great adventures were acted out. It was a surreal environment, and everyone I know who spent their early years in the ruins of post-war Germany raves about that time. With no fathers to listen to and no rules to follow, it was anarchy in the best sense of the word. We invented everything from scratch.
Some years ago I saw a film comprised entirely of footage shot in Leningrad before, during and after its siege during the Second World War.* Everything appears so peaceful, with no sign of imminent drama. People stroll through the streets, they chat in sidewalk cafes, and children play in parks. Nothing in their faces points to a looming disaster. Then the bombardment starts, followed by mass starvation. Death stalks those very same streets, cafes and parks with unspeakable horror. When I look back on my childhood, it's clear that Europe is currently going through a period of tranquillity rarely seen in human history.
_What are your earliest memories?_
One night my mother wrenched my brother and me out of bed and carried us – one in each arm, wrapped in blankets – up the slope behind our house. In the distance we saw an entire sky pulsating orange and red; it's one of those indelible, unforgettable images of childhood. "I took you out of bed because you must see this," she said to us. "Rosenheim is burning." Rosenheim, which for us was the big city at the end of the world, was being bombed. Sachrang sits in a valley, eight miles from Aschau, where there was a hospital and train station. Beyond that lies Rosenheim, which as a young child was somehow the limit of my universe.† I also have a memory of seeing Our Lord himself, when I was about three years old. It was on _Nikolaustag_ , when the holy St Nicholas appears with a book listing all your misdeeds of the year, accompanied by Krampus, a demon-like figure. I was absolutely terrified, fled under the couch and peed my pants. As if coming to my rescue, the door opened and a man stood there. He was wearing brown overalls and no socks, and his hands were covered with oil. I was sure it was the Lord himself, there to save me from Krampus, but it turned out to be someone from the electricity company who happened to be passing.
When I was five or six I fell quite ill. There was no point in calling an ambulance because we were too deeply snowed in, so my mother wrapped me in blankets, tied me on a sleigh and dragged me through the night to Aschau, where I was admitted to hospital. She visited eight days later, coming on foot through deep snow, and was amazed that I was without complaint. I had pulled a single piece of thread from the blanket on the bed and played with it for all that time. I wasn't bored. This strand was full of stories and fantasies for me.
_Do you ever get bored?_
The word is not in my vocabulary. I astonish my wife by being capable of standing and staring through the window for days at a time. I may look catatonic, but not so inside. Wittgenstein talked about looking through a closed window of a house and seeing a man flailing about strangely. You can't see or hear the violent storms raging outside and don't realise it's taking great effort for this man even to stand on his own two feet. There are hidden storms within us all.
_American soldiers occupied Sachrang at the end of the war._
We lived in one of the last places the occupying American soldiers moved into. The GIs arrived in jeeps with one leg dangling and chewing gum non-stop; I thought it was all the Americans in the whole world. For the first time I saw a black man, and I was completely mesmerised because I had only heard about black people from fairy tales. I ran to my mother and said, "I just saw a pitch-black Moor!" He was a big, wonderful man with a tremendous voice, which I can still hear today. My mother asked how I communicated with him. "We talk in American," I said. He gave me a piece of gum which I kept for a whole year, until my older brother found where I hid it every night and stole it. Another early flash of memory is of the white flags hanging from the windows of the houses in Sachrang. On the day the Americans rolled into town, every house had a white flag or bed sheet on view. This was a sign it was friendly, not resistant to the American occupation and not harbouring Werewolves or Nazis. I remember playing on the balcony of our house and letting this sheet fall to the ground. The scolding we got was particularly intense, like nothing I have ever experienced, which was understandable because our games meant the house could have come under immediate gunfire.
For a time my father worked as a supply officer in the army and sent food packages home whenever he could, but we were constantly hungry and looking for things to eat, forever hanging on our mother's skirt, crying. "Children," she once told us, "if I could cut a piece of flesh from my own ribs, I would." She was constantly searching for food and would sometimes skim the cream from the top of the milk churns when the farmers weren't looking. Anything that helped fill our stomachs. Once the farmers had harvested their nearby fields we would go in and collect the small potatoes they left behind. On the way to school we tried to catch trout in the creek with our bare hands. If we got one, we would put it in a tiny pond near by and pick it up after school. To this day I know the value of food and have always had great respect for whatever is on my plate. One time I stumbled across some workers who had shot a crow and were cooking it in a pot on the side of the road. For the first time in my life I saw fat floating on the surface of a soup; it was a sensation for me. Later I tried to shoot a crow, using one of the sub-machine guns we found in the forest, but I was thrown to the ground by the recoil. I was surprised that my mother wasn't angry. She took me into the forest and shot a single round into a thick beech log, causing splinters to fly out the other side. "This is what you should expect from a gun," she said to me. "You must never point even a toy gun at anybody." I was so stunned by this violence that I was immediately cured of my preoccupation with such things. She showed me how to secure and unload the weapon, telling me I could keep it so long as I learnt how to carry it safely.
_What were you like as a child?_
I was a taciturn and hot-tempered loner, usually withdrawn and known to brood for days on end, after which I would erupt in violent fits of rage. It took me a long time to get my behaviour under control, notably after an unspeakable disaster when I attacked my older brother with a knife. When I was eleven we moved back to Munich, where I learnt to concentrate because the whole family lived together in a single room. There were four of us in this tiny place, everyone doing their own thing. I would lie on my back on the floor reading for hours, no matter how much talking and activity was going on around me. Often I would read all day, incredibly focused, concentrating on my book, and eventually look up to discover everyone else had left hours ago. One of the first books I owned was a copy of _Winnie the Pooh,_ which arrived in an American care package. It's still one of my favourites, and along with cornflour was an excellent way to pull Germany back into the civilised world. Many considered cornflour chicken feed, but my mother was able to fool us by saying it had lots of egg yolk in it, and all of a sudden we found it delicious. Long live the Marshall Plan. All these years later I remain full of gratitude and have held America in high esteem ever since. Later, during my adolescence, the American influence in West Germany was strong, but not for me. I never wore jeans and was never that interested in Elvis, though I did go to see the first of his films released in Munich. In the middle of the screening everyone got up and calmly shook the rows of seats until they came loose from the floor. Eventually the police were called to restore order.
It was my brother Tilbert – who is a little more than a year older than me – who took charge once we moved to Munich. He was very smart, always the leader of the gang and epicentre of mischief. He was thrown out of school after a couple of years and immediately started in business, rising like a comet. At the age of fourteen he became an apprentice at a firm that imported tropical wood, and by sixteen was the primary breadwinner in the family. It was because of him I was able to continue in school, though I would work myself whenever I could. I owe a great deal to Tilbert; even today he remains the boss of the family. My younger brother Lucki is someone with whom I have worked closely over the years. We have different fathers but for me he is a full brother. He had great musical talent as a youngster but quickly realised he wasn't good enough to compete with all the other pianists out there, so he also went into business, also rising quickly through the ranks. I think that shook him up because he quickly took off for Asia, visiting India, Burma, Nepal and Indonesia. I wrote him a letter asking for help making _Aguirre_ , and he crossed the Pacific, making it to Peru to give us much-needed assistance. Eventually Lucki started working with me full time, and for several decades has run my production company. He was always better than me when it comes to the financial aspects of filmmaking.
_Is Herzog your real name?_
It's my father's name. My parents divorced when I was five or six, at which point my legal name became Stipetić, which was my mother's maiden name. I always felt much closer to my mother but chose to work under the name Herzog in part because it means "duke" in German. I thought there should be someone like Count Basie or Duke Ellington making films. It's hostile and murderous out there in the universe; what looks friendly to us is actually two hundred thousand atomic explosions every second. The sun is a tiny grain of sand and there are many even nastier suns out there. Down here, we humans are living proof that things have gone warped. Perhaps changing my name has somehow protected me from the overwhelming evil of the universe.
_What were the first films you saw?_
I didn't know cinema existed until I was eleven years old and a travelling projectionist for remote provincial schools showed up with a selection of 16mm films. Although I was stunned such a thing was possible, I wasn't particularly taken with the first film I saw, about Eskimos constructing an igloo. It had a ponderous commentary and was extremely boring. Having had to deal with a lot of snow as a child, I could tell the Eskimos weren't doing a very good job; they were probably just actors, and bad ones at that. There and then I learnt that the worst sin a filmmaker can commit is to bore his audience and fail to captivate from the very first moment. The second film, about pygmies building a liana bridge across a jungle river in Cameroon, was better. The pygmies worked well together, and I was impressed with their ability to construct such a well-functioning suspension bridge without any real tools. One pygmy swung across the river on a liana like Tarzan and hung from the bridge like a spider. It was a sensational experience for me.
Later I watched Zorro, Tarzan and American B-movies. A Fu Manchu film I saw was a revelation for me. A man was shot and fell sixty feet from a rock, did a somersault in mid-air, then a little kick with his leg. Ten minutes later, because of this little kick I recognised the same shot when it appeared in another gun battle; they had recycled it and thought they could get away with it. I spoke to friends about this and asked how it was possible the same shot had been used twice, but none of them had even noticed. Before this I thought it was some kind of reality I had been watching, that the film was something like a documentary. All of a sudden I saw how it had been narrated and edited, how tension and suspense were established, how a logical sequence of scenes had been pieced together to create a story. At that moment I became fascinated by cinema. In Munich I would steal empty milk bottles from schoolyards and use the deposits to see as many films as possible.
When I was about twenty-one, a young American named P. Adams Sitney came to Germany and brought with him a selection of experimental films, things like Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger.‡ That there was a group of young filmmakers using this vocabulary and grammar of cinema was exciting to me. I respected these fascinating films, so different from what I was already used to, even though I knew they weren't the kinds of images I wanted to work with myself. Just seeing there were people out there doing such bold and unexpected things, making films that ran counter to the standard textbook accounts of cinema history, intrigued me so much that I wrote about them and asked a film magazine to publish the article.§ What particularly excited me was that the range and depth of their work came not necessarily from an understanding of film and art, but from a lifetime of reading. The first time I met Stan Brakhage, years later at the Telluride Film Festival, he had a copy of Spenser's _The Faerie Queene_ in the original archaic English. He explained how important a text it was for him and asked if I wanted to hear some lines from it. "Of course," I said, at which point he closed the book and recited five minutes of beautiful poetry from memory.
_Have you written poetry yourself?_
As a youngster I entered a competition in Munich for young authors where there were ten awards available for the ten best poems. I submitted five under five different names, all posing as poets who lived together in a commune, and four of them won. What caused a stink was me outing myself by showing up and reading all four winning entries. I remember a couple of names I used; one was "Wenzel Stroszek," the other was the very Scandinavian "Erika Holmehave." Years later I published a small number of poems in a German magazine.¶ I did once start a novel when I was on the island of Kos for the first time, at the age of fifteen. I rediscovered the manuscript not long ago when I was clearing things out and realised how similar it is to _Signs of Life_ , which I made a few years later. I might still have a couple of novels in me, but great focus is needed for such a project and these days I don't have the time. A screenplay can be written quickly and a detective story can be knocked out in three weeks, while no one should spend more than a month on a doctoral dissertation. A novel, however, takes longer. For a while I have contemplated writing a book about battles that never took place because the armies missed each other. I might get around to that one day.
_It's surprising how few films you have heard of, let alone seen._
I love cinema, but unlike some filmmakers who spend their lives watching other people's films – Martin Scorsese, for example, who has his own library of film prints, and for whom cinema is the joy of his life and constant point of reference – I don't feel the necessity to see three films a day. Three good ones a year are enough for me. I average maybe one film a month, and that's usually at a festival, where I see them all at once. I'm not a compulsive film-goer, and compared to most directors am hardly what you would call cinematically literate. I can't imagine my work would be any better or worse if I crawled into a darkened room and spent days watching other people's efforts.
Cinema is the strongest fascination in my life. I feel overwhelmed when I see a great film. I might recall something I saw years ago and ache with pain about its beauty, though such things have forever remained a mystery to me. I don't think I could ever put my finger on what constitutes true poetry, depth and illumination in cinema. I have always wondered how Kurosawa made something as good as _Rashomon;_ the equilibrium and flow are perfect, and he uses space in such a well-balanced way. It's one of the small handful of truly great films ever made. The sins, on the other hand, are easy to name. The bad films have taught me most about filmmaking. Seek out the negative definition. Sit in front of a film and ask yourself, "Given the chance, is this how I would do it?" It's a never-ending educational experience, a way of discovering in which direction you need to take your own work and ideas. _Herakles_ , my first blunder, taught me certain important lessons, and from then on I had a much stronger sense as to how I should go about my business. It was good to have made that small film first, rather than jump into something more meaningful.
_You set up your own production company at an early age._
I was seventeen when I received a call from some film producers who were interested in a proposal I submitted to them. I had avoided meeting with any of these people because I was so young and felt I wouldn't be taken seriously. The reactions I usually got from producers were probably because my puberty was late; I looked like a child until I was sixteen. I would write letters or speak to them on the phone instead – some of the first calls I ever made – until finally, after a series of conversations, two producers seemed willing to accept me as a first-time director.
When I walked into their office, I saw the two of them sitting behind a huge oak desk. I remember it second by second. I stood there as they looked beyond me, waiting, as if the father had come into town with his child. The first one shouted something so abusive I immediately wiped it from my memory, while the other slapped his thigh and laughed, shouting, "Aha! The kindergarten is trying to make films nowadays!" The entire encounter lasted fifteen seconds, after which I turned and left the office, knowing full well I would have to become my own producer. The meeting was the culmination of many setbacks and humiliations, and proved to be a pivotal moment for me. "What makes these idiots producers?" I thought to myself, realising then and there that until the end of my days I would be confronted by this kind of attitude if I wanted other people to produce my films. Not long after this meeting, my mother took me to see the husband of a friend of hers, a wealthy industrialist, who she said would explain to me how to set up a production company. He started talking in a ridiculously loud voice and ended up shouting at me for nearly an hour. "This is completely foolish! You idiot! You've never been in business before! You don't know what you're doing!" Two days later I filled out the necessary paperwork, paid the few dollars to register the company, and founded Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.
Establishing my own company when I so young meant I didn't really have a proper childhood. I skipped over everything expected of someone my age, like finishing school and becoming an apprentice or attending university. Instead – not even twenty years old – I assumed certain responsibilities that most people confront only at the age of thirty. I probably didn't live my teenage years in any kind of traditional way either. A few years later, when I made _Signs of Life,_ my first feature, I was still only about twenty-five and looked even younger, but had a certain authority about me. I was always very firm about my ideas and knew exactly what I wanted, which meant the actors – many of whom were older than me – never doubted who was in charge. When the film was released, people who saw it thought I was in my forties or fifties. They were convinced it was the work of an older, more mature director, and found it inconceivable I was so young.
_You are hardly a typical Hollywood mogul._
My company was formed as an emergency measure because no one else would organise and finance my films, and to this day it has only ever produced my own work. For years I lived with my mother in her Munich apartment on Neureutherstrasse, which is where I edited many of the early films, though when my eldest son was born my wife and I moved to our own small apartment. Up until the time of _Nosferatu_ I worked out of this place with a telephone and typewriter. There was no clear division between private and professional life; my son was raised amidst a film-production office. Instead of a living room we had an editing room, where my wife and I would sleep. I had no secretary and only family to help with paperwork, bookkeeping and contracts. I did as much as possible myself; it was an article of faith, a matter of simple human decency to do the dirty work as long as I could. Inevitably, by the late seventies, as my work reached larger international audiences and there were more retrospectives being organised and too many people to stay in touch with, as well as more formidable productions being planned, it became difficult to operate that home office on my own, so for years I had a small office in Munich run by my brother and a full-time assistant. Three things – a phone, computer and car – are all you need to produce films. Even today I still do most things myself. Although at times it would be good if I had more support, I would rather put the money up on the screen instead of adding people to the payroll.
Years ago Twentieth Century Fox was interested in working with me on _Nosferatu_. The studio executives asked me to travel to Hollywood for a meeting and offered me the use of a mansion so I could sit and write the script. I didn't particularly want to go, so I invited them to Munich instead. It was almost a test to see how serious they were about the project. One freezing winter morning I met four men – all wearing suits and ties and carrying fancy briefcases – at the airport, and after squeezing them into my Volkswagen drove into the Bavarian countryside. They talked about "financing" a number of screenplays. I didn't understand what they were talking about. "How much do you need?" they asked. "It will take me a week and cost $1.50 for a hundred sheets of paper," I said. "Perhaps another dollar for a few pencils." They looked at each other in bewilderment.
_You paid for your early films yourself._
During my final two years at high school I worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory. I did _Punktschweissen_ , the kind of electrical welding that doesn't require the precise skills of a welder, which is much trickier and takes years to master. Much of what I did was menial assembly work, though occasionally I operated a high-pressure hydraulic machine to shape pieces of metal. I can scarcely remember my last two years at school; I was so tired, working every night until six in the morning, saving every penny. They threatened to throw me out because occasionally I would sleep through class. "It would be justified if you kick me out because I can't translate a phrase from Latin," I told my teachers, "but it would be a scandal if you did so because I'm working harder than anyone else."
The best advice I can offer to those heading into the world of film is not to wait for the system to finance your projects and for others to decide your fate. If you can't afford to make a million-dollar film, raise $10,000 and produce it yourself. That's all you need to make a feature film these days. Beware of useless, bottom-rung secretarial jobs in film-production companies. Instead, so long as you are able-bodied, head out to where the real world is. Roll up your sleeves and work as a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in a lunatic asylum or a machine operator in a slaughterhouse. Drive a taxi for six months and you'll have enough money to make a film. Walk on foot, learn languages and a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking – like great literature – must have experience of life at its foundation. Read Conrad or Hemingway and you can tell how much real life is in those books. A lot of what you see in my films isn't invention; it's very much life itself, my own life. If you have an image in your head, hold on to it because – as remote as it might seem – at some point you might be able to use it in a film. I have always sought to transform my own experiences and fantasies into cinema.
The owl carved out of a walnut in _Signs of Life,_ the one with a live fly inside, and the mummies at the start of _Nosferatu_ I first saw fifteen years before I filmed them, when I lived for a few months near Guanajuato in Mexico. Around the turn of the century there was no more space to bury anyone, so the authorities excavated the bodies in the local cemetery. It turned out that many had become mummified. There was a nearby underground tunnel where these mummies were placed in long rows, leaning on opposite walls with their mouths open, giving the impression of screaming or singing, which is why I chose choral music to accompany the images. It was an image that kept on coming back to haunt me and I knew it would fit perfectly in _Nosferatu_. By the time I went back to make the film, the mummies had been placed inside glass cases. I bribed the nightwatchman, who removed them from their transparent coffins so I could shoot them exactly as I remembered them all those years before.
For _Herakles_ , my first real film, I needed a good amount of cash, relatively speaking, because I wanted to shoot on 35mm, not 16mm. For me, filmmaking could only ever be 35mm; everything else was amateurish. It was also a format that had the capacity to reveal – more than any other – whether or not I had anything of substance to offer. "If I fail," I said to myself before starting production, "I will fail so hard I can never recover." At the time I was peripherally involved with a group of filmmakers; there were eight of us, most of whom were slightly older than me. Of the films we planned, four never went into production because the most basic hurdles couldn't be overcome. Another three were shot but never finished because of sound problems. Mine was the only completed project. It was instantly clear to me what the key to filmmaking was. They have a beautiful expression in Peru: "Perseverance is where the gods dwell."
_Money has nothing to do with it?_
It was faith, not money, that pulled the boat over the mountain in _Fitzcarraldo_. I was once asked about what an interviewer called the "disastrous" production of that film. I stopped him in mid-sentence and said, "It was not disastrous. It was glorious, a genuine achievement." I never made the mistake of thinking that the problems I encountered in the jungle could be resolved with dollar bills. When I went to the Cannes Film Festival and first spoke to producers about _Fitzcarraldo_ , one of them – a friend of mine who would open a fresh bottle of champagne if the one we were drinking from wasn't cold enough – became excited and asked how much money I needed for pre-production. "A million dollars," I told him. With a grand gesture he handed over a cheque for that amount, which I pinned to the wall of my office because I knew that was all it was good for. My encounter with this man was a sign that money wasn't necessarily going to help me get the project off the ground.
_You ended up producing_ Fitzcarraldo _independently._
"Independent cinema" is a meaningless term. It's a myth. Real independence is a state of mind, nothing more. To call someone "independent" is to give Hollywood too much credit; studios aren't the navel of filmmaking or the baseline of anything. There has always been a dependent relationship between financiers, directors and distributors, which means there's no such thing as true "independent" cinema, with the exception of home movies made for the family album or footage shot with a cellphone at a spring-break beach party in Florida. No one makes films completely alone; audiences and filmmakers have always been reliant on each other, though some – and I include myself here – have perhaps forged a greater degree of self-reliance than most. I have always been ready to roll up my sleeves and take care of whatever needs to be done. From the start I had a strong urge to do things for myself.
Years ago I was shooting in New York and showed up with a van at an equipment-rental place. "You aren't allowed to pick up anything yourself," the man who worked there told me. "A union truck has to deliver it." We had an endless debate until I grabbed what I needed, put it in my van – which was ten feet from the door of this place – and drove off. I once even considered setting up my own actors' union. A friend recently asked if I would record a couple of lines for a film he made, but the Screen Actors Guild told me it wasn't allowed unless I was paid the standard rate and his company was registered with the union, which my friend couldn't afford. I found it all completely ridiculous; it's the kind of mentality that stops emerging filmmakers dead in their tracks. At the time I contemplated establishing a competing labour union for actors. For me the questions were simple. Could I, a German, form a union in America, and how many Founding Fathers would I need? Four, forty or four thousand? There are too many rituals and hierarchies in Hollywood; to be independent means to be free of such things. The union caught up with us during production on _Stroszek_ and announced they were going to send a representative to the set. I told them to meet us in Death Valley, a couple of thousand miles away from where we were shooting. I never heard from them again.
_You have a reputation as someone who goes to extremes._
If you give a piece of an unknown metal alloy to a chemist, he will examine its structure by putting it under great pressure and exposing it to great heat; this gives him a better understanding of what that metal is composed of. The same can be said of human beings, who often give insight into their innermost being when under duress. We are defined in battle. The Greeks had a saying: "A captain only shows during a storm." Shooting under a certain amount of pressure and insecurity injects real life and vibrancy that wouldn't otherwise be there into a film. But I wouldn't be sitting here if I had ever risked anyone's life while making a film. I'm a professional who never looks for difficulties; my hope is always to avoid problems.
During filming on Mount Erebus in Antarctica, I wanted to be lowered down into the live volcano with a camera, but quickly realised how stupidly dangerous it was. However curious I was personally, I knew there wasn't any good reason to get those shots when it came to the film I was making. I don't believe in fate and destiny, but I have great faith in probability; I make sure that whatever I do puts me firmly on the side of safety. Perhaps mountaineers are motivated to seek out the most difficult routes, but not me. As a filmmaker, such an attitude would be wholly unprofessional and irresponsible, and being my own producer means it's especially in my interests to work as efficiently as possible. When it came to _Fitzcarraldo_ , I knew there would be certain inevitable problems to overcome, which meant it was inevitable I wasn't going to shy away from them. Some challenges can't be shirked. But in heading directly into such things, I'm only doing my duty. I have never gone out seeking inhospitable terrain to film in, nor have I ever taken idiotic risks, as a blind, stupid daredevil would do. I'm aware of my reputation of being a ruthless madman, but when I look at Hollywood – which is a completely crazed place – it's clear to me that I'm the only clinically sane person there. As my wife will convincingly testify, I am a fluffy husband.
_Surely you've taken a few risks as a filmmaker._
Perhaps, but only in a calculated and professional way. Generally it's me who tests the waters before everyone jumps in. As the leader of a platoon, the obligation to walk out front, with everyone following, is yours. I'm the one ultimately responsible for everyone's safety, and I would never ask anything of an actor or technician I wouldn't do myself. A director has to be on an equal footing with those around him, and by doing so establish a sense of solidarity. There is a scene in _Signs of Life_ where the soldiers are playing with fireworks; that's my hand in the close-up as the rocket – which really was full of gunpowder – is being lit. I tested the rapids of the raging river during production on _Aguirre_ before anyone else went down there, and walked ahead of the cameraman into a minefield in Kuwait during production on _Lessons of Darkness_. It was cold while we were filming the sequences of _Nosferatu_ with the rats, so when we released thousands of them onto the streets of Delft they all clustered together to keep warm. I ran in to try and disperse them, and was bitten at least twenty times. When you see rats crawling over naked feet in the film, that's also me; no one else wanted to do it. Years ago, when I was staging an opera, I thought about having a stuntman crashing down from the rigging about fifty feet above the stage, as if a mountain climber had fallen from a rock face and disappeared into the clouds below. He had to hit a narrow space – an opening in the floor with a large air cushion underneath – and it wasn't easy to achieve this from such a height. We couldn't afford a stuntman, so I decided to test the fall myself. I was hoisted up incrementally, trying it from various different heights, beginning at ten feet. Eventually, at a height of about thirty-five feet, I jumped down and got severe whiplash in my neck. I realised it was ridiculous to try from fifty feet, and immediately scrapped the whole idea.
In the jungles of Guyana, making _The White Diamond,_ I wanted footage from above the jungle canopy, but knew that the test flight of the electrically powered dirigible might be the only time it ever flew. I couldn't ask our cameraman to go up because a few years earlier a cameraman had died while filming something similar on the maiden flight of a prototype airship, so I insisted on shooting it myself, though the aerospace engineer Graham Dorrington – who designed and built the dirigible – was resistant. For a shot in _Rescue Dawn_ I wanted the actors to run across an old rope-and-plant bridge that spanned a stretch of flowing water. Christian Bale rightly insisted the bridge be checked before he made his move, which I did myself. When we filmed the scene of Christian and Steve Zahn moving downstream on the raft, I was in the water with them for hours. During the scene where Dieter eats a plate of wriggling maggots, I told Christian I would also eat some, but he let me off the hook. "Just roll the camera," he said. My first question to him when we met to discuss the film was: "How do you feel about sleeping in the jungle at night and waking up covered in leeches? Are you prepared to bite a live snake in half and eat it?" When he said, "Yes," it was clear we would be able to work together. I also told Christian – who spent months losing nearly sixty pounds under medical supervision – that I would lose half as much weight as he had to for the role, and ended up something like thirty pounds lighter. It would have been counterproductive if I showed up on set as emaciated as him.
_How did you lose the weight?_
It had nothing to do with dieting. Just eat less and move more. Let me add something about risk by mentioning two individuals who fascinate me. Quirinus Kuhlmann was a virtually unknown baroque poet, deeply, dangerously into the essence of life. He staged the last crusade by criss-crossing Europe on foot while preaching – he called it a divine mission – and eventually set off with two hysterical women, a mother and daughter, for Constantinople, where he attempted to set up a Jesus Kingdom. The women abandoned him in Venice, absconding with some sailors, and the ship left without him, so he jumped into the water and almost drowned. He was hoisted aboard and taken to Constantinople, where he was imprisoned after trying to convert the Sultan. He eventually arrived in Moscow, where he incited some sort of religious riot – which was misunderstood by the authorities as a political one – was imprisoned again and then, together with his books, burnt at the stake. For a time I had a vague idea about making a film with Kinski about Kuhlmann's life and ecstasies. Joseph Plateau was a Belgian physicist, the first person to study the principle of persistence of vision, the afterglow of light on the retina, which is the fundamental principle of moving images in cinema. I consider Plateau to be one of the most significant explorers who ever lived. His tests rendered him blind because he stared directly into the sun for too long. He's a hero; the man sacrificed his eyes for cinema. Was it worth it? Perhaps, because he helped give meaning to our existence. There is nothing wrong with perishing in the travails and tribulations of life.
_You recently uncovered your first effort as a filmmaker, made in 1957, when you were fifteen._
One of my friends, Tony Fischer, was a tall, handsome guy who kept telling me he was better looking than Gary Cooper and could act him off the screen, so one day I decided to put him to the test. My older brother was working in a trading company that had a cafeteria, and we got permission to film there one weekend. That was our western saloon. We put in swing doors, then nailed up a "WHISKY" sign and a "WANTED" poster. The result was a primitive silent, about six minutes long, on 8mm. There isn't much to it; it was the joy of kids making a film. We wore the most basic cowboy costumes we could get our hands on, played cards, swigged from a whisky bottle and got into a bar fight. Today I call it _A Lost Western_. It turned out that Tony did look as good as Gary Cooper, but was abysmally bad as an actor. A few years ago I was at the film museum in Turin and saw one of the first films ever made, _Nain et géant_ , by Georges Méliès, from 1901. At the time there was a retrospective of my work in town and I was able to watch, back-to-back, _A Lost Western_ and this early piece of cinema. What struck me was how similar my first film is to the Méliès short. It's as if, like those pioneers, I too was inventing cinema in my own way.
_You have said_ Herakles _was more an experiment in editing than anything else._
Looking at the film today I find it rather pointless, though at the time _Herakles_ was an important test for me. It was some kind of an apprenticeship; I felt it would be better to make a film than go to film school. I was friendly with the boss of a company who gave me several shots from the newsreels he produced, all for free. I took various pieces of this material and intercut it with footage I filmed myself of bodybuilders, including Mr Germany 1962. It was fascinating to edit such seemingly disconnected and diverse material, all these images and sounds that wouldn't normally fit comfortably together. A special spirit invades cinema when you marry together elements usually kept apart. One of the most interesting things in the film is a shot of a policeman at the Le Mans racetrack in 1955, immediately after a horrific accident that killed more than eighty people, when burning fragments of a car flew into the spectators' stand. He is so stunned by what has happened that he has no idea what to do, and just stares into the camera. There is a beautiful saying: "The best description of hunger is a description of bread." In the same way, the best description of a catastrophe is the blank stare of this policeman.
_The film focuses on the strongman, a figure that resonates throughout your work._
I have always felt a close affinity to strongmen. "Strongman" is a word that reverberates beyond mere physical abilities; it encompasses intellectual strength, independence of mind, confidence and perhaps some kind of innocence. I make a distinction between strongmen and bodybuilders. I don't like the quasi-beauty ideal that has emerged from bodybuilding; the complete opposite is actually more compelling. Many years ago the author Herbert Achternbusch and I talked about establishing a publishing company. Nothing came of it except our name, Fehler-Pferd, which literally means "All-Malady-Horse," and the logo we designed, which was adapted from an image issued by a major American pharmaceutical company that produced various drugs for horses. It was of a horse suffering from every conceivable illness and visible disease, just to show what can go wrong: a drooping lip, multiple hernias, a sagging, broken back, malnutrition, splintered hoofs. A truly wretched sight, the negative definition of beauty. We never published a single book, though the idea remains alive in my mind.
My fascination with strongmen probably stems from my childhood heroes when I lived in Sachrang. One of them was an old farmhand called Sturm Sepp ["Stormin' Joe"]. He must have been about eighty years old and was more than six feet tall, though you couldn't tell because he was always bent over. He was a strange, almost biblical figure with a full beard and long pipe, and was always silent; we never got him to say so much as a word about himself, or utter a single sound. We would taunt him when he was out mowing in the field, and he would go after us, swinging his scythe. I vividly remember watching Sturm Sepp, stark naked, washing himself with a bunch of roots, underneath the freezing, thundering waterfall in the ravine behind the house where I grew up. The story told to us children was that at one time he had been so strong that when his mule collapsed as it was pulling some tree trunks, Sepp loaded several enormous logs onto his shoulders and carried them down the mountain. Because of this feat of strength, he had been bent over at the waist ever since. There was also a legend that during the First World War Sepp single-handedly took an entire squad of French soldiers prisoner, twenty-four men in all. He was so quick at running across the hills, popping up again and again in different places, that the French – encamped in a small hollow down in the valley – thought they were surrounded by a massive detachment of Germans. I can still picture the scene in my mind.
My other childhood hero was Siegel Hans. He was a lumberjack, a brave, daring young chap with rippling Mr Universe muscles, and the first person in the village to own a motorcycle. We truly revered and admired him. Once, when the milk truck broke through a wooden bridge, Siegel Hans was fetched to help. He climbed down into the stream, took off his shirt, revealing his bulging muscles for all to see, and tried to heave the truck back up again with his bare hands. He didn't succeed, but the fact that he even attempted it was enough to inspire in us an awe that I am unable to comprehend today. It's an image I used decades later in _Invincible_. Siegel Hans was involved in a local smuggling operation, where a load of coffee was brought across the border with the collusion of customs officers. When the police came for Siegel Hans, he leapt out of a window and fled straight up the nearest mountain, the Geigelstein. At the summit he blew on his trumpet and the police set off in pursuit. When they arrived at the peak they suddenly heard Siegel Hans's trumpet from the opposite mountaintop. And so it went on, to and fro, for days. The whole village revered him for this; we went into positively religious ecstasies over him. In the end he gave himself up. I remember thinking that to evade the police in the valley for so long he had actually run around the entire German border. It's like shooting a bullet from a powerful rifle that will ultimately hit you in your own back because it orbits the entire planet.
When I was growing up, these kinds of tales – of mythological heroes and lumberjacks getting into bar-room brawls, which you see in _Heart of Glass_ – were ever present. The farmer next to our little house was another very strong guy called Beni, and for a couple of years Siegel Hans was always challenging him to a fight. These two bull-headed men would sit in the pub, beer steins in hand, staring at each other, then all of a sudden do something violent. To this day I can look at two Bavarians enjoying themselves at the Oktoberfest and know whether in the next ninety seconds they are going to start fighting. The signs are subtle, but I can read them. There is actually a law in Bavaria stating there must be two grooves on either side of a stein handle so it breaks off easily, otherwise too many skulls would be fractured. One day a fight erupted while I was in the pub. Siegel Hans eventually got Beni's head down into the urinal as the entire village cheered them on, shouting, "We have to know who is the strongest in the village!"
_Soon after finishing_ Herakles, _you won the Carl Mayer Award for your screenplay_ Signs of Life.
My behaviour at the time was ridiculous, but I was so convinced of my abilities that I arrogantly told my brothers I didn't need to read the other scripts I was competing against; I knew mine was the best. The jury held its session in Munich, and when one of its members rang at my door late one night with great excitement to tell me I had won the award – worth about $7,000 – I looked at him and said, "You don't have to wake me past midnight to tell me that. I already knew." Although the film wasn't made for a few years, the award was a step forward. At the time I felt it gave me real momentum and would carry me for a decade.
My next film was _The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz_ , financed by money I got from the screenplay award. The basic expenses were for raw stock, lab fees and something for the four actors. It's a short film about a group of men protecting an abandoned castle from imaginary attackers, the same story I worked with a few years later in _Signs of Life_. They barricade themselves inside a fortress and wait aimlessly for an enemy they know will never show up, then leave and take a wheat field by storm. At the start of the film the voiceover sounds like a commentary on the action, then emerges as deranged chatter that does nothing to clarify the situation, completely disconnected from what is happening on screen. This unreliable narrative gives the film a hallucinatory feeling. It isn't even clear whether these four men inside the fortress are playing a game or if they really are at war.
_You made a film between_ Herakles _and_ The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz.
_Game in the Sand_ , which was more of a proper film than _Herakles_ , but actually only a few people have seen it. I was careful to take it out of circulation almost immediately after finishing it, though at the time I did show it to friends. It's the one film I will never publicise in my lifetime; I might even destroy the negative before I die. It was filmed in the Burgenland province, in southeast Austria, and when Volker Schlöndorff saw the footage he decided to shoot his first film, _Young Törless,_ in the same village. _Game in the Sand_ is about four children and a rooster. During shooting I had the feeling things were moving out of control; the boys involved in the filming became violent, and I did nothing to stop them. When I look back, the film should probably not have been made at all, though I did incorporate elements of it into _Signs of Life_ , when Meinhard walks along the beach and comes across a heap of sand out of which is sticking the head of a rooster. Fortunately, something useful came out of my experiences, which is that I was able to establish – firmly and with absolute certainty – my own personal ethical boundaries. I learnt how important it was to set the parameters within which I would work as a filmmaker and ensure I had control over every situation. I learnt this by accident, by making a mistake.
_You visited the United States for the first time._
There were offers from producers who wanted to buy the screenplay for _Signs of Life_ and make the film, but I turned them all down; I knew I had to direct it myself. I couldn't find anyone to finance the film, even after shooting those early shorts and winning the screenplay award, so in 1964 I applied for and was awarded a scholarship to study in the United States. It gave me free choice about where to go, but I didn't want to head to a fancy city like New York or Los Angeles, so I chose Pittsburgh, a place populated by real working people, by welders. It was a world I understood. I took the boat from Bremerhaven, not long before transatlantic flying became the norm, and remember sailing for ten days, enjoying the anticipation of arrival. What I didn't know was that by the early sixties Pittsburgh was in heavy decline; the steel mills were shutting down and life for many people was falling apart. My plan was to study at Duquesne University, but I had no idea there was such a difference in quality between American universities, and quickly felt Duquesne wasn't the right place for me. Three days after I arrived I returned my scholarship and ended up penniless, with no host family and no passage home.
I was a drifter in Pittsburgh for a few weeks before being picked up from the side of the road by the Franklin family. Evelyn, the widowed mother, had six children between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven, as well as her own ninety-three-year-old mother. I owe them so much, this wonderful, crazy family who let me stay in the attic of their house near Fox Chapel, where I lived for almost six months. The youngest children were twin seventeen-year-old girls. Billy, the eldest son, was a failed rock star who would spend his nights playing gigs in bars. Grandma, hoping he would one day lead a virtuous life, tried to wake him every morning at seven, banging on his door and reciting Bible verses. Billy would eventually emerge, stark naked, at around four in the afternoon, talking wildly to his cocker spaniel in an invented language and theatrically pounding his chest, bemoaning his sinful life to Grandma. The twin girls would come home from school at around the same time, with a couple of friends in tow, who would screech and flee at the site of the naked Billy. Another brother had fallen from a moving car as a child; his speech had been slow and slightly slurred ever since. He had served part of his military service at Ramstein Air Base, not far from Frankfurt, and from him I took the line " _Was ist los? Der Hund ist los_ " and used it in _Stroszek_. It was the only German phrase he picked up in two years. The father – an alcoholic – had died a couple of years before I showed up. It was extraordinary how Evelyn ran this wild bunch, having added "The Kraut" into the family mix; I gave the mayhem added colour. That's mostly what they called me, though it changed depending on Grandma, because every second day she would ask me what my name was. "Werner," I said. "Ah, Wiener," she would say. Her hearing wasn't good and she was rather gaga. Actually, the name stuck, and even today, when he writes to me, my brother Lucki addresses his emails to Wiener. My son Rudolph calls me Wiener and to my granddaughter Alexandra I am Pappous Wiener. A few days later Grandma would call me something like "Urfan" or "Urban," so the twin girls sometimes called me "Urban Wiener, the Kraut." At the time I was good at high-jumping and the only one who could reach the ceiling of the living room with my head, which occasionally made me "The Leaping Kraut."
The twins introduced me to the Rolling Stones, and sometime in 1964 we all went to a concert in Pittsburgh. When it had finished, I noticed that rows of plastic seats were steaming; many of the screaming teenage girls had peed themselves. That's when I knew this was something big.
_How did you make a living?_
I heard about a film producer who worked with WQED in Pittsburgh. He was planning a series of films on advanced, futuristic, rocket-propelled systems for NASA, and suggested I make a film about plasma propulsion, which involved me going to Cleveland to talk to scientists and visit what at the time was one of the world's most powerful magnets. Journalists are always writing that I made films for NASA and abandoned a promising career as a scientist – even an astronaut – to become a filmmaker. The truth is that because they had a high-security atomic reactor in Cleveland, everyone who worked there had to be cleared through intensive security checks. I had access to certain restricted areas and talked to the scientists, but just before I was about to start work on the film it was discovered that I didn't have a permit to stay in the country unless I was a student. I had violated my visa status, and soon afterwards was summoned to the immigration office in Pittsburgh.
It was obvious I was about to be thrown out of the country and shipped back to Germany, so I drove an old Volkswagen to New York during an extremely bitter winter, where I planned to look for work. I lived in the car for a few weeks, though its floor was rusted through and I had a cast from my ankle up to my hip because I had fractured my leg a few weeks earlier while playing around with the Franklin twins in Pittsburgh. They had a habit of ambushing me with the cheapest perfume they could find and soaking me with it. One day I decided to jump out from the third-floor bathroom window and tackle them from behind, but that hadn't gone as anticipated. I couldn't move my toes properly in the cast and they nearly froze, so I wrapped wads of newspaper around them to make sure I didn't lose anything to frostbite. At night, when it got exceptionally cold, the homeless of New York – who live almost like Neanderthal men – would gather together on some empty, desolate street and stand huddling around fires kindled in metal trash cans, all without speaking a word. I didn't make a particularly good impression on potential employers because I was in such bad shape, so I eventually cut the damned cast off with a pair of poultry shears and fled across the border to Mexico, near Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende, then down to San Cristóbal de las Casas in the south.
_Mexico is where you learnt Spanish._
And where I developed my love and fascination for Latin America. While I was down there I struggled to make a living, until I discovered a weak spot on the border, across the Río Grande from Reynosa in Mexico to McAllen in Texas. Every day thousands of day-labourers would commute across the border and return home at night because they had a special sticker on their windshield. I stole one, bought some television sets for people who wanted them down in Mexico – where they were expensive – and resold them. It was, I suppose, smuggling of a sort, though I ended up with only pocket change. One time a rich ranchero asked me to get him a Colt pistol made of silver because he wasn't able to find one in Mexico, so I bought one and took it down there. I was able to support myself on these indiscretions, though from this years later came the legend I worked as a gun-runner.
I spent a couple of weekends as a rodeo rider in a _charreada_. They had three cowboys, or _charros_ , in the ring who would catch the bulls by using lassos to pull the animal to the ground and then tie a rope around its chest. Then I would squat on it, at which point the bull would explode with rage. I saw some of them jump clear over a six-foot stone wall. I had no idea how to ride a horse, something that soon became patently clear to the spectators, so I appeared under the name El Alamein, which after Stalingrad was the biggest defeat of the German forces in the Second World War. I was injured every time I went out there in front of the crowd, which loved cheering on the idiot. One time I was in the ring with a bull that got on its feet and stood there staring at me. _"BURRO!"_ I screamed. "YOU DONKEY!" I can still hear the crowd screaming. The bull became rather angry and tried to pin me to the stone wall. My leg – the one I had fractured in Pittsburgh – got caught and I sustained an injury that was so bad I quit there and then. Today it all sounds funny and I can look back at my time in Mexico with some humour, but it was rather banal and occasionally quite miserable, even if it was _pura vida_ – the raw, stark-naked quality of life – as the Mexicans say.
I drove back to Pittsburgh and spent a few weeks with the Franklins, though I was in hospital for much of that time because I picked up hepatitis in Mexico. Eventually I flew back to Europe and travelled around for another few months before returning home, where almost immediately I started pre-production on _Signs of Life._ I still wasn't taken seriously, even after the Carl Mayer Award and my short films, which by now had been screened at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival and other places. At the time Munich was the cultural centre of West Germany, and I was able to make contact with other filmmakers, including Volker Schlöndorff, who was about to make _Young Törless_ and showed up at my door one day. He has been helpful ever since, the most loyal of all the friends I have among filmmakers, though his films are so different to mine. He defended me with great passion during some of my darkest hours, and more recently spoke the French voiceover for _Cave of Forgotten Dreams_.
This was also when I encountered Fassbinder for the first time. Rainer was always a solid comrade in our battle to plough fields that hadn't yet been worked over. This pimply, chubby twenty-two-year-old showed up at my door one evening – it must have been around 1967 – and slammed down prints of his first short films. He looked like a peasant, though was actually quite sophisticated and streetwise; I immediately sensed there was something forceful about him, that here was real talent. "Watch these, now! I want you to produce my films," he told me. "For God's sake, Rainer," I said, "do it like me. You must produce your own work." I explained to him I wasn't a producer like any other, that I didn't make films on a mercantile basis by acquiring a project and then hiring a director. My company was established to make only my films. "You must have the guts to set up your own production company," I told him. "Just go for it." Later he was grateful I threw him out, and said I had shown him possibilities he never knew existed.
_You have lived outside of Germany for years, but have you retained your German sensibilities?_
You can't stand on one leg in Hollywood; you have to be all there or else you'll never belong. It was the dream of some German filmmakers to move to Hollywood and make American films, which meant leaving their own culture behind. That never interested me. Decades after leaving Germany, it doesn't matter where my films are physically made; they are still very much Bavarian in spirit. I can leave my land but not my culture. Some Irish write in English, but they are still Irish. Today I function very much in English, but I'm still a Bavarian. Historically speaking, Bavarians have never considered themselves part of Germany. My first language was a Bavarian dialect; my own father sometimes couldn't understand me, and one time he turned to my mother and asked her to translate. It was a culture shock when I went to school in Swabia for a few months, where everyone spoke a different language. I was teased because I spoke with such a thick accent, and at the age of about eleven had to learn _Hochdeutsch_ – proper German, the language established by Martin Luther – for the first time.
Down in Bavaria there's a different approach to doing things, a way of life I am inextricably intertwined with. Being Bavarian means as much as it is to be Scottish in the United Kingdom. Like the Scots, Bavarians are hard-drinking, hard-fighting, warmhearted and imaginative. The difference between a German and a Bavarian film is the difference between Kaiser Wilhelm of Prussia and King Ludwig II. Wilhelm was excellent at co-ordinating armies and starting wars, while Ludwig possessed an extraordinarily fertile mind and was a patron of Richard Wagner, to whom he was almost religiously devoted. He was completely mad and caught up in his own fantasies, but as a young man ended up as king because his brother Otto was even crazier. Ludwig designed a cable car suspended from a gas balloon that could carry him over the Alps, and nearly bankrupted the country by building a series of castles full of quintessential Bavarian dreaminess and exuberance, which became models for the ones you find in Disneyland. Wilhelm could never have come up with something like Ludwig's extraordinary castle at Neuschwanstein, incomplete at his death in 1886, which is full of frescoes that portray scenes from Wagner operas. His Linderhof Palace was technologically ahead of its time, and contains a fantastical grotto full of dynamos that provided an array of lighting effects. It was constructed for a single private performance of Wagner's _Tannhäuser_ ; Ludwig even designed the boat in which he personally rowed Tannhäuser to land. He was often up all night and would go out on an ornate sleigh he had designed himself, travelling through the winter forest with a couple of footmen, knocking on the doors of startled local peasants at four in the morning. He would ask for a glass of water, and in exchange hand over his most precious gold and diamond jewellery. Ludwig led a tragic life and was eventually forcibly removed from power; he died a mysterious death when he and his physician were found drowned in the shallowest part of Lake Starnberg. He's the only person who could have made _Fitzcarraldo_ apart from me. You see this kind of baroque imagination in Fassbinder's films, the kind of unstoppable, roughly hewn and ferocious creativity he had. Like his work, my films aren't ideological constructs, thin gargling water instead of thick stout, which we saw too much of in West German cinema throughout the seventies.
_What do you miss about Bavaria?_
An interviewer once asked me what my favourite season is. "Autumn," I told him. For years I have lived in southern California, where there are no seasons to speak of. I yearn for them. And I could murder someone for a steaming pretzel fresh from the oven, covered with butter, and a beer. That's what being Bavarian is all about. Living abroad means I rarely get to listen to the genuine Bavarian dialect, which I miss more than anything. A few years ago I was awarded the _Bundesverdienstkreuz_ , Germany's Order of Merit. I had no plans to accept, and attended the ceremony only after my brother called me to say that he had been asked by journalists, "The President has bestowed Herr Herzog with this honour, but he won't show up. Why does he hate Germany so much?" Of course I don't hate Germany, and especially not Bavaria, though not every development has been particularly enlightened. Today I look at Munich and see a city empty of all significance, invaded by Prussians and stripped of its Bavarian spirit.
_You have spoken about happiness as being something you aren't particularly interested in._
I find the notion of happiness rather strange, and do sometimes wonder why I seem to be different from many Americans, who even wrote the "right" to happiness into their Declaration of Independence. It has never been a goal of mine; I just don't think in those terms. I barked at a Hare Krishna disciple one time at Miami airport because he insisted I take the book he was offering. "Aren't you interested in happiness?" he asked. "NO!" A sense of justice is more important to me, and certainly more valuable than money and acclaim. I can't tell you how many honorary degrees I have politely declined from universities that are reckoned to be the best on the planet, including Cambridge and a big one in New York. I'm not interested in decorating my hat with such things. I'm after something else instead.
_What?_
I try to give meaning to my existence through my work. That's a simplified answer, but whether I'm happy or not really doesn't count for much. I have always enjoyed my work. Maybe "enjoy" isn't the right word; I love making films, and it means a lot to me that I can work in this profession. I am well aware of the many aspiring filmmakers out there with good ideas who never find a foothold. At the age of fourteen, once I realised filmmaking was an uninvited duty for me, I had no choice but to push on with my projects. Cinema has given me everything, but has also taken everything from me.
_Is it true you don't understand irony?_
It's a serious communication defect, one I have wrestled with my whole life, ever since I was able to think independently. I have no sensory organ for irony and am forever falling into its traps. I feel close to Kuhlmann because of this. Apparently he took everything literally, and around 1700, while the alchemists were searching for the philosopher's stone, he dug for it in the ground with a spade in Silesia. A few weeks ago I received a phone call from a painter who lives in the neighbourhood. He told me he wanted to sell me some of his paintings, and because I lived nearby he said he could make me a deal. He started to argue with me, saying I could have this or that painting for only $10, or even less. I tried to get him off the phone. "Sir, I'm sorry," I said, "but I don't have paintings in my apartment. I don't have art on my walls, only maps. Sometimes a family photo, but never a painting." He kept on and on until all of a sudden he started to laugh. "I know this laughter," I said to myself. The painter didn't change his voice when he announced that he was my friend, Harmony Korine.
Let me offer another example. I am unable to distinguish a gay man from a straight man unless he shows up in drag and make-up. For me, a man is a man. Not long ago I was with film director John Waters – who I have known for forty years – on stage at an event. A single, blinding spotlight shone down on him, and sixteen hundred eyes stared out from the darkness. I stepped aside and from arm's length looked at John with an intensified focus. I turned to my wife and whispered, "Could it be that John is gay?" Such a bold filmmaker, a man very dear to my heart. I admire his audacity, but I was truly oblivious to the fact that he is gay. I always just took him for John Waters.
After it was announced I was to receive the _Bundesfilmpreis_ for _Signs of Life,_ I got a call from the Ministry of the Interior. It was the minister's personal assistant who called me. "Are you Werner Herzog? The minister would like to have a conversation." I was then connected to the minister, who started stuttering and said, "Ah well, Mr Herzog. We have publicised the news that you have won the _Bundesfilmpreis_ but... ahem... I have to personally take the matter in hand and humbly apologise. I regret to say that in reality it was not you who won the award, rather someone else." I remained stunned yet composed, and replied, "Sir, how could this have happened? You as Minister of the Interior are responsible for many things, including internal security and the safety of our borders. In what kind of a state is your house? This letter in my hand has not only your signature, it has two others. I accept what you're saying, but how could it have happened?" It went on like this for ten minutes, when suddenly the minister started to roar so hard with laughter that I recognised the voice of my friend Florian Fricke. "Florian, you bastard," I said. He hadn't even used a different voice when he was playing the minister's personal assistant, but I still took them for two different people. That's how bad my communication defect is. When it comes to irony, there are things common to almost everyone that are lost on me.
Compared to other filmmakers – particularly the French, who are able to sit around in cafes, nursing their coffee and waxing eloquent about their work – I'm a brooding, squatting Bavarian bullfrog, a country bumpkin incapable of discussing art with people. The French love to play with their words, so to master their language is to be a master of irony. Technically I can speak French; I have the vocabulary and know the grammar, but will do so only when forced to. Only twice in my life has this happened. One time, while we were shooting _Fata Morgana_ in Africa, I was arrested. I was surrounded by drunken soldiers who aimed a rifle at my head, another at my heart and a third at my balls. I started to explain who I was, when the commander screamed at me, " _ON PARLE QUE LE FRANÇAIS ICI!_ " They pointed at one of our microphones and asked what it was. I made the sound of an electric razor because our equipment would have been immediately confiscated if I had told them the truth. Then they wanted to open our cans of undeveloped film, so I spoke to them in French before handing over three sealed cans, all full of wet sand. I insisted they find a darkroom before opening them, and we smuggled the real footage out of the country. The second occasion I spoke French was when we were making _La Soufrière_ on Guadeloupe, which is French-speaking, though almost the entire population is African. We found the man we were looking for, the only person who had refused to be evacuated from the island, asleep under a tree. I woke him up and we talked. So under pressure I will speak the language, but only when there is a real necessity, otherwise I withdraw and become a denizen of the crag.
_You might not understand irony, but you do have a sense of humour._
Of course. A magazine in Germany once ran an article on me with the headline "This Man Never Laughs" under a photo of me looking as serious as some people expect. "Laugh! Laugh!" the photographer said. "Why don't you ever laugh?" I was feeling more and more uncomfortable, and eventually told him, "I never laugh once a camera is pointed at me." Naturally they left out the second part of what I said.
There's a big difference between irony and humour. I can understand humour and laugh at jokes, even if I've never been very good at telling them myself; my face just isn't made for laughing. Often overlooked is the humour in my films, from _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ to _Bad Lieutenant._ My audiences laugh all the time, and an audience that laughs is always in the right; that's a law of nature. They even chuckle at _Aguirre_ , when one of the soldiers is hit by an arrow and says, "Long arrows are coming back into fashion," before falling down dead. Seeing audiences laugh at my films has always been important to me, though being unable to comprehend irony is an obvious defect of mine.
_An endearing defect._
Not if you saw me sitting in a Parisian cafe.
* _Blockade_ (2005), directed by Sergei Loznitsa.
† Rosenheim (birthplace of Hermann Göring) burnt on the night of 18 April 1945, less than two weeks before Hitler killed himself in Berlin. Herzog was about two and a half years old. That evening, in an attempt to destroy enemy transport systems, 148 American B-17s dropped more than 400 tonnes of bombs on the town's marshalling yards.
‡ From December 1963 to August 1964, P. Adams Sitney was curator of the International Exposition of American Independent Film, which travelled to several cities including Munich (January 1964), Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, London and Vienna. The trip was organised by Lithuanian-American filmmaker and curator Jonas Mekas, who later established Anthology Film Archives, one of America's leading venues for non-mainstream cinema.
§ "Rebellen in Amerika," _Filmstudio,_ May 1964. In this essay, Herzog describes a screening in Munich of films by Robert Breer, Dick Higgins, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacob, Ed Emshwiller and Kenneth Anger. "Tellingly," he writes, "German film reviewers – alarmed by the implications of such an event or, conversely, so fossilized as to be incapable of any sort of arousal – have until now virtually ignored the intensive efforts, evolving over the past decade, of the American avant garde, those filmmakers who have continued rigorously where Surrealist experiments left off."
¶ See "Ten Poems," p. 439.
# Blasphemy and Mirages
_You benefited from the film-subsidy system in West Germany._
I belonged to a generation of post-war Germans many of whom were attempting to express themselves in new ways cinematically, which isn't surprising when you think of West German cinema in the fifties. There were production companies in existence when we started out, but none of us wanted to have anything to do with them. Almost everything they produced was somehow tainted with Nazism, like the _Heimat_ films, steeped in blood and soil; none of it felt right to my contemporaries and me. Even an acclaimed film like _Die Brücke_ seemed outdated and old-fashioned, though it is anti-Nazi in spirit.
What was clear by the early sixties was that we West German filmmakers needed to grow up and take our destiny into our own hands. This went further than just production; I'm talking about creating our own festivals and distribution systems, and establishing relations with television stations willing to fund our work. I consider Alexander Kluge to be the spiritual and ideological force behind West German cinema of the period, including the film-subsidy laws that created an environment within which many of us were able to work, and the Oberhausen Manifesto, issued in 1962, the year after the Berlin Wall went up, declaring the arrival of a new generation of West German filmmakers. Kluge and Edgar Reitz – both ten years older than me – saw some of my early films and asked if I wanted to work through their company and the film school in Ulm they had founded [ _Institut für Filmgestaltung_ ]. When I told them I was going to be my own producer, they offered me the use of their equipment, and I spent time on their machinery transferring various recordings I had made. Kluge and Reitz's support was important to me because at the time I was an absolute unknown. It was through Reitz that I met Thomas Mauch, who was the cameraman on several of my films, including _Aguirre_ and _Fitzcarraldo_.
For a time the country had probably the most subsidised film industry in Europe, if not the world, but it was still never easy to make films there. There was an organisation called the _Kuratorium junger deutscher Film_ Committee of New German Cinema], devised and created by filmmakers, which gave a first start to many young West German directors.[* You had to submit your script and see if your film would be one of the few they decided to give money to. It was a decent amount of cash – about 300,000 DM for each film, around $200,000 – though you had to have the rest of the funding in place before they accepted your application. I had made three short films, each of which in some way caught the attention of the media and film festivals, and the screenplay for _Signs of Life_ had won the award a couple of years earlier. Although I already had some money to make _Signs of Life_ and felt myself to be an ideal candidate, I was denied _Kuratorium_ money for two years, probably because at the time there was nobody at the age of twenty-two who had produced and directed a feature film. I was just too young and inexperienced.
I did eventually benefit from the subsidy system, and acknowledge that the money it generated served as the cornerstone for several of my films, but I never felt it was the healthiest way to run things. It was decision-making by committee, some kind of artificial respiration, which has certain inbuilt weaknesses. Too many people were slaves to handouts, forever trying to fulfil the wishes of the boardroom, which is why so many of them made only one film, then gave up. They were too busy filling out paperwork. As soon as it became more difficult to qualify for subsidy money, many of these people dropped away; they weren't able to stand on their own two feet. When it comes to the kind of filmmaking I do, the free market is a harsher but more vibrant structure to function within. It's where the real battle is fought. If you can leave the respirator and submit yourself to the roughness of the market, you should. At the time I appreciated how lucky I was to be given certain opportunities, but felt I had to learn to walk on my own two feet as quickly as possible.
_Around the time of your first feature,_ Signs of Life, _what became known as New German Cinema emerged_.
So-called New German Cinema didn't have much significance for me because I started making films before the Oberhausen Manifesto was issued. There was a real culture of short films at the time, and I showed some of my work at the Oberhausen Film Festival, but never involved myself with the manifesto, which I was asked to sign. I found the whole thing too derivative of the French New Wave and considered the signatories a bunch of mediocre and insignificant epigones. Look at the list and you'll see that apart from Kluge and Reitz, only a tiny handful made any lasting impact as filmmakers. Most disappeared completely. Even experts in German cinema would have to dig deep into their encyclopaedias to find reference to these people. There was undoubtedly a rebirth of German cinema in the late sixties and into the seventies, but it's a myth that we were a coherent group, either stylistically or in terms of subject matter and theme. Everyone was producing very different films, and a few of us barely knew each other. I had loyalties to no one and felt distinctly alienated from some of my contemporaries and their work, like those doctrinaire political films that endlessly and stupidly postulated world revolution. They never had any mass appeal to audiences in West Germany, and rightly so. By the late sixties I had already produced a handful of films, and from my earliest days had spent time outside of Germany, so I could never realistically be seen as a spokesman for New German Cinema, which more than anything was a convenient construct of American and perhaps French journalists. Today I have no problems about being included because there was enough good work being done for me not to be embarrassed by it all. But I know I don't truly belong.
We were individuals making films independently of the mainstream industry in the country; that was the one crucial thing uniting us, not the films themselves. There was a highly active, collective excitement of the mind, a pragmatic solidarity between filmmakers, and several of us would assist each other logistically if we were able to. Having said that, when Schlöndorff and I would meet we would usually talk about women, and if I encountered Fassbinder at a film festival, with a glass of champagne in hand, some of his entourage thought I was gay because we gave each other a fleeting, rather shy hug. In public Rainer and I would be discreet about the things that mattered. When journalists expected some profound statement about cinema from either of us, I would point and say, "I like your tie." Our most intense discussions took place in his kitchen, deep into the night, fuelled by beer. Because he was so unruly – a sweaty, grunting wild boar crashing through the underbrush, leaving gaps wide open for others to walk through – and because of the recklessness of his private life, the media mistakenly labelled him a revolutionary, but I never considered him as such.
When I was doing pre-production for _Aguirre_ in Peru, without Fassbinder knowing I took his film _Katzelmacher_ down along with some of my own – and prints of Jean-Marie Straub's _The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach_ , Werner Schroeter's _Eika Katappa_ and Peter Fleischmann's _Hunting Scenes from Bavaria,_ all of which I had subtitled into Spanish – and held a mini-retrospective in Lima. These screenings, in a cinema I rented, were a big success, though at the time West German cinema was completely unknown down there. Later, when Fassbinder learnt that I had grabbed a print of his film and taken it with me, he was appreciative. I had the feeling that two or three of his films in a row weren't so good and I would lose heart; he made them so quickly, sometimes three or four a year. But then he would come out with a great one – like _The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant_ or _The Merchant of Four Seasons_ – and I would tell myself not to lose faith in the man.
German filmmakers came in waves. The first was the Oberhausen Manifesto people, who were generally older than people like Fassbinder, Wenders and me; I was part of the early second wave. Actually, Fassbinder and Wenders came a little later; they are almost the third wave. There were others who came after us with some fine films but who never persevered. They either dropped away entirely or started working exclusively in television, where there was more security.
_It took a while for the rest of the world to catch on to West German cinema._
You might say that by the time most people outside the country realised there was good work being done in Germany, New German Cinema was subsiding. For a brief moment a small number of West German filmmakers were able to screen their films internationally. You could see some Fassbinder, Schlöndorff and Wenders abroad, but never anything of Achternbusch or Werner Schroeter, who was one of the truly important filmmakers working in West Germany at the time. He had an extraordinarily innovative mind, though he was desperately underappreciated at home and elsewhere. In 1969, as a jury member at the Mannheim Film Festival, I insisted that his _Eika Katappa_ be given an award, against much cowardly opposition from the other jurors. The problem was that West German cinema had a tendency to be too provincial; it never occurred to some directors that they should try reaching international audiences. From my beginnings as a filmmaker I looked further than Germany's borders and was always hopeful my work would be distributed and appreciated overseas. It's gratifying to me that _Aguirre, the Wrath of God_ and _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ can be screened to audiences in London, Kiev and São Paulo, or to Native Indians in Peru, and be appreciated. I quickly realised that West German cinema wouldn't survive if it remained so insular.
Years ago I pulled up to a gas station in America's Deep South driving a car with Pennsylvania plates. The mechanic at the pump called me a Yankee and flatly refused to sell me any gas. A century and a half after the end of the Civil War, northerners still smell bad to southerners. Some people feel the same way about Germany today. Starting in 1945 there were two jobs of reconstruction: the cities had to be rebuilt physically, but just as important was the need to rebuild Germany's legitimacy as a civilised nation. The slow pace at which the collective consciousness changes is maybe one reason why recent German filmmakers had such a hard time exhibiting work outside their country so many years after the war. It isn't easy to say when German writers, painters and filmmakers will be able to retake their place, fully and freely, within international culture.
_Did you have any contact with the distribution company Filmverlag der Autoren?_
I was invited to be a part of the group when it started in 1971, but turned them down. The concept was good: filmmakers who had no access to distribution companies would create their own. But I didn't like the concoction of personalities at Filmverlag; there was something disparate about it that didn't feel right to me. If it had been just Fassbinder and a couple of others and me, then perhaps I would have trusted the operation, but there were some people involved who had an agenda and seemed disunited in their work. Later they distributed some of my early films, but I'm usually wary of collectives. They get watered down when mediocre people climb on board and the ship inevitably sinks. My advice is to find the best people and keep it exclusive.
Signs of Life, _inspired by a short story by Achim von Arnim, was your first feature film._
At the time I was reading about the Seven Years' War and issues of military strategy. I discovered a journal from 1807 that contained a short article about an incident in Marseille during the war in which a man became insane and locked himself up in a tower. It turned out von Arnim had used this same event when writing his story "Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau," written in the early nineteenth century.† Von Arnim's story is a wonderful tale about an old colonel sitting by the fireplace who gets so involved in telling a story he fails to notice that his wooden leg has caught fire. It's one of the few occasions – as with _Woyzeck_ and _Cobra Verde_ – when a piece of literature triggered a screenplay in my mind.
My travels to Greece when I was fifteen were the strongest influences on _Signs of Life_. I had spent time following in the footsteps of my paternal grandfather, Rudolph, investigating what he had done years before as an epigrapher and archaeologist on Kos. At a young age he ditched everything – he already had a university chair in Classics – and set off to become an archaeologist. He did his life's work on Kos, starting around 1902, carrying out important excavations for a few years; in the fortress where I shot _Signs of Life_ you can see inscriptions on stones that are the actual ones my grandfather translated and published more than sixty years earlier. Later he became insane, and I only got to know him when he was an old man. It was sad to see someone who had been so intuitively connected to the world suddenly so disorientated. For years, when he would read a book he would underline certain passages, but towards the end of his life he would carefully mark up page after page, until every line in the book was underscored. I loved my grandfather very much, though as children we were sometimes terribly cruel to him. We would hide behind the bushes in the garden and make fun of him by calling out nasty rhymes, like " _Herr Professor, Herr Professor, Menschenfresser!_ " ["Mr Professor, Mr Professor, cannibal!"], before climbing up the nearest tree, where he couldn't reach us. One time my grandmother used a wooden cooking spoon to give me the hardest spanking of my life.
Every evening my grandfather would pack his belongings into crates and stack up the furniture because he was convinced someone was going to arrive at the house with a truck, pick everything up and have him evicted. My grandmother endured a great deal. Every morning she would unpack his bags and put the table and chairs back in place. I can still hear her saying, "I have lived with him and loved him for so long that only over my dead body will he leave our home." One night my grandfather dressed for dinner, sat at the table, gently put his cutlery aside, folded his napkin, stood, bowed and said to my grandmother – who he no longer even recognised – "Madam, if I weren't already married I would ask you for your hand. How did I come to make your acquaintance?" It's a line I borrowed for _Nosferatu_. Although he was drifting into the night, my grandfather would often speak eloquently and coherently of his excavations as an archaeologist. He died when was I ten years old.
While in Greece, riding a donkey on Crete, I stumbled across the Lasithi Plateau. I was travelling over a mountain pass and looked down into a valley. Beneath me lay ten thousand revolving windmills; it was a field of spinning flowers gone mad. The squeaking noise alone was astonishing. My heart stood still and I had to sit down. "I have either gone insane or have seen something very significant," I said to myself. It turned out these frenzied windmills were real, pumping water for irrigation. I knew as I stood there I would return one day to make a film, and years later this cosmic image became a pivotal one in _Signs of Life_. My attention has always been drawn to the screams that emanate from certain images, and if something cries out so loudly and insistently, I respond. Had I never seen the windmills, I wouldn't have made the connection between this unimaginable ecstatic landscape and the von Arnim story, which I read later on.
Signs of Life _is set during the Second World War._
The story takes place during the Nazi occupation of Greece, so some people inevitably think it's an historical drama. But the facts of the occupation never interested me in this context, and there is absolutely nothing in the story that makes any direct reference to the Second World War. If a pedantic historian were to look carefully, doubtless they would find many falsehoods. I used a truck dating from the mid-fifties in the film, which was much cheaper than anything I could find from the forties, and when I show the soldiers they are almost always barefoot or shirtless and they never salute. When the captain has them fall in, one of the soldiers is munching on a roll. This has nothing to do with the Third Reich. How often do you see German soldiers acting as decently as this in a war film? Shakespeare based _Hamlet_ on events that took place hundreds of years before his time, yet the story's relevance is there not only for his time, but ours as well. _Signs of Life_ concerns itself not with a particular era or military conflict, but with the idea of putting instruments of war into the hands of individuals.
_Did_ Signs of Life _have a smooth production?_
As a filmmaker, dependent on so many things outside my control, making _Signs of Life_ was an important lesson for me. Things never go exactly as you hope. Whatever potentially can go wrong will eventually go wrong, and there's no point in fuming about it. I quickly learnt that this was the very nature of filmmaking, something that hit me harder and earlier than it did most of my colleagues. Throughout the shoot it became clear that I – as a filmmaker – attract certain troubles. It was as if a curse weighed on me. There were problems during the making of _Signs of Life_ that paved the way for what happened later with _Fata Morgana_ and _Fitzcarraldo_.
I secured permission to shoot where I wanted to, but three weeks before we were due to start filming a military _coup d'état_ took place in Greece. It was a dramatic moment, with multiple arrests of politicians, the immediate suppression of civil rights and suspension of the constitution. I was unable to contact anyone; telephone lines were down, airports were closed and trains were stopped at the border. I drove by car non-stop to Athens and discovered I wasn't allowed to shoot on Kos because the authorities were afraid of the military. My filming permits had become invalid overnight. The problems eventually died down, but then, well into the shoot, the lead actor, Peter Brogle, had an absurd accident and broke his heel bone. He had originally been a tightrope walker, so I suggested we shoot a sequence in the fortress where he walks from one wall to a small tower. He fixed the rope himself but fell about eight feet, and we were forced to suspend shooting for five months. It was unclear whether we would ever finish the film. When we all returned for a final ten days of filming it wasn't easy to find our rhythm again, especially because we could shoot Brogle only from the waist up; he had to wear a brace that kept his broken heel off the ground. When it came to the final sequences of the film, the military forbade me to use fireworks, though they were essential to the story. "You'll be arrested," an army major told me. "Then arrest me," I said, "but know that I will not be unarmed tomorrow, and the first man who approaches will drop dead with me." The next day there were fifty policemen and soldiers standing around watching me work, plus a few hundred people from the town who wanted to see the fireworks. None of them dared come close. My threat to carry a gun was an empty one, of course, but they weren't to know.
_What exactly is it that causes the main character, Stroszek, to go mad?_
He can't find the words to express himself or make himself understood, and is inhibited because of this. His eventual response is shooting fireworks at the sun, meeting absurdity with absurdity, violence with violence. I always felt Stroszek is actually quite sane.
There are some mysterious moments in the film, but I couldn't really tell you how they explain Stroszek's actions. In one scene he sits on the quay with some boys, one of whom says – for no apparent reason – "Now that I can talk, what shall I say?" before staring directly into the camera. Another moment is very important to me, when the two soldiers are on a reconnaissance mission. They meet a shepherd who lives in a remote house and gives them some water to drink. A young girl sits in the doorway. The shepherd explains that because her mother is out with the sheep all day and he works through the night, the girl rarely hears spoken words and hardly ever talks. "It's beautiful up here in the mountains, but there are no children here for her to talk to," he says. "Sometimes she picks up a few words down in town when she's with her aunt." The father then asks her to recite a poem to the soldiers. I wrote a text about ninety-eight sheep wandering around the Lasithi mountains, one of which gets lost, but purposely didn't give the girl much time to learn it and hid the entire crew behind the camera so she couldn't look around for help from anyone. As she starts to recite the poem she gets stuck and twists her skirt in despair. On her second attempt she got through the whole text beautifully, but I knew it was the first version that should be in the film.
Never in _Signs of Life_ did I want to concentrate on Stroszek's psychological state. Before his disintegration, the film is a series of scenes spread over weeks, but once he barricades himself in the fortress, laying siege to an entire town, the story is condensed into only a couple of days. At the moment he might become interesting to psychologists, we see him from a thousand feet away. In fact, we basically don't see him at all in the last twenty minutes of the film; his explosive responses and actions take over as he fires rockets across the bay, sets a chair on fire and shoots a donkey dead. Everyone – including Peter Brogle – asked me why I didn't move in for a close-up at this point. He told me it was important he be allowed to express his character's insanity on screen, then piped up with some drivel about how the human face is the most fascinating landscape on God's earth. "It is not," I told him. "You'll be more fascinating to the audience if they see you as big as an ant in the landscape." I have always preferred keeping a distance between camera and actors. Moving too close to a face is intrusive, almost a personal violation of whoever is in front of the camera. Close-ups aren't necessarily the apotheosis of psychological intimacy; you won't find many in my films. I prefer wide-angle shots because I want audiences to be aware of the physical space the characters inhabit. During the emotional moments in _Nosferatu_ – like the scene when Jonathan says goodbye to his wife – I filmed the actors from behind; we don't even see their faces. I have never wanted to see an actor weep. I want to make the audience cry instead.
_What did the public think of_ Signs of Life?
They were unimpressed. The film won the annual _Bundesfilmpreis_ [National Film Award] in West Germany, which meant money for my next production plus a trophy and handshake from the Minister of the Interior, and was awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Word spread, so there was some level of public awareness. I was invited to a screening in Wiesbaden after a local newspaper published an article about the film, and got to the place to find only nine people in the auditorium. It's the kind of shock I still feel in my bones. I have forever struggled to get audiences' attention in Germany; my films have never been as well received there as they have almost everywhere else in the world, by both reviewers and audiences. The fact is that Germany has never been a nation of film-goers; it's full of passive television viewers instead. For decades there has been insecurity among audiences, which is understandable as Germany was the cause of the two biggest catastrophes of humanity of the past hundred years. This has continued to make post-war generations very cautious. Whenever somebody sticks their head out too far from any kind of obscure or marginal trench – trying to draw attention to themselves or show their work to the world – the rest of the country is immediately suspicious.
The Germans have never liked their poets, at least not the living ones. Compare this to Ireland. I once stayed at a tiny guesthouse in Ballinskelligs, on the southwest coast. The landlady asked me what I did, and off the top of my head – I don't know why – I said, "I'm a poet." She opened her doors and gave me the room for half price. In Germany they would have thrown me out into the street. Years ago I had the good fortune to be able to descend eight floors into a nuclear-proof bunker under the state bank in Reykjavik, where the _Codex Regius_ is stored, a piece of literature that defines the Icelandic soul, similar in importance to the Dead Sea Scrolls for Israel. For three hundred years the Danes had owned this little wrinkled parchment, until it was returned to Iceland by Denmark's largest warship, accompanied by a submarine. Half of Iceland's population celebrated for five days and nights. When they discovered I had held the actual manuscript in my hands, I was treated like a king. Such things are inconceivable in Germany. Around the time of _Aguirre_ I was at a press conference in Cannes talking about the renaissance of West German cinema when I heard a laugh from the corner of the room where the Germans were sitting. People don't believe me when I tell them the ratings board hated _Aguirre_ and refused to acknowledge it had any cultural value, which meant there were no tax incentives for cinemas in West Germany to screen the film and it was treated like a hardcore porno. Years later it stunned me when _My Best Fiend_ was embraced by both the German press and audiences. I felt it was the first time they had truly accepted my work.
_How did the short_ Last Words _come about?_
The film was a departure into unknown terrain, as if there were no history of cinema preceding it. It has an utter disregard for the narrative "laws" that traditional cinema uses to tell stories. _Signs of Life,_ by comparison, is conventional indeed. Without _Last Words_ I don't think _Fata Morgana_ would have happened, nor would I have developed subsequent narrative stylisations in my work. I shot the film on Spinalonga, a little island off the coast of Crete, in two days and edited it in one. Everything about it was so evident and clear-cut to me that it has been a source of encouragement ever since.
The idea behind _Last Words_ is of a decaying island that has been evacuated because of an outbreak of leprosy. Bizarre stories are told about its former inhabitants, like the man with no legs and the woman with no arms who marry each other out of necessity. One man who has clearly lost his mind and believes himself to be king refuses to leave the island. He is forcibly brought to the mainland by the police, but remains defiant of the forces of society, even of the rules of language. Back living a so-called respectable life, the man continues to fight against the world and refuses to speak or go out, except at night, when he plays on his lyre. Not all of this is explained in the film; we get only glimpses and compulsive repetitions – for example, the man who tells the tale of the last Turk's last footprint. He jumped from a cliff into the sea and left a footprint behind him in the rock, and the Greeks have constructed a chapel on the spot. The man has scarcely finished telling this tale when he starts it again from the beginning, then retells it a third time. There are also the two policemen, to whom I said, "When you make a film you always do a scene over and over again, so please repeat the words ten times and I'll use the best version." They stand there together, in front of the camera, saying the same thing over and over again: "We got him from over there, we saved him," and "Hello, how are you doing?" By hearing these stories – again and again in quick succession – the language of these people takes on a strange quality, and despite the compulsion they are locked into, through their torment you get an inkling of who these people are. The lyre player was fascinating to me. All he recites for minutes on end is, "No, I'm not saying a word. Not a single word. Absolutely nothing. I won't even say no. You won't hear a word from me. I'm saying nothing. If you tell me to say no, I'll refuse to do even that."
Precautions Against Fanatics _is set at a racetrack where various individuals feel it necessary to protect the animals from various "fanatics."_
I went to the racetrack on the outskirts of Munich, where a number of prominent media figures and actors were taking part in an annual race, and when I saw them in training immediately decided to make a film. Like _Last Words_ , it's a bold short in its narrative structure and has a strange humour to it, though that might not be immediately evident to those who don't understand German. At the time audiences roared with laughter because all the people in the film are celebrities, like director Peter Schamoni, actor Mario Adorf and the sensational Serbian goalkeeper Petar Radenković, who played for Die Löwen [The Lions], a team from Munich. He was a loose cannon, a real eccentric who during a game would spot a duck at the side of the field and run after it. He was also known to dash out of his area and sprint towards the ball if a player got through the defence. The crowd would go wild whenever he made his way into the opponents' half of the pitch.
I talked Kodak into giving me some raw colour stock for free; it had been returned to them after apparently having been exposed to extreme heat in Africa and was also long beyond its expiration date. Under no circumstances can raw stock like this be sold, though apparently Kodak were interested in discovering if it could survive such disadvantageous conditions. They gave me about ten rolls only after I signed a letter of indemnity stating they had warned me it was unusable and weren't responsible for the results. I gladly took the stock and shot the film not knowing if I would end up with anything. I figured that if decades after Scott had died near the South Pole his negatives had been successfully developed, then this Kodak film was bound to be okay. We lost not a single frame, though the colours are a little off, which gives the images a strange quality. Sometimes I think about getting my hands on all the out-of-date stock out there and making a film or two.
_You went to Africa, where you interwove the filming of_ Fata Morgana, Even Dwarfs Started Small _and_ The Flying Doctors of East Africa.
_The Flying Doctors,_ filmed in Tanzania and Kenya, is what I call a _Gebrauchsfilm,_ a "utility" film. It's more a _Bericht_ – a report – made as a gift to the doctors than a film, and it earned them a fair amount of money, enough to purchase two small aeroplanes. I was asked to work on the project by a woman who raised funds for the doctors, and went with them into the field where they performed surgery, to places where people had never seen doctors before. While I was out with the flying doctors, they were primarily doing preventative medicine, in particular vaccinations and lectures, in this case against trachoma. Prevention is cheap and easy; the disease is caused by a lack of hygiene. I was allowed to fly on their tiny aeroplanes and shoot things I wouldn't otherwise have been able to film, material that was later incorporated into _Fata Morgana,_ like the beautiful aerial footage of Lake Nakuru, full of millions of pink flamingos.
Though I made _Flying Doctors_ with a specific purpose, it does offer some unusual observations. The most interesting scenes stem from my interest in vision and perception, the process of recognising images and how the brain sorts through and makes sense of them. One of the doctors in the film talks of showing a poster of a fly to the villagers, who had never seen photographs or images of any sort. "We don't have that problem," they said. "Our flies aren't that big." It was a response that fascinated me, so we took the posters – one of a man, one of a human eye that filled an entire piece of paper, another of a hut – and conducted an experiment. I asked if they could identify the human eye, and most of the villagers couldn't; the images were just abstract compositions to them. One man thought the window of the hut was an eye, and another pointed to the eye and said, "This is the rising sun." It was clear that certain elements of visual perception are in some way culturally conditioned, that these people were processing images differently to how Westerners might. There were other things that emerged, like the fact that – perhaps because of some ancient taboo – members of the Maasai tribe were extremely reluctant to enter the mobile medical unit. The trailer was elevated just two feet off the ground, but only a few eventually braved this obstacle and climbed the steps.
In _The White Diamond,_ decades later, Graham Dorrington tells Marc Anthony Yhap that when he first landed his airship, he had the feeling that local Amerindian children weren't able to see it, as if the airship was so inconceivable to them that it was invisible. He explains that when Captain Cook first landed on a Pacific island, the native Maoris apparently didn't see the boats because the concept of such a thing was beyond their bounds of perception. They couldn't comprehend the existence of such a thing. It's a wonderful idea, but doesn't sound very likely. After all, the Aztecs could clearly see the Spanish fleet of Cortés, and in the _Florentine Codex_ there are accurate descriptions and illustrations of a sighting of distant galleons and the landing of ships. However unfamiliar the concept of a galleon was to them, the Aztecs could still see them. Human figures in ancient Egyptian art are shown only in profile, but the fact that the Egyptians didn't represent perspective doesn't mean they couldn't recognise and understand it in real life.
_There is an image in_ The Flying Doctors of East Africa _of five Irish doctors_.
We see them from head to toe, staring into the lens, as they surreptitiously start to shuffle about as a group. "I don't want to move the camera towards you because I don't have a dolly and the shot would be too shaky," I explained, "but perhaps you can move imperceptibly towards me, as if you're floating." They were half embarrassed and half bemused, but as they start edging forward, an instantaneous empathy develops between them and us.
During the filming of _Flying Doctors_ I shot some sequences for _Fata Morgana_ in Tanzania and Kenya with cameraman Thomas Mauch. Then we went to Uganda with the intention of filming with John Okello, the man who a few years before had staged a rebellion in Zanzibar and declared himself field marshal and president. I had read wild stories about him in various newspapers; he was also the mastermind behind the atrocities committed against the Arab population there. I never did find Okello, though I corresponded with him for a time because he wanted me to translate his book into German and publish it,‡ something I never did, though a couple of years later I named a character in _Aguirre, the Wrath of God_ after him because the film owes something to his hysterical and atrocious fantasies. He would deliver incredible speeches from his aeroplane directly through to the radio, things like, "I, your field marshal, am about to land. Anyone stealing so much as a piece of soap will be slung into prison for 225 years." The tone of Okello's rants was a strong influence on the language that Aguirre uses. Near the end of his journey through the jungle, he warns his troops that anyone who eats so much as a single extra grain of corn will be locked up for 155 years, and whoever thinks about deserting will be cut into 198 pieces, then trampled on until his body can be used to paint walls.
_Did you go to the desert with a script for_ Fata Morgana _or was your plan just to document whatever you found?_
I never look for stories to tell; instead they assail me, and I knew there was something I needed to film in Africa. To me, those primordial and archetypal desert landscapes, strewn with debris, look completely unreal, as if from another planet; they had fascinated me since my first visit to the continent. But _Fata Morgana_ soon became an extremely difficult ordeal, something that rubbed off on the general feel of _Even Dwarfs Started Small,_ which was made almost immediately afterwards. Although I was cautious in Africa, things always went wrong for me there. I'm not one of those Hemingway Kilimanjaro nostalgia types who tracks animals through the underbrush with an elephant gun while being fanned by natives. Africa is a place that has always left me nervous, a feeling I will probably never be able to shake off due to my experiences there as a young man. What I experienced on the shoot of _Fata Morgana_ was no different.
We shot the film in bursts, starting at the end of 1968, then returned in the middle of 1969 and December of that year, and finally went back the following year during the summer. At no point was there a script; we filmed with no coherent sense of what we might do with the footage once we got home. My original idea was to go to the southern Sahara and shoot a science-fiction story involving aliens and ancient astronauts from the planet Uxmal in the Andromeda Nebula who arrive on Earth with a camera and film the planet and its inhabitants. They want to prepare a report for folks back home, but their spacecraft crashes. In the debris we humans discover their footage and edit the material into a kind of investigative film, a report of a strange, unknown planet, which enables us to see how aliens perceive us and our world.
On the first day of shooting I decided to scrap this idea. The visionary aspects of the desert landscape that had taken hold of me were much more powerful than any ideas I had brought with me, so I junked the story, opened my eyes and ears, and filmed the desert mirages. I asked no questions; I just let it happen. My reactions to what I was seeing around me were like those of an eighteen-month-old baby exploring the world for the first time. The film is like those moments when you are half asleep in the early morning and a series of wild, uncontrollable things flow through your mind. These are rarely orderly thoughts and images, yet they belong to you and have a mysterious coherence to them. It was as if I had woken up after a night of drunkenness and experienced a moment of real clarity. All I had to do was capture what I was seeing and I would have my film. Every night when I slept in the desert, I forgot about what I had shot the previous day. I worked as if in a dream or hallucination, never asking myself questions during the shoot or thinking about how to structure the material I was gathering. I went to sleep in the sand without the faintest idea of what I was going to film the following day. Interestingly, there does remain in _Fata Morgana_ a distant echo of science fiction, with its imagery of the beauty, harmony and horror of a world that is obviously our own, even though it seems like a distant alien planet.
_What is a Fata Morgana?_
A mirage, one which you can actually film in the desert. You can't capture hallucinations – which are only in your own mind – on celluloid, but mirages are something different. A mirage is a mirror reflection of an object that exists and that you can see. It's similar to you taking a photograph of yourself in the bathroom mirror. You aren't really there in the reflection, but you can still capture the image of yourself on celluloid. The best example is the sequence of the bus on the horizon, which was shot with a long telephoto lens. The vehicle seems to be almost floating on water, and it looks as if the people are gliding alone. We filmed much of _Fata Morgana_ in the afternoon, when the heat – which that day was truly beyond belief – creates a strange hallucinatory quality. We were extremely thirsty and knew some of the buses had supplies of ice and cooled water on board, so immediately after filming we all rushed over there. From a distance the bus looked as if it were no more than a mile away, but we couldn't find a single trace of anything. No tyre tracks, no tracks at all. There was nothing there, nor had there ever been anything there, and yet we had been able to film it. There must have been a bus somewhere – maybe twenty or a hundred or three hundred miles away – which was visible to us because of the heated strata of air that reflected the image of this vehicle.
The opening sequence was filmed at Munich airport one hot summer's day and is comprised of eight shots of eight different aeroplanes landing one after the other, starting early in the morning. The hotter the air became, the more the heat shimmered and distorted the images. Eventually something visionary sets in – like fever dreams – and it remains for the rest of the film. The more aeroplanes that land, the stronger the sense of unreality. I had the feeling that audiences who were still watching by the sixth or seventh landing would stay to the end of the film; the opening sequence lays out the challenge of what is to come. The first three minutes allow viewers to acclimatise themselves to _Fata Morgana'_ s unusual tone. They divide the audience into those who walk out, those who fall asleep and those whose eyes remain affixed.
_You filmed in the Sahara._
Deserts are mysterious places. The Sahara is so unreal it's like being in a perpetual dream or on another planet. It isn't merely a landscape, it's a way of life. The solitude is the most overwhelming thing; a hushed quality envelops everything. At night the stars are so close that you can harvest them with your outstretched hands. Although we were driving, the spirit of our journey was like one made on foot, something only people who have travelled through the desert can truly understand. My time there was part of an ongoing quest.
There were four of us: me; Hans Dieter Sauer, a mountain climber who had studied geophysics and had already crossed the Sahara several times; photographer Gunther Freyse; and cameraman Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein. The whole thing started rather unfortunately. On our first day, barely out of Munich, I accidentally banged the hood of one of the cars down on Schmidt-Reitwein's hand. The bones in one of his fingers were smashed and he needed special steel wire to fix everything in place. We drove down to Marseilles in two cars, which we also slept in because we couldn't afford hotels, and from there to Africa. Once we reached the desert there were real technical problems. The emulsion on raw stock doesn't take heat well, and at one point it was more than 120ºF in the shade. During sandstorms it was impossible to keep the cameras totally sealed and free of sand; we spent days cleaning them and finding ways to keep the raw stock cool. You don't notice how much you sweat in the desert – particularly a salt desert – because it evaporates immediately, so drinking a minimum of eight litres of water is imperative. Freyse was so thirsty he started fantasising about wells and declared he was going to jump, ass first, into the next one we found. Fortunately I checked before he leapt. It was more than two hundred feet deep, and empty.
I looked at various books beforehand and had a vague idea of where I wanted to go. We visited the salt flats of Chott el Djerid, before heading south to the Hoggar mountains in the Algerian desert, then to the Republic of Niger, where we ran straight into a sandstorm that took several days to recover from. By the time we reached the southern Sahara it was the start of the rainy season, and the sudden flash floods became the most serious problem. More people die in the Sahara from flooding than from dehydration. I still remember the thunderstorms and lightning that lit up the sky with such intensity that you could have stood outside, in the middle of the night, and read a newspaper. We planned to arrive during the hottest time of year because that was the best moment to film mirages, so we had no choice but to accept these fierce challenges of nature and particularly difficult conditions. After that we drove to Côte d'Ivoire to film in a lagoon, which is where the procession and chants I used in _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ were shot. I wanted to go back to Uganda to film up in the Ruwenzori mountains – where there is a kind of prehistoric landscape with unusually mysterious and luxurious vegetation ten thousand feet up – but we weren't able to cross Nigeria because of the raging civil war. Eventually we decided to head to the Congo, and ended up travelling to Cameroon by boat, then heading northeast overland.
Almost immediately after arriving in Cameroon, things got completely out of hand. There had been an abortive _coup d'état_ in the country a few weeks before we arrived. All four of us were arrested because Schmidt-Reitwein had the bad luck of having a name similar to that of a German mercenary the authorities were looking for and who had been sentenced to death _in absentia_. They were convinced they had caught a wanted man, so we were thrown into a narrow cell with no water, food or light and sixty other men. For many it was standing room only, and someone in there was close to death after having been badly beaten. Whenever anyone used the toilet bucket in the corner, everyone would shout and sing obscene songs, but when I sat on the bucket the whole place went dead silent. I fervently prayed for them to make noise. I don't want to go into details, but we were no longer in control of the situation. Schmidt-Reitwein and I both contracted malaria and bilharzia, a blood parasite. We were unable to contact the German embassy, and when we finally got out, quite ill, there was still a warrant out for us – either on purpose or because the slovenly officials had forgotten to withdraw it – so we were arrested again. We stopped shooting only when we were too sick to continue. On arrival in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, we took an aeroplane back to Germany. We had been in the desert for three months.
_Fata Morgana_ was a difficult film to make, but I learnt how to wrestle something creative from a bad set of circumstances and come up with something clear, transparent and pure. Two months later I was in Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, to start work on _Even Dwarfs Started Small,_ which is where I finished shooting _Fata Morgana_.
_Who are the people in the film?_
We stumbled across them, including the woman on the piano and the guy with goggles playing the drums who play some of the saddest music I have ever heard. I gave him the goggles and stuck black paper over them so he couldn't see anything. We shot that scene in a brothel in Lanzarote during production on _Even Dwarfs Started Small;_ she's actually the madam and he's a pimp. He was in charge of discipline and would beat any prostitute who hadn't pleased her client. In some way the film is about ruined people in ruined places, and that sequence spoke of a terrible sadness and despair. There is one rather strange image in the film which I shot on Lanzarote, amidst its bizarre rock formations, where grapes for Malvasia wine are grown. We encountered a busload of Western tourists, who I asked to climb down into the holes in the ground and go as crazy as they could, flailing about. I think it was in the Republic of Niger where we met the nurse who stands in the puddle with the children, teaching them to say _"Blitzkrieg ist Wahnsinn"_ ["War is madness"]. I found a boy with a pet fennec fox and asked him to hold it up to the camera. I promised he would be well paid if he didn't move or blink. He stood absolutely still for ten minutes, then walked away.
To this day I find the man who reads the letter he takes from his pocket very moving. He was a German who lived in great poverty in Algeria, a former foreign legionnaire who fought on the side of the French against the Algerian revolutionaries, but at one point during the war he had deserted and switched sides. I liked the attitude of the villagers who took care of him; the Muslim world deals with people like this with great dignity. By the time we met him he had basically lost his mind and was carrying a letter that had been written by his mother probably fifteen years before. You can see it's in tatters; he had kept it under his shirt all this time. He proudly read the letter to us on camera, but I always felt that he wasn't actually reading it, just inventing something. I think he had forgotten how to read and write. There is great sadness here; it's obvious he'll never get home again. The man wearing goggles with the reptiles was from Switzerland and had clearly been out in the sun too long. He owned the little hotel where we stayed during the shooting of _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ ; at the time it was the only one on the island, inconceivable now when you see what the place has become after the infection of tourism. Under the cliffs of Bandiagara in Mali we filmed an old man with his medals – probably awarded for his service with the French army – standing next to a boy carrying a radio, then walking slowly towards the camera. He spoke to us in a Dogon dialect. To this day I have never asked anyone to translate it.
The long tracking shot of the sand dunes was done from the roof of our VW van. It took real work because we spent days smoothing out the terrain before we filmed. Vast areas needed to be cleared up – something we did ourselves under incredible heat – because I felt that one six-minute shot would be more interesting than a series of short shots. Schmidt-Reitwein was on the roof of the car with the camera, and I was driving, with one eye on the dunes. It was important to understand how to move with the rhythm and sensuousness of the landscape, so I was constantly slowing down and speeding up. All the strange machinery you see in the film, these absurd and desolate fragments of civilisation simmering under the sun, was part of an abandoned Algerian army depot. We would find things lying in the middle of the desert – a cement mixer or something like that – a thousand miles from the nearest major settlement or town. Was it ancient astronauts who placed these things there? Were they man-made? If so, what purpose could they possibly serve? These are the embarrassed landscapes of our planet, the kinds of images that appear throughout my work, from _Fata Morgana_ to _Lessons of Darkness_ and beyond.
_The structure of the film was conceived during editing._
There were no opportunities to look at rushes while we were shooting, and once we finished filming I had no clear idea what had been shot, so the editing of _Fata Morgana_ was a more important process to me than it had been on my work up to that point, though in a strange way the film's rhythm was still established during shooting. We brought the footage home and ploughed through everything. The film has a three-part structure: "Creation," "Paradise" and "The Golden Age." During editing I looked at every shot and said, "This belongs to the first part and this to the last." Some of the images I organised, some organised themselves.
As I sat watching the footage, I felt that a Mayan text I had stumbled across when living in Mexico – the sacred book of the Quiché Indians, _Popol Vuh,_ one of the most beautiful things I have ever read – corresponded to the images I was looking at. _Popol Vuh_ consists of long passages on the heroic exploits of the first migrations, and I decided to adapt the Creation myths at the beginning of the book for the voiceover of "Creation," the film's first third, in which we see a wrecked aeroplane, piles of machinery, empty oil drums, the flames of a refinery and the carcasses of rotting animals. In _Popol Vuh_ we learn that the initial creation of the earth was such a failure that the gods started again – I think it was four times – and by the end they had entirely wiped out the people they had originally created. I found all this particularly interesting because I never felt connected to the Christian concept of Creation I had grown up with, one that culminates in a planet of equilibrium and beauty. There is something primordial and anarchic about Mayan myths that goes beyond our Western way of thinking. They remind me of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych _The Garden of Earthly Delights,_ in the first part of which he shows us Paradise, in which something dark and ominous, almost cannibalistic, lurks; we see a creature that has caught something in its mouth, but Adam and Eve are oblivious. Murder and disaster are implanted in part one of the painting and inevitably spread into the other two panels. According to Bosch, Hell – on the right side of the triptych – is inevitable because during Creation, on the left side, God made so many mistakes. The other two sections of the film – "Paradise" and "The Golden Age" – use texts that I mostly wrote myself. "Paradise," in which the voiceover announces that "The gates of Paradise are open to everybody," is full of damaged people, like the impoverished quarry workers covered head to toe in slaked lime. There is also a bizarre, unfinished factory being constructed in the middle of the desert, hundreds of miles from any human habitation. No one could tell us what it was for or who was building it.
_Fata Morgana_ remains close to my heart because two remarkable people assisted me with the film. One was Lotte Eisner, who did the original German voiceover and about whom I will talk later. I travelled to her Paris apartment with a Nagra and recorded it in a single take, with no rehearsals. The other was historian Amos Vogel, who refined the English translation I did of the voiceover. Amos was a remarkable man, a true visionary and great film scholar who was a mentor to me for decades. He grew up in Vienna and escaped with his family from Austria before the Holocaust, eventually arriving in New York, where he established the film club Cinema 16. Later he was instrumental in creating the New York Film Festival, which he ran for several years. I first met Amos at the Oberhausen Film Festival in the mid-sixties, where he stood up for a film of mine that had been derided by the crowd. "Do whatever you want," he said. "Boo and hiss as loud as you can. This film will outlive us all." He was a deeply impressive man, the person who one day, out of the blue, said to me, "You look like someone who should have children." I named my first son after him: Rudolph Amos Ahmed Herzog. The name Ahmed comes from the last surviving workman from my grandfather's excavation on Kos; he was seven years old when my grandfather took him in and gave him a job. Ahmed was overjoyed that I made the journey to Kos, at the age of fifteen, so many decades later, and took me on a tour of the site where my grandfather had worked. He opened all the empty drawers and cupboards in his house, proclaiming, "This is all yours!" Ahmed appears briefly in _Signs of Life_ , and even today I find seeing his dignified presence on screen a moving experience. The Greek children would make fun of him because he was a Muslim who prayed so many times a day. He even wanted me to marry his granddaughter. I politely declined, but promised I would have children one day and name the first of them after him. So my first son ended up with three names.
_The music in_ Fata Morgana _always fits the images_.
The tracking shot of the dunes felt like a feminine landscape, and by playing a recording of a women's choir singing Mozart's _Coronation Mass_ audiences are seized more powerfully by the shot. Some images become clearer and more understandable when a particular piece of music is playing behind them. They don't physically change, but their inner qualities are exposed and new perspectives opened up. Music is able to make visible what is latent; it reveals new things to us, helps shift our perception and enables us to see deeper into things. We perceive what we would otherwise be oblivious to. An image might not be logical in a narrative sense, but when music is added – even if it somehow disrupts and undermines that image – certain qualities might all of a sudden become transparent that were previously unknown. This can work the other way round, when a piece of music is transformed and resonates with new meaning if juxtaposed with a specific image.
Look at the opening moments of _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ with the boat, the tower and the washerwoman. Some of those shots were filmed with a telephoto lens, on top of which I mounted a wide-angle lens, which gives an eerie quality. These images might not make strict sense in terms of the story, but they acquire a dynamic internal logic when accompanied by an aria from Mozart's _The Magic Flute_. Listen carefully to the soundtrack during the lengthy shot of the windmills in _Signs of Life_ , which is as important as the imagery. I started by taking the recording of nearly a thousand people clapping at the end of a concert, then distorting it electronically until it sounded like pieces of wood clacking together. I added another sound, what you hear when you put your ear on a telegraph pole and the wind passes through the wires. As children we called it "angel song." This constructed soundtrack doesn't physically alter the thousands of windmills or the landscape, but it does change the way we look at them. This is what I have always tried to render in my films: a new perspective, one that touches us deeper than realistic sounds and images. Such things are beyond verbal explanation; combining images with music is a wholly intuitive process. The point is that there is no such thing as background music in my films. It's always an integral part of the whole.
There are very few directors who truly understand the possibilities of music in cinema. Two exceptions come to mind, both of whom are extraordinarily lucid in their use of music: Satyajit Ray and the Taviani brothers. I doff my hat to them. In the Taviani brothers' _Padre Padrone_ the music suddenly starts up and builds until an entire landscape appears to be in mourning. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, but the television network in West Germany that co-produced the film said it wasn't going to release it theatrically and would screen it only on television. "No matter what your contract might say," I told the television executives, "this film will be released in cinemas." The next day Volker Schlöndorff and I, along with several other filmmakers and my young son, chained ourselves to the gates of a cinema in Munich in protest. The film is about a shepherd, so we brought a sheep with us. The press reports of this stunt somehow triggered various people to ask the fundamental question: why can't we see _Padre Padrone_ on the big screen? Eventually the film – which remains one of my favourites – was released in cinemas, and I reviewed it for a newspaper.§
_You chose not to release_ Fata Morgana.
Today I can see elements of the film in my more recent work, like _The Wild Blue Yonder_ and _Encounters at the End of the World,_ with the images of the Ross Ice Shelf and tunnels under the South Pole and the frozen sturgeon. But immediately after finishing _Fata Morgana_ I had a feeling it was inaccessible to audiences, that they would ridicule it. It seemed dangerously fragile, like a cobweb, and I didn't consider it a robust or releasable piece of work. Sometimes it's better to keep things under wraps, passing them from friend to friend, never making them public. Only after several generations should a film be released. I held on to _Fata Morgana_ for almost two years without showing it, but was deviously tricked by my friends Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, and Lotte Eisner, who worked there as a curator. They borrowed a print and screened it at the Cannes Film Festival. When I saw the public's reaction, I knew the film could be shown in other places too, including the New York Film Festival. It was eventually released and considered by some people as one of the first European art-house psychedelic films, a genre with which it has absolutely no connection. Today, more than forty years later, _Fata Morgana_ is very much alive to audiences; it's like nothing they have ever seen before, and everyone comes away with their own understanding. Perhaps more than any other of my films, it needs to be completed by those who watch it, which means all feelings, thoughts and interpretations are welcome.
_Why dwarfs in_ Even Dwarfs Started Small?
German culture is full of them, from the earliest fairy tales through to Wagner and _The Tin Drum_. The dwarfs in the film aren't freaks; these are well-proportioned and beautiful midgets. If you are only two feet tall, it's the world around you that's completely out of proportion: motorcycles are monstrous, beds and door handles are huge, the world of commerce is grotesque, and education, table manners and religious education are all horrific abnormalities. Even flowerpots have the strangest of dimensions. If the film has a "message," it's that we and the society we have constructed for ourselves – with oppressive and institutionalised violence, rules and regulations – are monstrous, not the dwarfs. We all have something dwarfish, inadequate, impotent and insignificant inside us, as if there is an essence or concentrated form of each of us screaming to escape, a perfectly formed representation of who we are. Think about the laughter we hear at the end of the film, which is laughter that can never be surpassed. A very real nightmare for some people is knowing that deep down they are a dwarf. Sometimes, when I was working on the film, I woke up in terror and had to feel about with my arms and legs. Was I still as big as I was when I went to sleep? Reactions to _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ seem to depend on people's feelings about their inner dwarf.
_Where did you find the actors?_
When you find one midget you find several, so for a year I went from one to the next, hiring everyone. They were happy to make the film, and I would always ask their opinions about what was or wasn't suitable. For the first time they were able to reveal their real personalities to the world. If the dwarfs are good in the film, it's because they express genuine humanity, and by doing so affirm their dignity. A deep relationship formed between the actors and the crew, and after a week of working with them I completely forgot they were so tiny. They really got into the spirit of things. The one up on the roof of the car as it goes round in circles was truly a bold little guy, and he was actually run over by this automobile. I thought he was dead, but he scrambled to his feet, proud of having done something that would usually have been entrusted to a stuntman. Later in the film, when the dwarfs burn the flowerpots, they really did water them with gasoline. All of a sudden this same dwarf caught fire. The crew stood there, looking at him as he burned like a Christmas tree, so I ran over and smothered him beneath me to extinguish the flames. Fortunately only his ear was singed.
Incidents like these led to a little side event being reported in almost every biography of me. As I have already explained, being on equal terms with the crew and actors is vital. A director should never be safe behind the camera while everyone else is alone out there. The day this little guy caught fire, I told everyone, "If all of you get out of this film unscathed, if you're unhurt at the end, I will jump into that field of cacti. Get your 8mm cameras ready. I'm going to do the big leap into the plants for you." I thought I should give them something for their family album, the way kids on snowboards leap up into the air and strike a pose. I put on some goggles to protect my eyes and jumped from a ramp, but miscalculated. I can tell you that getting out is more difficult than jumping in. Any old idiot can make the leap, but it takes great skill to extricate yourself from something like that. The spines were the size of my fingers. I don't think there are any left embedded. The body seems to absorb them eventually.
_Where is the film set?_
In the published script it says the story takes place near San Cristóbal, in Chiapas, Mexico, at an institution for juvenile offenders. But I couldn't say for sure.
We filmed for five weeks, and were especially careful with the sound because I knew it was important to record all the dialogue live. Hombre's unique high-pitched voice is the reason you could never dub a film like this into another language. On the first day of shooting I discovered he had an extraordinarily shrill laugh, so I would grab and tickle him when he wasn't expecting it. "Your laughter is more important than any spoken words in this film," I told him. I found his laughter – which he would secretly rehearse – so astonishing that I decided it would carry the end of the film, with the shot of him and the dromedary as he literally laughs himself to death. In the final frames it's almost as if he is screaming for help. That one sequence sums up the whole film. "Give it your best laughter," I told him. "This is your big moment. Go wild. We'll shoot it only once, but make sure you give the ultimate performance. You'll be the last thing in the film." He gave it everything he had and even started to cough, but kept on going. If I had gone back three weeks later, he would have still been there. Eventually the moment came when I couldn't take it any longer. "This really is too much," I said to myself. "Let's go home. End of film."
The scene with the car that drives round in circles – an image you also see at the end of _Stroszek_ – was inspired by a real experience of mine. When I was a teenager I had an absurd job as a parking attendant at the Oktoberfest. There was an area filled with Ferris wheels and other rides next to a gigantic meadow, which was used as a parking lot, and every night I had to cope with two thousand drunkards. The Bavarian police weren't much help; they would let people drive off unless they were half unconscious. Some were so far gone I confiscated their keys and hoisted them from their cars. They wouldn't even bother getting up and just fell asleep there and then. Sometimes I would take an automobile, lock the steering wheel in place, step out and let it drive around in circles until it ran out of gas.
_Where does the opening music come from?_
I asked a young girl, perhaps eleven years old, from Lanzarote to sing a local song, which I recorded in a cave, gaving it a strange, unique sound. "Sing until your soul departs," I said. "Sing your lungs out of your body." What she did has something wild and ecstatic about it, and corresponds perfectly with the rest of the film. _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ also has music that I originally recorded for _Fata Morgana:_ a thousand-person choir in a cathedral at Grand Lahou in Côte d'Ivoire. I had gone there because someone claiming to be the Messiah had created his own little state where a group of people lived; he would preach in the cathedral and perform miracles for the locals. We went there on a Sunday and encountered an extraordinary procession and beautiful singing. If you look carefully, you'll find other things from _Fata Morgana_ that seeped into _Even Dwarfs Started Small,_ like the goggles the two blind dwarfs wear. In many ways the films intermingle.
_How different do you think_ Even Dwarfs Started Small _would have been if your experiences in the desert had been less harrowing?_
When I returned to Lanzarote I was still much affected by sickness and the hardships of the production of _Fata Morgana_. The resulting film became much more radical than I had originally planned, and when I look back, it's clear I made _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ to free myself from recent bad memories; _Aguirre_ looks like kindergarten in comparison. Somehow I had the feeling that if Goya and Bosch had the guts to do their gloomiest stuff, why shouldn't I? There was such pressure inside me that I felt the necessity to share these visions. Up until that point my other films had been quite discreet, but _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ screams loudly at audiences. When it was first screened in cinemas, I asked projectionists to turn up the volume because I felt the film's impact would be diminished if it weren't loud enough. It all sounds so gloomy when I talk about it here, but the film has a genuinely playful tone and is actually a comedy. Destroying everything they can find and turning everything upside down has been a truly memorable day for the midgets; you can see the joy in their faces. Audiences walk out aching from laughter.
_The film wasn't widely seen._
In West Germany at the time we had something called _Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle_ , which was essentially voluntary censorship. After the Nazi era, the West German constitution refused to accept any sort of censorship, though the film industry had a self-imposed set of rules. You weren't legally obliged to submit your films to the censorship board, and if you chose to bypass it there were no penalties per se, but distributors generally wouldn't touch films that hadn't been passed, and most cinemas refused to screen them. I submitted _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ , and the board banned it from the first to the last minute. I appealed the decision and said they would be forever ashamed if the film went unseen in West Germany, then rented a handful of cinemas in a couple of towns to screen it myself. Eventually it was released uncut, and I got several death threats. A white-supremacist militia from Bavaria called every week to tell me I was second on their "to kill" list. To this day the film has never been broadcast on German television.
_Even Dwarfs Started Small_ was accused of being anarchistic and blasphemous, which I suppose it is. The film certainly breaks a number of taboos, though none of the criticisms bothered me because time always somehow allocates the correct significance to things. The animal-rights people were furious at the scene in which the monkey is tied to the cross and paraded about, though we used soft wool to hold the creature down. The religious song the dwarfs sing meant the Catholics were also breathing down my neck, and the final scene caused problems because a rumour went around that to get the dromedary on its knees for so long I cut its sinews. I quickly learnt that you can't kill a rumour with a fact; you kill it only with an even wilder rumour. I immediately issued a statement explaining that I had actually nailed the dromedary to the ground. That shut everybody up. In reality the creature was a docile and well-trained animal whose owner was standing two feet outside the frame giving it orders. He was trying to confuse the dromedary by constantly giving it conflicting orders by hand: sit down, stand up, stand still. Not knowing what to do, the animal defecated in despair, something that looks exquisite on screen.
The only film I can think of that has a similar quality to _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ is Tod Browning's _Freaks_ , which, with its exceptionally dark vision, I consider to be one of the greatest films ever made. I hadn't actually seen _Freaks_ when I made my film, but after finally watching it I was overjoyed to discover that forty years before me there was a filmmaker doing something comparable. Although the monsters in _Freaks_ are portrayed with real tenderness, it seems that Browning was apologetic about his film, and maybe never knew what a great piece of work he had created.
_You have described your films as "the articulation of collective dreams."_
The images in my films are your images too. Somehow, deep in your subconscious, you find them, dormant, lurking, like sleeping friends; they correspond with the inner landscapes inside us all and strike directly into the soul of man. Occasionally – perhaps only a dozen times throughout my life – I have read a text, listened to a piece of music, watched a film or studied a painting and felt that my existence has been illuminated. Even if centuries are being bridged, I instantly feel I'm not so alone in the universe. Watching one of my films is like receiving a letter announcing you have a long-lost brother, that your own flesh and blood is out there in a form you had never previously experienced. This is one reason why so many people around the world seem to connect with my films, which represent the universal visions buried within us all. None of my work is subject to trends or historical movements.
In no way would I compare myself to the man, but allow me to cite his name to make a point. I once went to the Vatican to see Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that before he started painting, no one had articulated and depicted human pathos with such clarity. Pathos had always existed, but Michelangelo was the first to really express it. Since then we have been able to understand ourselves that much deeper. The purpose of the filmmaker is to record and guide, as chroniclers of past centuries did. Like many people who express themselves through images or writing, I am seeking some insight into human nature. There's nothing exceptional about this; most painters and writers with any skill are working away at the same thing. It isn't that I'm particularly inventive, only that I am able to awaken certain feelings and thoughts inside of you. I can see, on the horizon, unpronounced and unproclaimed images. I can sense the hypnotic qualities of things that to everyone else look unobtrusive, then excavate and articulate these collective dreams with some clarity.
_Apparently you never dream at night._
Every morning upon waking I feel a deficit. "Again! Why haven't I dreamt?" This might be one reason why I make films. Maybe I want to create images for the screen that are so obviously absent from my head at night. Perhaps my films are a way of filling this void. Please note, however, that I constantly daydream.
_You really never dream?_
It's very much a singular event for me, perhaps once every couple of years. And my dreams – always in monochrome – are very prosaic, something like me eating a sandwich. Do the psychoanalysts really want to spend time on that?
* The not-for-profit _Kuratorium,_ funded by the Ministry of the Interior, was established to put the proposals of the Oberhausen Manifesto into practice. Submitted scripts were read by film reviewers. Between 1965 and 1968 the _Kuratorium_ assisted in the financing of twenty films by providing interest-free loans.
† Translated as "The Mad Veteran of the Fort Ratonneau" in _The Blue Flower: Best Stories of the Romanticists_ , edited by Hermann Kesten (Roy, 1946).
‡ _Revolution in Zanzibar_ (East African Publishing House, 1967).
§ "Vom Ende des Analphabetismus," _Die Zeit,_ 24 November 1978. In his review, Herzog compares the Taviani brothers' film to two other recent books published in Germany, all "cases of village illiterates who, through appalling suffering, liberate themselves from backwardness and isolation by their own strength. At the same time these books illuminate something else, the fact that the phenomenon of illiteracy has another side to it. It is a form of experience and intelligence which is necessarily being lost in our civilisation, a cultural asset disappearing from the Earth." Translated by Martina Lauster.
# Adequate Imagery
_Do you have an ideology, something that drives you beyond mere storytelling?_
"Mere storytelling," as you put it, is enough for a film. Steven Spielberg's films might be full of special effects, but audiences appreciate them because at the centre of each is a well-crafted story. Spielberg deserves the position he is in because he understands something that those who are concerned only with the fireworks of flashy visuals don't. If a story in a narrative film doesn't function, that film won't function.
My films come to me very much alive, like dreams, without explanation. I never think about what it all means. I think only about telling a story, and however illogical the images, I let them invade me. An idea comes to me, and then, over a period of time – perhaps while driving or walking – this blurred vision becomes clearer in my mind, pulling itself into focus. I see the film before me, as if it were playing on a screen, and it soon becomes so transparent that I can sit and write it all down, describing the images passing through my mind. I don't write a script if I can't see and hear the entire film – characters, dialogue, music, locations – in my head. I have never written a screenplay for anyone else because I see my stories in a certain way and don't want anyone else to touch them. When I write, I sit in front of the computer and pound the keys. I start at the beginning and write fast, leaving out anything that isn't necessary, aiming at all times for the hard core of the narrative. I can't write without that urgency. Something is wrong if it takes more than five days to finish a screenplay. A story created this way will always be full of life. I saw the whole of _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ as a continuous nightmare in front of my eyes and was extremely disciplined while typing so I wouldn't make any mistakes. I just let it all pour out and didn't make more than five typos in the entire screenplay.
People sense I am well orientated, that I know where I have come from and where I'm headed, so it's understandable that they search for some guiding ideology behind my work. But no such thing exists as far as I'm concerned. There is never some philosophical idea that guides a film through the veil of a story. All I can say is that I understand the world in my own way and am capable of articulating this understanding through stories and images that are coherent to others. I don't like to drop names, but what sort of an ideology would you push under the shirt of Conrad or Hemingway or Kafka? Goya or Caspar David Friedrich? Even after watching my films, it bothers some audiences that they are unable to put their finger on what my credo might be. Grasp this with a pair of pliers, but the credo is the films themselves and my ability to make them. This is what troubles those people who have forever viewed my work with tunnel vision, as if they were looking through a straw they picked up at McDonald's. They keep searching. No wonder they get desperate.
_Some of these milkshake-drinkers have located themes running throughout your work._
Apparently so, but don't ask me to do the same. A film is a projection of light that becomes something else only when it crosses the gaze of the audience, with the viewer able to connect what he is looking at with something deeper within himself. Everyone completes images and stories in a different way because everyone's perspective is unique, so it's never been a good idea for me to explain what my films might mean. The opinion of the public, however different from my own, is sacred. Whenever anyone asks me if Stroszek kills himself at the end of _Stroszek,_ I tell them they're free to choose the ending that best works for them. If anyone is expecting a statement from me on such matters, it would be best if they put this book down right now and poured themselves a glass of wine. Consider this line from Walt Whitman: "Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity. When I give I give myself." None of my films were made following deep philosophical contemplation. My way of expressing certain ideas – our deep-rooted hopes and gnawing fears – is by rendering them visible on screen.
Those hordes who write about cinema have often been trained to think in certain ways, to analyse a body of work and investigate apparent connections, to bring certain rigid, fashionable theories to bear and show off everything they know while doing so. They read their own intellectual make-up and approach to life into my films, apparently deciphering things that for me don't need to be deciphered, and by churning out page after page of unappealing prose actually obscure and confuse. It doesn't mean they're right, it doesn't mean they're wrong. They function in their world, and I in mine. I want to appeal to people's instincts before anything else. When I present an audience with a new film I hope they bring only their hearts and minds, plus a little sympathy. I ask for no more than that. Film isn't the art of scholars but of illiterates. It should be looked at straight on, without any prefabricated ideas, which is something Henri Langlois knew all too well. At the Cinémathèque Française he would screen films from around the world – in Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese – without subtitles. It means audiences had to cultivate a kind of intelligence and intensity of vision that has little to do with rational thought. They almost developed their own sense of illiteracy, tapping into an innate but usually long-dormant facility.
_You must be able to see some connections between your films._
People say I'm an outsider, but even if everyone finds me eccentric, I know I'm standing at the centre. There is nothing eccentric about my films; it's everything else that's eccentric. I never felt that Kaspar Hauser, for example, was an outsider. He might have been continually forced to the sidelines, he might have stood apart from everyone, but he's at the true heart of things. Everyone around him, with their deformed souls, transformed into domesticated pigs and members of bourgeois society, they are the bizarre ones. Aguirre, Fini Straubinger and Stroszek all fit into this pattern. So do Walter Steiner, Hias in _Heart of Glass,_ Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, the Aborigines of _Where the Green Ants Dream_ and the desert people of _Fata Morgana_. Look at Reinhold Messner, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Nosferatu and even Kinski himself, or Vladimir Kokol, the young deaf and blind man in _Land of Silence and Darkness_ who connects with the world only by bouncing a ball off his head and clutching a radio to his chest, much like Kaspar, who plays with his wooden horse. None of these people are pathologically mad. It's the society they find themselves in that's demented. Whether dwarfs, hallucinating soldiers or indigenous peoples, these individuals are not freaks.
I have always felt that my characters – fictional or non-fictional – all belong to the same family. It isn't easy to put my finger on exactly what binds them together, but if a member of the clan were walking about town, you would intuitively and instantly recognise them. If you were to sit and watch all my films in one go, you would see the cross-references, the relationships and similarities between characters. They have no shadows, they emerge from the darkness without a past, they are misunderstood and humiliated. If you turned on the television and saw ten seconds of something, you would immediately know it must be one of mine. I look at my films as one big story, a vast, interconnected work I have been concentrating on for fifty years. Like the separate bricks that make up a building, taken together they constitute something bigger than their individual parts.
_Does investigation of these individuals tell us anything about their surroundings?_
We learn more about the buildings, streets and structures of an unknown city by climbing to the top of an overlooking hill than by standing in its central square. Looking in from the outskirts, we come to understand the environments in which these characters live.
_How close do you feel to the characters in your films?_
I have a great deal of sympathy for these people, to the point where Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein joked that I should play everyone in my films myself. I function pretty well as an actor and in several of my films could have played the leading character if necessary. I could never make a film – fiction or non-fiction – about someone for whom I have no empathy, who fails to arouse some level of appreciation and curiosity. In fact, when it comes to Fini Straubinger in _Land of Silence and Darkness,_ Bruno S. in _The Enigma of Kaspar_ _Hauser_ or Dieter Dengler, these people are points of reference not just for my work, but also my life. I learnt so much from my time with them. The radical dignity they radiate is clearly visible in the films. There is something of what constitutes them inside me.
_Do you watch television?_
One of the great achievements of communal life is our ability to create narratives, something we have been doing since Neanderthal times. We should cherish this flame we all have inside of us and get on our knees to thank the Creator for having endowed us with the gift of storytelling, something cavemen huddled around campfires understood and appreciated. Instead, today, with television and its incessant commercials, our consumer culture has destroyed any semblance of dignity we might have once had. We are fragmenting and fracturing stories for the sake of business. We grow up enveloped by fifteen-second storytelling and are conditioned by filmmaking at breakneck pace. Decades from now, our great-great-grandchildren will look back with amazement at how we could have allowed a precious achievement of human culture like storytelling to be so disrespected, infected, then shredded by advertisements. It will be the same amazement we feel today when we look at our ancestors, for whom slavery, capital punishment, the burning of witches and the Inquisition were acceptable everyday events. We will be blamed for having not thrown hand grenades into television stations and laying waste to their institutionalised cowardice, for not taking up arms and occupying such debased places which venerate that single, pernicious god: the _Einschaltquote,_ the ratings. It has always been their Golden Calf. It has nothing to do with me or my films.
Our culture today, especially television, infantilises us. The indignity of it kills our imagination. May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world. Those who watch television lose it. Sitting at home on your own, in front of the screen, is a very different experience from being in the communal spaces of the world, those centres of collective dreaming. Television creates loneliness. This is why sitcoms have added laughter tracks which try to cheat you out of your solitude. Television is a reflection of the world in which we live, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It kills spontaneous imagination and destroys our ability to entertain ourselves, painfully erasing our patience and sensitivity to significant detail.
Just when I think television can't get any more sordid and unadventurous, it does. Years ago the executive from the station that paid for _Little Dieter Needs to Fly_ saw the film for the first time, and immediately asked where the men's room was because he said he needed to vomit. "This is unquestionably the worst film I have ever seen in my life," he said, before shifting it from a prime-time slot and burying it late at night, when hardly anyone was even awake, let alone watching his station. When the film won awards and received positive reviews, he told me that perhaps it wasn't so bad. One of my most recent experiences working with a television station was _Encounters at the End of the World,_ which was a big success with audiences. There is a line in the voiceover where I speak about "the abomination of aerobic studios and yoga classes" down at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. The network executives insisted on cutting it because they didn't want to insult the housewives who might be watching, and washed their hands of the film by selling it for a tenth of what they had originally invested. It might also have been the word "evolution" – which one of the scientists uses in the film – that the network was unhappy with. Darwinism is a concept that's anathema for half of the United States' population. I hammer home to the participants of my Rogue Film School that they must brace themselves for such attitudes.
I sound so negative about all this, but fortunately there is another side to it. Television specialises in those early-morning satellite experiences, like the Muhammad Ali/George Foreman fight and the moon landing. I was so excited I almost had a heart attack before those. Over the last decade standards have risen when it comes to storytelling on television. It's wonderful to see audiences immersing themselves in such intelligent narratives that play out over a period of years. Many of these series are expertly written, acted and directed, with a great sense of pace and long-range timing.
_Tell me about what you describe as the "inadequate imagery" of today's civilisation._
Our inability and lack of desire to seek fresh imagery means we are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements in magazines, or turn on the television, or walk into a travel agency and see huge posters with those same tedious images of the Grand Canyon, I sense that something dangerous is emerging. Just as a person without a memory will struggle to survive in this world, so will someone who lacks images that reflect his inner state.
We are, as a race, aware of certain dangers that surround us. We comprehend that global warming and overcrowding of the planet are real dangers for mankind. We have come to understand that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger, that resources are being wasted at an extraordinary rate. But I believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude, as serious a defect as being without memory. I'll repeat it again as long as I'm able to: we will die out like dinosaurs if we don't develop adequate images. We need to learn to adapt our visual language to new and unforeseen situations. If our ingenuity isn't up to the task, if we aren't able to create fresh images, we will be stunted in our growth, unable to face the unforeseen challenges charging at us. All too many images are at a standstill, and consequently meaningless. Look at the depiction of Jesus Christ in Western iconography, unchanged since the kitsch of the Nazarene school of painting in the late nineteenth century. Representations like this are sufficient proof that Christianity is moribund. Why doesn't anyone ever paint a chubby or laughing Jesus? Look at France in the 1870s, by which time the Industrial Revolution had transformed the country, yet its art still depicted the Napoleonic era. The Impressionists weren't describing the future, they were updating things. You see the same thing with language. In Latin America they speak a lively Spanish compared to formal Castilian Spanish, as if the conquest of the New World paralysed language back home, creating some kind of impasse that has yet to be overcome. When a language becomes immobile, unable to adapt, the culture that created it disappears into the abyss of history.
We need images in accordance with our civilisation and innermost conditioning, which is why I appreciate any film that searches for novelty, no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. Years ago I saw an astonishing four-hour film by Theo Angelopoulos. Everyone said it was too long, but the images awoke new ideas in my mind, so to me it felt much too short. The struggle to find unprocessed imagery is never-ending, but it's our duty to dig like archaeologists and search our violated landscapes. We live in an era when established values are no longer valid, when prodigious discoveries are being made every year, when catastrophes of unbelievable proportions occur weekly. In ancient Greek the word "chaos" means "gaping void" or "yawning emptiness." The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art and cinema.
_Who is willing to take the necessary risks?_
I would never complain about how difficult it is to get images that belong to the recesses of the human heart, that show unexpected things we have never seen or experienced before, that are clear, pure and transparent. I would go absolutely anywhere; that's my nature. Down here on Earth it's hardly possible any more. I wouldn't hesitate for a second if given the chance to venture out with a camera to another planet in our solar system, even if it were a one-way ticket. It's frustrating to me that astronauts never take advantage of the photographic possibilities available to them. On one of the Apollo missions they left a camera on the moon, slowly panning from left to right, then right to left, for days. I yearned to grab the damned thing. There are so many possibilities up there for fresh images, and I always thought it would be better to send up a poet instead of an astronaut; I would be the first to volunteer. I did actually once seriously consider applying to NASA to be on one of their missions. Space travel is unfinished business for me, though these days I wouldn't be allowed. You need a complete set of teeth to get inside a spaceship.
_Do you ever tire of travelling?_
Jet lag is no friend of mine, believe me, and the cultural shock of moving from one place to the next is hard to absorb. I'll be at home in Los Angeles one day, then on an island off the coast of Panama the next. From there to Paris, the tropical jungles of Thailand, the desert terrain of North Africa and the mountains of South America, then back to the cold winds of Berlin. Living the way I do, having a real home is vital. It's essential I can wake up in the middle of the night and know where the light switch is. I would never travel without a book that requires great attention; it becomes my home into which I immerse myself. The truth is I am continually drained by travelling, but never tire of it. It has forever energised me.
_Why does_ Land of Silence and Darkness _resonate so strongly?_
In contrast to _Even Dwarfs Started Small,_ there's a lot of serenity in the film. _Land of Silence and Darkness_ is particularly close to my heart; if it didn't exist there would be a hole in my life. Fini Straubinger – the fifty-six-year-old deaf and blind woman at the centre of the film – helped me understand something about loneliness to an extent I never had before.
Fini was outside of society and history. When I asked what she remembered about the Second World War, she explained that because she wasn't able to hear or see, the destruction barely registered for her. The only thing she perceived was hunger and the physicality of being led down into the cellar during bombing raids to take refuge from the explosions. In her case loneliness was taken to unimaginable limits, and I have the distinct impression that anyone seeing the film asks themselves, "What would be left of my life if I were deaf and blind? How could I live, overcome loneliness, make myself understood?" The question of how we learn concepts and languages is woven deep into _Land of Silence and Darkness,_ with its deaf and blind characters who make visible the difficulty of human communication. The film is about the terror of sometimes not being able to make ourselves understood, and our subsequent isolation. If you were to knock on Fini's door, she wouldn't hear you, and if you were to switch on a light, she wouldn't see it. When you rang her doorbell, a small ventilator turned itself on so that Fini would feel a draught and know there was a visitor. It meant she could prepare herself for the fact that someone was arriving from the outside world and would be laying their hand on her shoulder. She had all these practical ways to prevent fright and shock. Once I rang her bell and nothing happened; it turned out the ventilator was broken. I went in anyway, found her sitting at a table, and asked myself how I should best approach her and make my presence known.
_The film was made by only three people._
Yes, and the ratio of footage shot to what you see in the final film is probably two to one. The film is an hour and a half, but we shot about three hours of footage in total. Not only that, but the film cost only $30,000. It was me recording sound, Schmidt-Reitwein on camera and Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, who edited the film. We had absolutely nothing, yet came up with a film still watched forty years later. This should be a lesson to filmmakers today with inexpensive digital technology at their disposal. You need only a good story and guts to make a film, the sense that it absolutely has to be made. Every able-bodied filmmaker out there today should be able to raise the pittance needed to make a film like _Land of Silence and Darkness_. Don't wait for the system to finance such things. Rob a bank if you need to. Embezzle if necessary.
There was no preconceived structure before we started shooting; things fell into place very easily, and the resulting film is some of the best work I've ever done. Look at the sequence at the end with Herr Fleischmann, the deaf man who became blind when he was thirty-three years old and lived for six years in a cowshed just to experience the warmth of other living beings. I consider him to be one of the most important characters in any of my films. He lived with his mother in a retirement home because she was the only person he wasn't afraid of. She explained to us that five years before, after a heavy snowstorm, when she opened the window, took his hand and put it into the snow, he said, "Snow." It was the last word he ever uttered. The shot where Herr Fleischmann walks away from the group of people and approaches a tree, feeling its shape by gently touching – almost embracing – the branches, is unforgettable; it's an entire human drama played out in two minutes, and one of the deepest moments audiences will ever encounter in a film. If you were to show that scene to someone who hadn't seen the whole film, it would seem insignificant. What's happening on screen at that moment is startlingly simple, and anyone who tuned into the film would think, "It's just a shot of a man touching a tree." But this is an image that requires the preceding one and a half hours for audiences to be sufficiently receptive to its power. If this were the opening sequence of _Land of Silence and Darkness,_ it would be meaningless, and nor would it make sense if you showed it apart from the rest of the film. As with _Little Dieter Needs to Fly_ and _Stroszek,_ for an hour before the end of the film the inner rhythm inexorably leads us to the final sequence, and as soon as I saw Herr Fleischmann under that tree I knew I had the last scene of the film. It was one of those things that occasionally fall into my lap and that I wonder if I really deserve.
I had my arm around Schmidt-Reitwein and gently turned him towards Herr Fleischmann. He understood that there was something he hadn't noticed, turned to pick up on this solitary figure walking slowly away, then zeroed in on him under the tree. You can feel the tender approach we took in the camerawork of _Land of Silence and Darkness_. I wanted the characters to come across in the most direct way possible, and told Schmidt-Reitwein that if he used a tripod, we would end up with fixed, lifeless images. I wanted him to let the camera beat as if it were part of his own heart, and by extension that of the people he was filming. It was clear that if the camera were sitting on his shoulder – even when he wasn't moving – it would make a tremendous difference. I told him that wherever possible he shouldn't use the zoom, but instead move towards people with his whole body.
_How much freedom do you give the cameraman at moments like these?_
I have always had a symbiotic and physical relationship with the cameramen I work with. I move step by step in contact with them; we're like a pair of ice skaters. From behind, I put one arm around their chest or my hand on their belt, and if I see something unforeseen and interesting I push them towards it with a nudge or whisper. The cameraman's peripheral vision is restricted when he looks through the lens, so an important part of my job at moments like this is to provide an additional set of eyes and guide him in certain directions. But this is never the sighted leading the blind. The cameraman is always searching with his other eye for the next thing to film.
Peter Zeitlinger, with whom I have worked for the past few years, is the only cameraman ever to put the camera down in the middle of a take and say, "Werner, this scene has no rhythm." In his youth Peter played ice hockey for Sparta Prague, which means in his hands a camera is more fluid than a Steadicam. Along the slopes of Mount Erebus in Antarctica, steam has created a series of bizarre ice corridors and chimneys, some reaching two storeys in height. During production on _Encounters at the End of the World,_ Peter and I descended down into the ice and moved along a fumarole, which is a long tunnel, at points only twenty inches high. There is a beautiful shot in the film where you see me crawling, as if exploring the unknown. Then, suddenly, the tunnel opens out into a blue grotto of pure fantasy, with intense light shining through the ice. Peter was on his belly behind me, and with extraordinary agility was holding the camera stretched out with one hand in front of him. He has always understood how physical his job is, and in one sequence for _Encounters_ managed to control a moving snowmobile with one hand while filming with the other. In _Little Dieter Needs to Fly,_ when Dieter is tied up and runs through the jungle with his captors, Peter was running after everyone, the camera to his eye, skilfully avoiding the trees and roots that covered the path. At one point he crossed a creek using a fallen tree as a narrow bridge. Watch the scene again and you'll notice that a third of the way across is a wooden branch sticking up out of the mud. Peter had placed it there himself in preparation for being able to balance his body so that he could get a smooth shot as he moved from one side of the creek to the other. I never liked the system in America where a distinction is made between the cinematographer and camera operator. A real cinematographer operates his own camera.
_Where did you first meet Fini Straubinger?_
I was asked to make a film about victims of the West German equivalent of thalidomide, and produced a film called _Handicapped Future_. The film isn't as stylised as some of my other documentaries because, like _The Flying Doctors of East Africa,_ it was proposed by someone else, in this case by a young man whose friend was in a wheelchair. The initial suggestion was that I do a film on him alone, but after some investigation I felt there was more to the subject, so I made _Handicapped Future,_ an attempt to tackle basic issues about how physically disabled people functioned in West Germany. I gave the film – which is another example of a "utility" work – to several institutions that took care of the physically handicapped, and they used it to raise public awareness of their cause.
Beyond the fundamental practicalities – like the lack of ramps in public spaces and sidewalks inaccessible to wheelchairs – the more deep-rooted problem was that many handicapped people felt isolated from society. There were more than four million of them in West Germany at the time, including nearly half a million of school age, but the treatment of these people was mediaeval, and according to surveys the majority of Germans didn't want to live anywhere near them. What opportunities could their communities and government usefully offer them? I became interested in the community facility that was built in Munich in 1968 where, for the first time, handicapped people could live with their families in specially furnished apartments instead of being isolated in institutions, as was mostly the case; it was the equivalent to assisted-living facilities for the elderly. There were two schools, medical amenities and a gym where physical training could take place, including the balancing exercises you see in the film. People with no arms have different perceptions of balance and their bodies than everyone else. _Handicapped Future_ is probably my most politically aware film because I wanted to explore the development of legislation emerging from the United States that was providing assistance to the handicapped and which later trickled across to West Germany and other European countries. I went out to the UCLA campus in California and filmed with Adolph Ratzka, a young German university student who some years before had been paralysed by polio. He spoke of the "pompous stairways" common in German buildings, compared to the mandatory facilities for wheelchair users in public buildings in California.
I don't know if I like the film today. It tries to maintain some kind of friendly attitude, and seems dangerously conventional and well behaved. If I were to work on a similar project today, it would have a harsher tone when it came to the lack of acceptance of disabled people in general. Still, the film was one of the first voices to let it be known that changes were needed in West Germany, and it helped trigger a shift in awareness of these issues, eventually leading to new legislation. More importantly, it was somehow a predecessor to _Land of Silence and Darkness_ and led directly to that project. During filming, Schmidt-Reitwein and I went to hear a speech by Gustav Heinemann, the president of West Germany, which is where I met Fini. The first time I encountered her was captured on film; it's the scene about halfway through _Land of Silence and Darkness,_ when she is at Heinemann's talk, sitting with a companion who is describing to her what is being said by use of an extraordinary tactile language. We were filming the president when I turned and saw this man tapping with his fingers onto the hand of the woman sitting next to him. I immediately sensed this was something big and that I should take note, so I gently nudged Schmidt-Reitwein, who slowly moved his camera around and filmed the two of them.
I was instantly fascinated by Fini. As a nine-year-old child she had fallen down a staircase and landed heavily on her head, but because she was worried about her mother being angry, she kept quiet about it and felt sick for months. The doctor thought it was because she was growing, but after one or two years she became blind, then as a nineteen-year-old became deaf. Adding to this misfortune she was addicted to morphine – prescribed to alleviate her constant pain – and was bedridden for thirty years. Because she couldn't hear herself, Fini talked very slowly and carefully. For her, history stopped around 1920 because she had lived for so many years surrounded by pious nuns in a convent and spoke an anachronistic German from the previous century. The day I saw Fini for the first time was the day I decided to make a film about her.
_How easy was it to persuade her to be filmed?_
I was able to establish an immediate trust with her and learnt the tactile language fairly quickly; it takes about as long as it does to learn how to type. I was eventually tapping onto Fini's toes and the sole of her foot, and using her left hand instead of her right, which is like writing in reverse. I would speak to Fini as straight-forwardly as I would to anyone else, and once told her that the sweater she was wearing didn't match her skirt, suggesting she put on a different one instead. Nobody had ever told her anything like that before, and she immediately went to change. Fini allowed me to make _Land of Silence and Darkness_ because she understood that the film wouldn't be just about her, but also the community in which she lived and the people she surrounded herself with. Happiness or unhappiness never played a role in Fini's existence. She experienced complete isolation having been bedridden for so many years, unable to see and hear, but there were things that were more important to her. She knew her life had meaning because she was such a support for other deaf and blind people. We filmed, on and off, for more than a year, following her to various events, meetings and special occasions.
For her birthday one year I organised a ride in an aeroplane, the first time she had ever flown; she loved feeling the jolts and shifts of air as the aircraft bounced along. I knew Fini had always wanted to go to the zoo and that the other deaf and blind people she spent time with had also never been there, so I persuaded the director of the local zoo to let them feed the elephants and hold the chimpanzees. We also went to a local arboretum, where they handled various cacti. Away from the cameras I did things with Fini that nobody else would ever do, like have her cook me a meal. She had been prevented from making mischief for such a long time, so I took her out into the countryside on my motorcycle to poach pheasants. It was exhilarating for Fini when she fired my small-calibre rifle, which she would hide under her coat because I had no hunting licence. Later, when she plucked the pheasants, Fini was still delighting in the mischief we had made together, and the bird tasted twice as good. When I would have her over for dinner, she could tell whether my roast was ready just by the smell. It was one sensual, visceral experience after another. I even asked Fini to babysit for my son Rudolph, who was only a year old; nobody had ever entrusted her with such responsibility. My mother became close to Fini and learnt the tactile language so they could communicate with each other. For my mother and me, our contact with Fini went far beyond the film.
_You filmed with children born deaf and blind._
I thought it was important to show another side to the story, and these sequences came naturally. Fini became deaf and blind when she was a teenager, which makes a difference to the kind of contact she had with the outside world. She knew language and what things looked like. There are well-known cases, like the American Helen Keller, who became deaf and blind at an early age and wrote several books; her story raises questions about innate human emotions and how these children think about abstract concepts. But it isn't easy to know what children born deaf and blind think about the environment they inhabit because there is no easy way to communicate with them. Contact rarely surpasses the palpable essentials, things like, "This is heat. Do you need food?" It seems certain they feel and understand emotions like anger and fear as anyone else would, but how do they cope with their anonymous fears within? Although their brains are normal, they have no conception of language or their environment. Without the ability to see and hear, it's difficult for their minds to be fully awakened. The children we filmed seemed to experience moments of deep fear that related only to what was happening inside their own heads.
We discovered some other extraordinary cases. Else Fährer was a deaf and blind woman, about fifty years old. The only person she was able to communicate with was her mother, but she had died and no institution in Germany would accept Else, so she was placed in a psychiatric hospital where the nurses had no idea how to look after her. Else knew she didn't belong in this place, surrounded by such unstable people. She could read Braille and was able to speak and write, but after her experience in this psychiatric institution she retreated into herself so much that she wasn't able to communicate with anyone. There is a scene in the film where Fini goes to meet Else. She tried to make contact in any number of ways, but was never able to. Words appear on screen: "When you let go of my hand, it is as if we were a thousand miles apart."
_Land of Silence and Darkness_ was rejected by television stations for more than two years, so I threatened the executives by telling them I would buy their stations in twenty years' time, when I was rich, then fire everyone. Eventually they tested the waters by screening the film late at night, and it got such a favourable response from the public that it was repeated twice shortly afterwards and became a great success. Some reviewers – primarily in Germany – accused me of exploitation. Thankfully several people jumped to the film's defence and gave it the backing it needed, including Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author of _Awakenings,_ who loved the film. Somehow word spread that it was a worthy project.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God _was your first international success, a film regarded as one of the great achievements of post-war German cinema_.
Perhaps, but hardly anyone wanted to see the film when it got its first limited release, and it was difficult to find money to even make it. The budget came from the small amount of revenue I had received from my previous films, plus a loan from my brother Tilbert, plus money from Hessischer Rundfunk, a German television station, which had the right to screen the film the very evening it was released in cinemas, so naturally it was hardly a box-office success. This was before the _Film/Fernsehen Abkommen_ [Film/Television Agreement, 1974], which opened up opportunities for co-productions with the networks and put in place a rule that films released theatrically wouldn't be screened on television for at least two years. When I made _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ a couple of years later I made sure the contract stipulated there would be a substantial delay between the film's cinema release and its television premiere. We struggled to sell _Aguirre_ at first, but it was finally picked up by a small French distribution company and sold out a couple of Paris cinemas of about a hundred seats each for more than two years. Eventually the rest of the world took notice.
Aguirre _is about a little-known sixteenth-century Spanish adventurer who went in search of El Dorado._
From one point of view, as I look back on it, _Aguirre_ could be viewed as an adventure story that on the surface has all the characteristics of the genre, but on a deeper level contains something new and more complex. It really is a genre unto itself.
The film isn't about the real Aguirre. As with _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ a couple of years later, I took the most basic facts known about the man and spun my own tale. By chance, at a friend's house I found a book for adolescents about adventurers – Alexander the Great, Roald Amundsen, Columbus, people like that – with a few lines on Lope de Aguirre, a Spanish conquistador who threw himself into a search for the lost city of El Dorado and called himself "the Wrath of God." He initiated a revolt, made himself leader of the expedition, declared the king of Spain overthrown, and went down the entire length of the Amazon. After reaching the Atlantic, half starved, he sailed north and attacked the Spanish garrison at Trinidad, completely underestimating the forces there, before finally being captured and put on trial. These few lines in this book fascinated me and I tried to find out more about Aguirre, but little is known about his life; there are only a few remaining documents about the man. History is generally on the side of the winners, and Aguirre is one of its great losers. There are, however, several pieces of literature – novels and memoirs – that discuss him in legendary terms. Years after I made the film I read Aguirre's letter to King Philip II of Spain, which is actually rather boring.
Aguirre fascinated me because he was the first person who dared defy the Spanish crown and declare the independence of a South American nation, though the film – which is set during the first few weeks of 1561 – never dwells on Machiavellian politicking per se, only the madness of such things. I invented a wildly defiant tone for him, a fury and absolute fanaticism, as he rebels not just against political power, but nature itself. He curses the king, dethrones and strips him of all rights, proclaims himself the new emperor of El Dorado and New Spain, then insists, "When I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees, then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the Wrath of God. The earth I walk upon sees me and trembles." By the end of the film it isn't just Aguirre who is mad; the whole situation is demented. There is a powerful sense of menace surrounding the characters. We feel them slipping further and further into trouble as the story progresses, and because of this the movement of time in _Aguirre_ is more important than in any of my other films. What interested me was how these Spanish conquistadors set off in search of El Dorado and gradually all drift to their deaths. There is an army of a thousand people at the start, but by the end this is a small and pathetic group of the sick and wounded, a military force that has lost all sense of direction, eventually grinding to an almost complete standstill. At a certain imperceptible moment, a feeling sets in that everyone is futilely revolving in circles, that there can be no happy resolution to this story. This is one reason why _Aguirre_ was shot in sequence, because the chronology of the story is so linked to the film's rhythm.
It wasn't my original plan to have a voiceover, but during editing I felt the film needed a more precise tempo. A voiceover also allowed me to introduce specific dates and emphasise the passing of time, underlining just how long these soldiers have been in the jungle. By creating the impression of time dragging on, we get the sense it's running out for them. The text you hear is an invented diary of the monk on the voyage, though a real monk with the same name – one of the first to have travelled down the Amazon – did actually exist and wrote a diary of a totally different expedition. Historians are always asking me where I found the documents; I tell them it was in this and that book, but unfortunately can't remember the title. Some of the other characters were invented, or if they did exist weren't on the expedition as portrayed in the film. Gonzalo Pizarro, for example, the brother of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, died a few years before the story takes place. I made up characters based on the names I read in the handful of real documents I could find. The script is pure invention. It's my interpretation of history, like Brecht's retelling of Galileo and Shakespeare's _Henry V_.
_Real events acquire unreal qualities._
There is an inner flow to most of my films, one that can't be followed with just a wristwatch. In _Aguirre_ things steadily move into delirium and become hallucinatory, as if the audience is being taken directly into the interior of things. You certainly experience this by the time of Aguirre's revolt against Ursúa. Watch the scene of Don Fernando de Guzman's "coronation" and you'll see a brief tableau, a highly stylised shot, where all the characters look directly into the camera, like in a nineteenth-century photo. This is similar to the shot of the Irish doctors in _Fata Morgana_ and the image in _Nosferatu_ , with Renfield wearing a straitjacket and two guards standing on either side of him as he leaps crazily up and down. There is also a similar shot in _Signs of Life,_ at the wedding, when the couple and their parents pose for the photographer and stare into the camera. Look again and you'll notice Peter Brogle gasping for breath. I made him race me as fast as he could for a mile in the suffocating heat; everyone was ready to roll while we ran at top speed back to the set. I quickly tossed Peter a towel for him to dry his face and made him line up with the others, telling him, "Stare at the lens and try to suppress your heavy breathing. Don't let on that you're panting." He stood there, his face contorted.
There is an image in _Aguirre_ that comes immediately after the opening sequence, a minute-long shot of the raging waters of Río Urubamba, below Machu Picchu. The waters are so violent, almost boiling with rage, completely out of proportion to what a human being might be able to withstand. Three seconds of this would have been sufficient, but a minute of it prepares the audience for an approaching fever dream in the jungle. A filmmaker carefully sows, then harvests. After having seen this image, we are better prepared to accept the disproportion to come, the outrageousness of Aguirre, his grandiose failure to conquer an entire continent with thirty starving and ill-equipped soldiers.
These frozen moments don't necessarily have any significance for the story per se; they connect more deeply, to the film's inner narrative. _Aguirre_ almost holds its breath as the multiple threads of a story moving in all directions are tied in a knot for one brief moment. Images like this have more to do with music – with pace and rhythm – than with cinema. It's like knowing how long audiences can be confronted with absolute silence in a concert hall or opera house before they start squirming in their seats. While making _The Transformation of the World into Music_ I spoke to James Levine, who was conducting _Parsifal_ at Bayreuth; he's the one in the film who always conducts with a neatly folded towel over his left shoulder. During the fermata, after the first few bars of the overture, he would signal for the musicians to stop, then take the towel from his shoulders, mop his brow, put it back on his shoulders and wait. The orchestra would look at each other nervously, thinking there was a problem. Only then would he start up again. James told me he wanted the silence to continue until the audience began to wonder if the conductor had dropped dead in the orchestra pit or run off because his house was on fire.
By the time Aguirre is standing on the raft staring into the face of a monkey, the surreal qualities and fever dreams of the jungle have infiltrated his fantasies. What we see on screen might be a delirious hallucination. Even the way the soldiers die is done in an operatic way. Ursúa's wife has been wearing a blue dress throughout the film, but when she walks into the jungle – presumably never to be seen again – suddenly she's wearing a beautiful golden royal gown, in perfect condition, though everything around her is rotting away. Logic plays no part in such things; grandiose stylisations have taken over. When audiences see the brigantine up in the tree they wonder if it really is there or if it's just a fantasy of the soldiers. The image might appear unreal to us, but for those on the raft – who have long since lost their sense of reality – it doesn't seem so strange. For that scene I wanted a slightly stylised feeling, so we waited for the heavy atmosphere that emerges during the rainy season, when ominous clouds appear about an hour before it starts to pour with rain. We constructed the boat in five sections, built an enormous scaffold around the tree and hoisted it up. It took twenty-five workmen a full week to reassemble it. The thing had no bottom, so it couldn't float, but it had a mast and sails, and a canoe dangling from its stern. Who knows, it might still be up there.
_You spoke earlier of the "rhythm and sensuousness" of the desert. Can the same be said of jungle landscapes?_
Absolutely. Jungles and deserts are at the extreme ends of the landscapes this planet has to offer, and both have enormous visual force. They also both hit back at idiots like me who challenge them by wanting to make films there.
As a Bavarian I have an affinity for the fertility of the jungle, the fever dreams and physical exuberance of the place. For me, jungles have always represented an intensified form of reality, though they aren't actually particularly difficult challenges. A jungle is just another forest; it's the myth of travel agencies that they are dangerous places. I really wouldn't even know what hazards are out there. Like deer, snakes usually flee as fast as they can crawl. It isn't as if the jaguars are all lined up to eat you, and piranhas won't bother you unless you do something stupid. I used to catch them with a fishing line and eat them, and right after I pulled one out would jump into the water and take a swim. There's no danger so long as you stay away from stagnant water. I have a strong memory of the cobalt-blue butterflies, attracted by the sugar-cane brandy we would drink at night. I would be awoken by the screeching monkeys on the other side of the river and find five butterflies had settled on my hand, slowly opening and closing their wings. It was an inexplicably beautiful moment. There is something glorious about people lying all day in their hammocks on the riverbank, endlessly watching the river passing by. Everyone does what they want because no coherent authority exists. It's complete anarchy out there, a world away from the established order of the city. Outsiders have to adapt or leave, like a girl wearing a bikini in Munich during winter who quickly enough realises what needs to be done.
I never present literal landscapes in my films. What I show instead are landscapes of the mind, locales of the soul. Just as there is no such thing as background music in my films, landscapes aren't picturesque or scenic backdrops as they are in Hollywood, nor merely representations of physical space. Most directors exploit landscapes only to embellish what is happening in the foreground, which is one reason why I like some of John Ford's films. He never used Monument Valley as just a backdrop; for Ford it signified the American soul and the very spirit of his characters. Westerns are all about our basic notions of justice, and when I see Monument Valley I somehow start to believe in American justice. For me landscapes are active members of the cast, like the desert in _Fata Morgana_ and the burning oil fields of Kuwait in _Lessons of Darkness_. During the opening credits of _Signs of Life the camera holds_ for an unusually long time on a single image of a mountain valley in Crete, allowing audiences to climb deep inside the landscape. The jungle of _Aguirre_ is never some lush, beautiful environment there for decoration, as it might be in a television commercial. It's a representation of our most intense and forceful dreams, our deepest emotions and nightmares. With its madness and confusion, the place becomes a vital part of characters' inner landscapes, taking on almost human qualities.
When I write a script, I often describe landscapes I have never seen. Although I had never been to Peru before I started making _Aguirre,_ I imagined the atmosphere with a strange precision, and when I arrived in the jungle for the first time everything was exactly as I had pictured it. It was as if the landscapes had no choice; they had to fit my imagination and submit themselves to my idea of what they should look like. Although sometimes I struggle to find actual environments that match those in my head, I'm good at reshaping physical landscapes and making them operative for a film. They always somehow adapt themselves to the situations required of them. Often I try to introduce a certain atmosphere into a landscape, using sound and vision to give it a definite character. The fact is that I can direct landscapes, just as I do actors and animals.
_Where does this ability come from?_
Perhaps my grandfather, Rudolph. As I said, he was a self-taught archaeologist, an unusually bold and distinguished man with a real instinct for terrain. He could look at a landscape and determine where a temple now deep under the ground had been constructed two thousand years before. On Crete, the remains of Knossos had been known about for centuries because columns were sticking out of the ground for everyone to see. On the island of Kos, by contrast, there was no visible trace of any ancient ruins. Archaeologists there had already spent years searching for the Asklepieion, which was some sort of centre of healing and resort dedicated to Asklepios, the god of medicine. My grandfather read about it in a text by Herondas when he was a classics teacher, immediately quit his job, proposed to and married my grandmother – who was nineteen years old – and went in search of the Asklepieion. Like Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated Troy, my grandfather set out with only a spade and started digging. Other archaeologists had carried out excavations in different spots on Kos without finding anything, but for reasons known only to himself my grandfather chose to dig in the middle of a field that was covered in trees and vineyards, and promptly discovered a Roman bath.
_What preparation did you do for filming in the jungle?_
The calibre of some films is decided by pre-production, and pre-production on _Aguirre_ was meticulous. Before I took the crew into the jungle I bought the most primitive and cheapest of cameras – some tiny Super 8 plastic thing with a wide-angle lens which I couldn't even focus – and went to Peru, where I scouted locations. It was the first time I had ever been in the jungle. I did reconnaissance on a small steamboat, then had a nimble balsa raft constructed. For several weeks an oarsman and I drifted down the Urubamba, Nanay and Huallaga tributaries, sleeping on hammocks and rarely leaving the raft. From the first to the last tributary was a distance of nearly fifteen hundred miles. I was trying to develop a feeling for the river's currents, searching for those that looked spectacular but weren't too dangerous. Several stretches were clearly too hazardous for a film crew. At one point the raft struck some rocks and was split in two. The half we were on became caught in a whirlpool; what saved us was getting stuck in a strong current and being swept several miles away. It would have been a disaster to have made the film without having gone down there beforehand to test things out. It was crucial to be in physical contact with the rapids before I started filming, not unlike a few years before, when I took the actors and crew around the fortress before we shot _Signs of Life_. I had to create some tactile connection to the place, and wanted everyone to be familiar with the environment before we started filming. "We aren't going to pull out the equipment for at least two days," I said, and asked them to walk around, touching the walls and feeling the smooth surfaces, which is how I had experienced the fortress myself when I first encountered it as a teenager.
Peru was governed by a military dictatorship at the time we made _Aguirre_ , but a left-wing one that had nationalised various industries and instituted a vast land-reform programme. President Juan Velasco Alvarado was of Native Indian descent and controlled a regime very different to those of people like Stroessner in Paraguay and Pinochet in Chile. We weren't offered much assistance by the Peruvian government, though the army supplied us with an amphibian aircraft and established a radio station, which meant we could be in contact with the nearest big city, providing the electricity didn't fail. Shooting permits were needed, otherwise showing up at conspicuous places like Machu Picchu would have been problematic. The government representatives we worked with appreciated that the strongest force in _Aguirre_ is the Native Indians with their ancient heritage, fighting the imperialist invaders. They are the ones who ultimately survive, not the plundering Spanish conquistadors.
Once production started, we built an encampment for 450 people on Río Urubamba, including the 270 Indians from the mountains who acted as extras. It was so big I decided it needed a name, so I called it Pelicula o Muerte [Film or Death], which is a joke version of the Cubans' cry of " _Patria o muerte_ " at the Bay of Pigs. For a time I slept in a nearby hut owned by a hunchback dwarf, her nine children and more than a hundred guinea pigs, which crawled all over me. We eventually moved to Río Huallaga, but with a much smaller group of extras because throughout the story so many characters drop away like flies. Filming took about six weeks, including a whole week lost when we took the cast and crew from one tributary to another, a distance of more than a thousand miles. Once we arrived at Río Nanay we lived on rafts that had been especially built. There were less than ten in total, and on each was a small hut with a thatched roof and hammocks inside. We weren't able to set foot on dry land because in the flat lowlands the jungle was flooded for miles around, so at night we tied the rafts to over-hanging branches. They floated in a convoy about a mile behind the one we were shooting on, which meant we could film the river without having any other rafts in shot. Once filming was done for the day, we would tie up and wait for this floating village to arrive, including the raft that was used exclusively as a kitchen.
_In one scene the rafts pass through the rapids._
It took only two minutes, or even less, and we absolutely had to get those shots the first time around. The wooden rafts were extremely solid, constructed by the Indians, who were expert builders, and we also had several excellent rowers. Having said that, sometimes they were drunk and had no control over where they were going. With _Aguirre_ the audience can feel the authenticity of the situations the actors are in, but there was never any danger because everyone – including the Indian rowers – was attached by cords, which you can see if you look carefully. Cameraman Thomas Mauch and I were the only people moving freely.
The scene where the soldiers get caught in the whirlpool and are found dead the following morning was especially difficult to shoot because the flow of the river was so fast and violent. At the end of the day we lowered ropes down to the actors from the cliff above, which they attached to themselves, and we pulled them up. The next morning the raft was still there, wrestling with the fierce counter-current. The extras – who were paid more than everyone else – were proud of themselves once they reached safety, though they were vomiting because of the raft's incessant spinning. At one point I was standing on the cliff looking down at the water; the rocks were slippery, so I grabbed a branch to stop myself from sliding. I could see it was covered in fire ants, but stupid as I am I swung my machete to chop the thing off. All that did was shake it violently, and hundreds of these ants rained down on me. I was bitten all over and ended up in bed for two days with a serious fever.
Later, at a much calmer bend on Río Urubamba, we found a cable strung across the river, with a primitive platform attached to it. The rope needed to pull the platform to either side was missing, so my production co-ordinator Walter Saxer and I decided to swim across, carrying a rope with us. We also wanted to explore the other side of the river, which looked like an especially beautiful spot. I jumped in and almost immediately saw a whirlpool coming at me. It was moving quickly in a semi-circle and gave off a loud, strange slurping sound. I managed to swim to the other side of the river and then, with the rope in my mouth, swung my arms and legs over the cable and pulled myself towards the platform in the middle of the river. I had a beautiful gold watch in my pocket, one of my most prized possessions at the time, a gift from my first great love. As I was clambering across I felt it slipping, and watched helplessly as it dropped into the water. I was very upset, but at the same time I knew that all these rivers carry gold deposits. "Oh well," I remember thinking to myself. "Gold back to gold."
_How much trouble were the monkeys in the final sequence?_
That scene was different from the one written in the screenplay, but during my initial scouting of the rivers I befriended a little monkey who would sit on my shoulder. He became a good comrade and I named him after one of my two favourite football players, Di Stéfano, the brilliant Argentinian. Unfortunately Di Stéfano perished because of a stupid mistake I made. I tied him to a metal post because I had to go on land and take care of some things. When I returned three hours later, he was dying because he had wrapped his leash around the post and was dangerously exposed to the sun. He died later that day because of my negligence, so I thought I should honour my little friend with the scene at the end of the film. My other favourite football player of all time, by the way, is Garrincha, a brilliant dribbler.
I hired local Indians who captured hundreds of savage little monkeys – the ones who overrun the raft – but gave them only half the money up front because I knew if I paid full price, the guy organising everything would run off with the cash. Even so, the animals never arrived on set, so we drove out to the airport as quickly as possible. It turned out they had all been resold to an American businessman and were already on an aeroplane waiting to be shipped out to a dealership in Miami. "I'm the veterinarian!" I yelled to the cargo handlers, making use of the kind of subterfuge that has always been an indispensible element to my filmmaking. "Stop immediately! Where are the vaccination documents for the monkeys?" They were caught completely off guard and admitted they had no papers, so we unloaded the animals from the aeroplane, put them into our truck and sped off. When it actually came to shooting the sequence, the monkeys had some kind of panic attack and bit me all over. I couldn't cry out because we were shooting live sound at that point. Another jumped onto the shoulder of the cameraman Thomas Mauch and started viciously biting his ear. His mouth was wide open but no scream came out. He just kept on filming, endearing himself to me beyond description.
_Where did the Indian extras come from?_
From a single village high up in the mountains. I travelled there to explain what the film was and what I needed from them, and we ended up hiring almost the entire population, a conscientious group unafraid to carry out the sometimes difficult work. They were well paid compared to what they usually earned. One time, after filming in the mud and swamps, I noticed the Europeans were exhausted and wanted to call a halt for the day, but the Indians asked me why we were stopping. They said it would be even more difficult to continue later on, so why not carry on now and finish the job? I can't say I ever truly understood the Indians, but we were all aware of something we had in common: a mutual respect for work. They were part of a socialist co-operative at Lauramarca, with a real knowledge both of their own history and the current political situation, and understood that their time on the film wasn't useful only for themselves, but for the Indians' cause as a whole.
One of the extras was a man I encountered at the main square in Cusco, where he would drum on tin cans and play a pan flute, and occasionally make money by selling pairs of scissors. I never knew his real name and I'm not sure he even knew it himself, so everyone called him Hombrecito, which means "Little Man." I liked him so much I asked him to come with us for the shoot. I explained I would pay him well, more than what he would earn in ten years sitting there playing for people. At first he refused, saying that if he were to stop playing in the square, everyone in Cusco would die. He wore three alpaca sweaters at the same time, even when it was unbearably hot and humid, and refused to take them off because he thought they would be stolen. He said they protected him against "the bad breath of the gringos." Hombrecito seemed to carry all the humiliation, oppression and despair of his people on his shoulders. I persuaded him to join us, and he became the crew's mascot; you can see him in the film playing his pan flute. He would take his sweaters and place them carefully in a plastic bag which he hid in the jungle so no one would steal it. Every evening the crew had to hunt around for the bag because Hombrecito could never remember where he put it. Once filming was over, he went back to Cusco's main square, this time wearing three jackets, one on top of the other, which he had bought with his wages.
We shipped in costumes and props from a rental company in Spain. Jungle transportation wasn't easy to organise because we had to squeeze everything – including all the camera equipment and even the horse – into one big amphibian aeroplane. In the sequence where the soldiers go on shore and raid a village is a single shot of a mummy. My brother Lucki found a real one and flew it in from Lima. It was so fragile he had to buy a separate seat for it, so for the entire journey had this ferocious-looking thing sitting next to him wearing a seatbelt.
_Did you write the script for Klaus Kinski?_
I don't need to hole myself up in a monastery or retire to a quiet spot for months on end to write. Most of the screenplay was written on a bus going to Italy with the football team from Munich I played for. By the time we reached Salzburg, only a few hours into the trip, everyone was drunk and singing obscene songs because the team had drunk most of the beer we were bringing as a gift for our opponents. I was sitting with my typewriter on my lap. In fact, I typed the whole thing almost entirely with my left hand because with my right I was trying to fend off our goalie sprawled on the seat next to me. Eventually he vomited over the typewriter. Some of the pages were beyond repair and I had to throw them out of the window. There were some fine scenes lost because I couldn't recall what I had just written. They're long gone. That's life on the road for you. Later on, in between football games, I wrote furiously for three days and finished the script. It was written so fast and so spontaneously that I didn't think about who might play the part, but the moment I finished it I knew it was for Kinski and sent it to him immediately. A couple of days later, at three in the morning, I was awoken by the telephone. At first I couldn't figure out what was going on; all I heard were inarticulate screams at the other end of the line. It was Kinski. After about half an hour I managed to filter out from his ranting that he was ecstatic about the screenplay and wanted to play Aguirre.
My first choice for the role was actually Algerian president Houari Boumediene. Take a look at photos of him from when Algeria won its independence and you'll see why he intrigued me; his physical presence was powerful indeed. Ahmed Ben Bella became president in 1963, but Boumediene was the man behind everything, including running the military. Later he ousted Ben Bella in a _coup d'état_ and became president. I never pushed the script on him as I figured he had other things to take care of, but if he had been removed from office himself before we started filming I would have offered him the role.
_How was Kinski in the jungle?_
He arrived with a load of alpine equipment – tents, sleeping bags, crampons, ice axes – because he wanted to expose himself to the wilds of nature. But his ideas about the jungle were rather insipid; mosquitoes and rain weren't allowed in his world. The first night after setting up his tent it started to pour and he got soaked, which set off one of his raving fits. The next day we built a roof of palm fronds above his tent, and eventually moved him and his wife into the only hotel in Machu Picchu. We all drank river water, but Kinski had a constant supply of bottled mineral water.
He had just cut short his infamous _Jesus Christus Erlöser_ tour, scenes of which you can see at the start of _My Best Fiend_. His plan was to take the show around the world, but the first performance, in Berlin, ended in mayhem after about ten minutes. Kinski was playing the kind of ferocious, revolutionary Jesus who chased the merchants from the temple with a whip, not the kind, tolerant and benevolent Son of God. He lived by styling himself to excess and would adopt the personae of various people. For a time he was François Villon, whose poetry he recorded; later Dostoyevsky's idiot; and in the years before his death he portrayed himself as Paganini. When he arrived in Peru to start filming _Aguirre_ he identified so strongly with his role as a derided, misunderstood Jesus that he would sometimes answer questions in character and scream at me in biblical verse. Every day Kinski could see the problems I was having, yet he continued to create scandals or explode if so much as a mosquito appeared.
I knew of his reputation, that he was probably the most difficult actor in the world to deal with; working with Marlon Brando must have been like kindergarten in comparison. While filming a scene he nearly killed an actor when he struck him on the head with his sword. Thankfully the man was wearing a helmet, though he carries a scar to this very day. One evening a group of extras were in their hut; they had been drinking and were making too much noise for Kinski. He screamed and yelled at them to stop laughing, then grabbed his Winchester and fired three bullets through the thin bamboo walls. There were forty-five of them crammed together in this small room, and one had the top of his finger shot off. It was a miracle Kinski didn't kill any of them. I immediately confiscated his rifle, which is one of my big souvenirs. During filming he would insult me every day, sometimes for hours. Kinski had seen _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ , so to him I was the "dwarf director." He screamed in a high-pitched voice in front of everyone, saying it was an insult I would even think about talking to him, the great actor. He insisted he could do everything himself, that being directed by me was like working with a housewife, and shrieked that David Lean and Brecht had left him alone to do his job, so why shouldn't I? "Brecht and Lean?" I said. "Never heard of them." That upset him even more. I was forced to put up with his behaviour, but Kinski never reckoned with my determination to see the job through. No one tamed him as well as I did.
Kinski and I agreed on nothing without a struggle. Temperamentally he was forever on the verge of hysteria, but I managed to harness this and turn it to productive ends. Sometimes other methods were necessary. On one occasion, towards the end of the shoot, he was looking for a victim to jump on; it was probably because he didn't know his lines. Suddenly Kinski started shouting like crazy at the sound assistant. "You swine! You were grinning!" He insisted I fire the guy on the spot. "I'm not going to do that," I said. "The whole crew would quit out of solidarity." Kinski immediately left the set and started packing his bags, saying he was going to find a speedboat and leave. I went up to him and said, very politely, "Mr Kinski, you will not do this. You will not leave before we are finished here in the jungle. Our work here is more important than either our personal feelings or private lives." Quitting like that would have been a gross violation of his duty to the film, so I told him – quietly and calmly – that I would shoot him if he left. "I have had time to ponder the unthinkable," I said, "and have already made up my mind about this. After months of deliberation I know precisely what line I will not permit you to transgress. I don't need a single second longer to know what must be done. Leaving now is something you will not survive." I told him I had a rifle – it was actually his Winchester – and that he would only make it as far as the next bend in the river before he had eight bullets in his head. The ninth would be for me. Although I didn't have a gun in my hand at that particular moment, he knew it was no joke and screamed for the police like a madman, though the nearest police station was at least three hundred miles away. The police would never have done anything anyway. Over there the laws of the jungle are what count; a few bottles of whisky and a couple of hundred dollars would have been sufficient to dissuade the locals from investigating or have them put the incident down to an unfortunate hunting accident. For the remaining ten days of the shoot Kinski was extremely well behaved. The press later wrote that I directed him from behind the camera with a loaded gun. A beautiful image, but complete fiction.
Kinski was known for breaking contracts and walking away from a film if he felt like it. During a performance of Goethe's _Torquato Tasso_ he stopped in the middle of a speech, hurled insults at the audience, threw a lit candelabra into the auditorium and wrapped himself in the carpet that was lying on stage. He remained coiled inside until the audience was cleared from the theatre. Before _Aguirre_ he had to have a check-up for insurance reasons. I took him to see a doctor, who asked routine questions about allergies and hereditary diseases, and then: "Mr Kinski, have you ever suffered from fits of any kind?" "YES, EVERY DAY!" screamed Kinski at the highest pitch possible, before laying waste to the doctor's office. At one point during filming I reached up to move a strand of hair that was hanging down over his face. "Pardon me, Mr Kinski," I said, gently brushing it aside. He immediately exploded. "HAVE YOU GONE CRAZY? NOT EVEN MY BARBER IS ALLOWED TO TOUCH MY HAIR. YOU'RE AN AMATEUR!" The tabloid press adored him, and whenever he appeared on a talk show everyone in the audience would sit on the edge of their seats waiting for him to deliver the scandal. It never took more than a few minutes.
_You admire his performance in the film._
Absolutely. He was an excellent actor and truly knew how to move on screen. I wanted to give Aguirre a vicious little hump, like a tumour on his shoulder, the size of a fist. I felt there should be some differentiation between Aguirre's physicality and everyone else's; the character had to have some kind of inner distortion that would be apparent on the surface. It was Kinski's idea that Aguirre should have a kind of pigeon chest with a slight protrusion, and he decided to make one of his arms appear longer than the other so he would walk lopsidedly. His left arm became so short that his sword wasn't around his waist; it was higher up, almost up into his armpit. He introduced these physical aberrations into the film gradually and precisely, and by the final scene the character is even more deformed. Kinski did it all perfectly, moving almost like a crab walking on sand. As an actor he knew all about costumes, and I learnt a great deal as I watched him oversee every buttonhole and stitch. He wanted a dagger as a prop, as long and thin as a knitting needle. "When I stab someone," he told me, "it has to be malicious. No blood should be shed. My victims bleed to death internally." In the screenplay, to spare her the shame of his defeat, the original idea was that Aguirre kills his daughter with this dagger.
Having said that, he was a complete scourge and didn't care if _Aguirre_ was ever finished or released. He was interested only in his salary, and once shooting was over he refused to come to Munich and re-record some of his dialogue. About 20 per cent of what we recorded in the jungle was unusable because of the noise from the roaring rapids. What he actually said was: "I'll be there, but it will cost you a million dollars." He was absolutely serious about this, so I had no choice but to hire an actor – who had a lengthy career dubbing Humphrey Bogart into German – to dub Kinski's entire part. He did it with great skill, and years later I heard Kinski raving about how good he was in the German version of _Aguirre_. For the next film we did together I put into the contract that he was obliged to do a few days of re-recording, though Kinski insisted I could kidnap him, drag him to the studio, sit him in front of a microphone and handcuff him, and he would only sing his lines. Although for a couple of years afterwards he said he hated the film, I know he eventually liked it very much. At times it was clear he recognised and respected the work we did together, and understood that he and I were out to capture things beyond our individual existence, even beyond our collective existence. The man was a complete pestilence and a nightmare, and working with him became about maintaining my dignity under the worst conditions. It's also true that I call every grey hair on my head Kinski. But who cares about such things now? What's important is that the work was done and the films were made.
_What was the film's budget?_
Three hundred and seventy thousand dollars, a third of which went to Kinski, so I couldn't afford to take many people with me into the jungle; the entire crew numbered less than ten and we shot only a very small amount of footage in total. Although Kinski later insisted that I dined on caviar every night, sometimes I had to sell my boots just to get breakfast. I was the one who would take a boat out at four in the morning and go downriver to buy some chicken, eggs and yucca, or ate nothing if there wasn't enough food to go around. Like _Fitzcarraldo_ a few years later – where I traded unopened bottles of shampoo and aftershave I had bought in Miami for sacks of rice – _Aguirre_ was a barefoot film, so to speak, a child of poverty. Some of the actors and extras sensed this might be one of the film's virtues, so they never took their costumes off, even though they were full of mould because of the humidity. There is something authentic about the jungle that can never be fabricated, and if we had filmed in a studio I would have burnt through the entire budget in three days.
_Was the spectacular opening shot in the script or did you stumble across the mountain?_
I originally planned a scene on a glacier, 17,000 feet up, which started with a long procession of four hundred altitude-sick pigs tottering and staggering towards the camera. After a few minutes of following this line of animals, the audience would realise they are part of a Spanish army of adventurers, accompanied by hundreds of Indians. I tried things out with various pigs during pre-production, but none of them became altitude sick. Later a veterinarian in Austria did some tests, but after injecting a pig it became aggressive rather than woozy, so I ditched the whole idea, especially when several of the crew – some very tough men – became altitude sick up on this glacier. Taking all those people and animals that high up clearly wasn't feasible.
We ended up filming the opening sequence at a much lower altitude near Machu Picchu, on the side of a mountain that had a sheer vertical drop of 2,000 feet. It's thick vegetation up there, though the Incas had dug out a narrow staircase in the rocks, which is the trail the hundreds of people in the shot are using as they emerge from the clouds. We started transporting everyone at two in the morning – plus horses, pigs, llamas and cannons – and when I finally arrived at the top of the mountain there was indescribable chaos. It was pouring with rain and extremely slippery, there was dense fog and the whole valley was completely enshrouded by grey clouds. The Indian extras came from an altitude of 14,000 feet, but many of them still got vertigo, and we had to secure them with ropes during shooting. I spent much of the time trying to persuade everyone not to go home, begging them to be patient. I must have run up and down those steps three or four times instructing people what to do. I didn't want to use a megaphone; such things have to be done in direct contact with people. I somehow managed to convince them this was something special and extraordinary, and a couple of hours later was relieved that everyone was still in place as the fog and clouds suddenly opened up. We shot it only once, this line of people with the fog on one side, the mountain on the other. When the camera rolled I had a profound feeling, as if the grace of God were with this film and me.
Kinski eventually realised he would be a mere dot in the landscape, not the centre of attention, and wanted to act in close-up, leading the entire army with a grim face. I explained he wasn't yet the leader of the expedition, and in the end removed him entirely from the shot because I had the feeling the scene would be far more powerful if there were no human faces in it. Our concepts of the landscape differed profoundly. Kinski wanted the shot to embrace all of scenic Machu Picchu, including the peak and the ruins, which would have looked like a postcard or television commercial. I had in mind a very different framing of the landscape, an ecstatic one.
_Is_ Aguirre _a metaphor for Nazism?_
Because their work is often seen explicitly in light of their nation's history, there are misunderstandings lying in wait around every corner for Germany's artists, writers and filmmakers. Even today Hitler's legacy to the German people has made us hypersensitive. Like many Germans I am acutely aware of my country's history, and apprehensive even about bug spray; I know there is only one step from insecticide to genocide. With _Aguirre_ there was never any intention of creating a metaphor for Hitler.
_You worked with Thomas Mauch previously on_ Signs of Life _and_ Even Dwarfs Started Small. _Was your approach to filming in the jungle any different?_
Not really. I wanted to use a hand-held camera for most of _Aguirre_ because the physical contact the camera had with the actors was an important element of the film. I never needed to explain to Mauch what I wanted; he intuitively knew. The final shot – with the camera circling and swooping around the raft – had to be as smooth as possible. A helicopter would have been too expensive for us, so Mauch and I boarded a speedboat and drove it around the raft several times. I manoeuvred it myself, just as when I drove the van through the desert in _Fata Morgana_. When a speedboat approaches a raft at forty miles an hour it creates an enormous wake, which meant we moved through the waves we were creating. I rehearsed with the boat, going faster and slower; the whole thing was done with great precision. I had to feel with my whole body what the water around us was doing.
We shot the entire film with a single camera, which meant we were forced to work rather crudely during production; it added to the authenticity and spirit of the film. There was none of the glossy multi-camera sophistication you find in expensive Hollywood productions. Perhaps this is why _Aguirre_ has survived for so long. It's such a basic film; you really can't strip it down any more than it already is. The camera I used was actually stolen from the predecessor to the Munich Film School. They had a lot of equipment – including editing tables and a row of cameras sitting on a shelf – but never let young filmmakers use any of it. I wanted them to lend me a camera but had to endure an arrogant refusal. One day I found myself alone in this room next to the unlocked cabinet, saw a couple of cameras smiling down at me, and decided to liberate one of these lazy machines for an indefinite period. It was lying there looking up at me, a basic 35mm silent Arriflex, the camera I ended up using to make my first dozen or so films. I never considered it theft. For me, it was truly a necessity. I wanted to make films and needed a camera, so I had some kind of natural right to this tool. It was expropriation. If you are locked in a room and need air to breathe, take a chisel and hammer and break down the wall. When you have a good story to tell, by dint of destiny or God knows what, you gain the right to do such things. I helped this camera fulfil its destiny.
_At one point Aguirre screams at a horse so maniacally that it collapses._
The idea was that he would shout at the animal and it would pass out in terror. We visited various veterinarians and tried all sorts of methods to make a horse topple over as if unconscious, but the animals would just get drowsy and eventually fall asleep. The solution was an injection directly into the carotid artery that would make a horse collapse in twelve to fourteen seconds. We gave the animal the shot and rolled the camera. Kinski started his dialogue, then turned and shouted at the horse, which dropped to the ground; it was all timed to the second. I had originally intended a scene where Aguirre shouts at a huddle of pigs and they all drop dead, but it was a logistical nightmare. A few years later we shot a scene that was cut from _Nosferatu_ in which the vampire is standing in front of some horses in a meadow. At the moment when he slowly raises his arm an explosive went off behind the camera and the animals bolted. It looked good, but in the end I felt it was too much like a circus trick.
Many of my films contain animals, like jellyfish, which show up in several scenes, but I have no abstract concepts to offer that might explain how a particular animal signifies this or that. All I know is that animals have an enormous weight in my work, and some of the most hilarious performances I have ever seen are by animals, including those wacky television programmes where people send in videos of their crazy cat or piano-playing hamster. People always remember the dancing chicken at the end of _Stroszek_. I encountered that freak show about fifteen years before I made the film, at a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina, and couldn't get it out of my head; I knew that one day I had to return and film it. It's also where I heard Sonny Terry's harmonica music for the first time, which lingered in my mind. There was no doubt it had to be used at the end the film, and also, decades later, in _Bad Lieutenant_. It was too good not to recycle. I asked the owners of the chickens, which were in Alabama for the winter, to start special training months before we were due to film. Usually the animals would dance the barnyard shuffle for only five seconds and pick up a grain of corn after a quarter was deposited into the machine, but I needed this to go on as long as possible, so the owners set about intensively preparing the creatures for their big moment. It's a very bleak image, accompanied by the rather miserable feeling that if you came back a year later, the animal would still be there, dancing away. But as with the last sequence of _Land of Silence and Darkness,_ you know it fits perfectly, including the manic rabbit jumping on a toy fire truck and the duck playing the drums. _Stroszek's_ small crew of about ten people all found the scene very stupid and embarrassing; everyone asked whether we were really going to shoot such rubbish after spending so much time on this stupid film. "Please," I said to Thomas Mauch, "just point the camera, press the button and let it roll until the film runs out. This is something very big. It's unobtrusive when you look at it with the naked eye, but can't you see there is something big about it?" Perhaps a great metaphor too, though for what I couldn't say. It's like those perfect goals you score from a theoretically impossible angle. Such things are beyond me.
_Chickens obsess you._
Chickens in some forms – roasted, for example – are perfectly acceptable to me, but look into their eyes while they are alive and bear witness to genuine, bottomless stupidity. They are the most horrifying and nightmarish creatures in this world. During production on _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ I watched a group of chickens trying to cannibalise a one-legged comrade, and in _Signs of Life_ and _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ I show audiences how to hypnotise them, which is ridiculously easy. Hold the bird to the ground and using a piece of chalk draw a straight line away from its head. Do that and they don't budge an inch. You can also draw a circle around the animal and it will run in a loop until it drops from exhaustion.
Many years ago I became fascinated by a rooster named Weirdo, who weighed over thirty pounds. His offspring, Ralph, was even bigger. The man who had raised these extremely aggressive animals had been forced to singe off their spurs with a blowtorch. Then I found Frank, a miniature horse, specially bred from sixteenth-century Spanish stock, who stood less than two feet high. I told Frank's owner I wanted to film Ralph chasing Frank – with the tiniest midget riding him – around the biggest sequoia tree in the world, more than a hundred feet in circumference. It would have looked extraordinary because horse and rider together were still smaller than Ralph the rooster. Unfortunately Frank's owner refused. "My horse isn't going to show up for that," he said. "It will make him look stupid."
# Athletics and Aesthetics
_For you, filmmaking is athletics, not aesthetics._
It would be misleading to boil things down to a maxim like that, but let's try to shed some light on it. Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree. Cinema doesn't come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from knees and thighs, from being prepared to work twenty-hour days. Anyone who has ever made a film knows this. I have always appreciated a physical connection to my tools, from using the camera on location through to carrying prints of my films, each of which can weigh up to forty-five pounds, from my car into the projection room. What a relief to feel this weight, this substance, then let the heaviness drop away. It's the final stage of the physical act of filmmaking. A coward in body is often also a coward in mind. I will continue making films only as long as I am physically whole. If I were to lose a leg tomorrow, I would stop directing, even if my mind and sight were still solid. Let me offer a metaphor: all my films have been made on foot.
_Have you always had this appreciation of all things physical?_
For years I played with a bottom-division football team in Munich. Although almost everyone else was a faster or more technically skilled player, I was able to read the game better than anyone and often ended up in the right place at the right time, the spot where the ball would land, which meant I would regularly score goals. I'm still something like number three in the list of the all-time highest scorers for the club, even though some people spent twenty years playing for the team. Knowing what was going to happen next on the pitch and how to use the space around me was my only quality as a footballer.
I'm an excellent map reader and am rarely lost. You could take me down into the subway, lead me through the tunnels and spin me around three times, and I would still know which way was east. This ability to orientate myself has decided many important battles for me. When shooting interiors I always work closely with the set designer. Together we might move heavy furniture – perhaps the piano and bookshelf into this or that corner – to see how it feels. Physically rearranging objects in a room provides the knowledge necessary to operate within that space. With all this taken care of, I quickly work out where to place the actors in front of the camera. No time is wasted. Any aesthetic pattern that emerges within a shot always comes from a physical understanding of the environment in which the filming is taking place. I could never work competently in a space – interior or exterior – that I hadn't experienced with my body.
In the death scene of _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,_ with all the characters arranged around Kaspar's bed in a tableau, there is a perfect balance within the space. Even with two days to move the actors about, no one would have succeeded in filling that space more effectively. There is a short scene earlier in the film shot in a garden where we worked for six months during pre-production. Before we got there it was a potato patch, so I planted strawberries, beans and flowers myself. Not only did this patch start to feel like the landscaped gardens of the era, but when it came to filming I knew exactly where every plant and vegetable was. I usually have no patience for these kinds of things, but in this case it was vitally important.
_Why did you make_ The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner?
I have always felt close to ski flyers. I grew up on skis and, like all children in Sachrang, dreamt about becoming a great ski flyer and national champion. I was in serious training until a friend of mine had a horrifying accident. He hit some rocks at sixty miles an hour, fracturing his skull, and was so badly injured that I was convinced he would die if I moved him even an inch. I ended up carrying him back to the village a mile and a half away, down a steep slope. My friend was in a coma for three weeks but miraculously recovered. This experience was the instantaneous end of my hopes of being a ski flyer. Then, in 1973, I saw the Swiss ski flyer Walter Steiner – the best of his generation – compete at Oberstdorf in Bavaria, where he jumped so far that he landed only thirty feet short of the flat. I had finally encountered the living embodiment of my dreams, someone who could move like a bird. It was almost as if it were me flying out there.
Ski flying at the level Steiner practised is fantastically dangerous. The speeds reached on the slope mean the slightest gust of wind or patch of bad snow can cause a serious crash landing. God help the athlete who tumbles off the end of the ramp and is projected uncontrollably into the air, which is comparable to falling off a speeding express train. The other danger is flying too far and landing on the flat, which would be like hitting the ground after jumping from the Empire State Building. I knew just what Steiner must have been going through before each jump, and would joke with him, saying, "Walter, if I had continued to jump, I would have been your only true rival." He was also a woodcarver and would leave his art on trees hidden up in the mountains, many of which remain undiscovered.
Though Steiner is an introverted, taciturn man, we had an instant rapport and he immediately understood my intentions. I told him that when I saw him in competition as a seventeen-year-old, trailing far behind all the others, I turned to my friends and said, "That's the next world champion." A few years later I was proved right. During production even the television network I made the film for kept reminding me that in the previous events Steiner had come in almost last, asking if perhaps I might rather choose a different jumper for the film. But I knew this man was the greatest of them all. Much of _The Great Ecstasy_ was shot at Planica in Yugoslavia, where Steiner outflew everyone and even had to start lower down than everyone else, otherwise he would have landed on the flat again. Most ski ramps were truly lethal for someone with Steiner's skill, and in the film he talks about the thousands of spectators down in the valley out for his blood, though he asked me to edit out the line. "Don't put it in the film, for heaven's sake," he said. "I'll never be able to compete in Yugoslavia again." I told him it was important to include his thoughts on the subject, that people should have an idea of what it means to be up there against such inhumane demands. Steiner's experiences in Planica actually helped facilitate an eventual change in the construction of ski ramps.
_You appear in the film._
People who accuse me of self-promotion point to _The Great Ecstasy_ as proof, but it was actually a requirement that I be in the film. The German television network in Stuttgart had a series called _Grenzstationen_ [ _Border Stations_ ], which included some remarkably good work. I knew there must be one person behind all these films, so I called the station and asked who was responsible for the series. I met with him and explained I had an idea that would fit perfectly, and half an hour later we had a deal. Any film I made for this particular series would have to conform to the network's rules, one of which was that the filmmaker appear on camera. I never felt particularly comfortable with being physically present in the film, but because ski flying is so close to my heart I knew I could act as a competent commentator. When I finished _The Great Ecstasy_ , I came to understand that if a film needed a voiceover commentary, it would be best that I spoke it myself; it's more credible that way. I have the feeling my presence can give a film a certain authenticity, something you don't necessarily get from listening to a well-trained actor with a polished voice. I realised there was value in me being the chronicler of events and presenting my own viewpoint on things. My work is never anonymous, and these days I would feel alienated from a film if I didn't record the voiceover myself, including English versions, which make for a stronger connection to my original intentions than audiences reading subtitles. I'm aware that my voice has an interesting cadence and tone to English speakers; they seem to like hearing me talk. The same is true for Germans because, with its Bavarian inflections, my voice is similarly unusual.
_What is the "great ecstasy"?_
The word comes from the Greek " _ekstasis_ ", meaning "to step outside oneself," like the mediaeval mystics did, experiencing faith and truth in an ecstatic, visionary form. Ecstasy in this context is something you would know about if you had ever been a ski jumper. You can see it on the flyers' faces as they sweep past the camera, mouths agape, with their extraordinary expressions.
Ski flying isn't just an athletic pursuit; it's also spiritual, a question of how to master a fear of death. Those jumpers who thought they could beat Steiner only through athletic means never stood a chance. There is a profound solitude in what these men do. These are lonely people who train for ten years to prepare themselves for a few seconds in the air, when they step outside all we are as human beings. It's as if they fly into the deepest, darkest abyss there is, in flagrant defiance of gravity, chasing one of mankind's oldest dreams: to move through the air without a machine. Overcoming this mortal fear and deep anxiety is the striking thing about ski flyers. You rarely see muscular athletic men up there on the ramps; usually these are young kids with deathly pale, pimply faces and an unsteady look in their eyes. They dream about flying, about stepping into the ecstasy that pushes against the laws of nature. I don't particularly care for gravity, so I suppose it's no coincidence that several of my films – _Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Wings of Hope_ and _The White Diamond_ – are about people who dream of flying, are punished for it and crash to earth. I always saw Steiner as a brother of Fitzcarraldo. Both defy the laws of gravity in their own way.
We had five cameramen and special cameras on either side of the ski ramp that could shoot in extreme slow motion, at something like four or five hundred frames a second. Filming at this speed is a challenge because the entire reel shoots through the camera in only a few seconds, and enormous physical force is placed on the celluloid. For this short moment of acceleration the cameramen follow the trajectory of the jumper through the air, trying to keep him in frame and focus. The result is slow-motion shots of these men endlessly floating down to earth. Once seen, these images are never forgotten.
_Steiner tells the story of his raven._
I went through his family album and found a picture of him as a kid with a raven. I asked him about it, but he turned the page and wouldn't say anything. It took three more attempts on different days before he agreed to tell the story. You can see how uncomfortable he is in the film when he explains that when he was twelve, his only friend was a raven that he reared on bread and milk. Both the raven and Steiner were embarrassed by their friendship, so the raven would wait for him far away from the schoolhouse, and when all the other children were gone it would fly onto his shoulder and together they would ride on his bicycle. When the raven started losing its feathers, other birds began pecking it almost to death, and it was eventually so badly injured that Steiner was forced to kill it himself. "It was torture to see him being harried by his own kind because he couldn't fly any more," he says in the film. From that scene I cut to Steiner flying in slow motion, a shot that lasts more than a minute. A written caption appears, taken from a text by Robert Walser: "I should be all alone in this world, I, Steiner, and no other living being. No sun, no culture, I, naked on a high rock, no storm, no snow, no streets, no banks, no money, no time and no breath. Then I wouldn't be afraid any more."*
The story with the raven made such an impression on me that a couple of years later I borrowed it for a short film called _No One Will Play with Me_ , made at a school for problem children in Munich. No one will play with Martin because, say his classmates, he stinks. He tells Nicole, a girl in his class, about his talking crow called Max, and they both visit it. Nicole then invites Martin to her home, where Nicole's mother takes care of the bruises and cuts on Martin's feet. It turns out he has been beaten repeatedly by his father and eats only popcorn because his mother is bedridden and dying of cancer. The conclusion I came to after making _No One Will Play with Me_ is that there is no such thing as problem children, only problem parents. As with _The Flying Doctors of East Africa_ , what interested me were questions of human perception, and before filming I spent time with the children, showing them prints of various paintings. One was of a city with castles, a harbour, a fish market and hundreds of people unloading ships; there were all sorts of things going on. I projected a slide of the picture for maybe ten seconds before turning it off, then asked the children, "What have you seen?" Four or five of them shouted in one voice, "A horse! A horse!" "Where on earth is the horse?" I thought to myself. I put the slide back on and searched. "Down there!" they all shouted, pointing. Hidden in the corner of the picture was a single horseman with a lance, standing next to a horse. Then we watched an American film, and I asked them to talk about what they had seen. Several said they liked the soldier leaning in a doorway. I couldn't understand where they had seen this figure, but then replayed the scene and noticed that at one point the prince and princess leave the castle and a solitary soldier is standing guard. No adult would even have noticed this minor character, but for some of the children it was the thing most strongly imprinted on their minds. It makes me think to this very day.
_Do you make a point of reading the reviews of your films?_
Rarely. A positive review doesn't make a film better, nor does a negative one make a film worse. I've never been interested in circling around my own navel; I try to avoid myself. I might glance at some of the more important reviews because they can influence box-office takings, but generally none of it has anything to do with me. Audience reactions have always been more important than those of professional film-goers. When it comes to other people's work, I trust the professional even less; urgent recommendations are what I prefer. Some reviewers – like John Simon – have hated almost all my films, but that's okay. I never minded Simon dunking me underwater for as long as he could, and actually like him for his hostility and all-pervading vitriol. He is dismissive of a film from beginning to end. The man is not apathetic.†
_He wrote that_ The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser _is historically in accurate because Bruno S. – a forty-year-old man – played a sixteen-year-old boy._
When it comes to that film, age doesn't matter. Bruno looked like a sixteen-year-old and is so unbelievably good on screen; he radiates such profound tragedy and radical, unblemished human dignity as no one else ever has. He's the finest actor I have ever worked with, and at the time I insisted he win the Academy Award for his performance. I remain convinced he gives one of the greatest performances ever on film; no other actor in the world has moved me so deeply. As with some of the situations in _Aguirre_ that were genuinely dangerous for everyone involved, when you see Bruno on screen you aren't watching an actor merely playing a role and pretending to suffer. Some filmmaking is all about stylisation, but Bruno's fundamental identity as a human being was untouched in _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_. Watch the film and witness genuine human suffering, not theatrical melodrama. Anyway, who cares about the man's age? I'm a filmmaker, a storyteller, not an accountant of history. Whether Bruno was forty or seventy or fifteen years old isn't important. Criticism like this comes from the knowledge that audiences bring with them, and has nothing to do with the film per se.
Some reviewers compared it to Truffaut's film _L'Enfant sauvage,_ which had been released a few years before and is about the doctor who cared for the Wild Boy of Aveyron, a young child who was found in a forest, unable to speak or walk properly. Truffaut's film is about a child raised by wolves who has some kind of social system instilled in him, even if it was that of wild animals. But Kaspar has no nature whatsoever, not that of bourgeois society, nor of wolves. He is, simply, human. Over time there have been several documented cases similar to the one in Truffaut's film, but Kaspar's story is unique. Nobody could tell exactly how old the real Kaspar was, though there are plausible guesses that he must have been about sixteen or seventeen when he was pushed out into the open as a foundling, unable even to walk.
_Who was Kaspar?_
Nobody had any idea where he came from or who he was when he showed up in Nuremberg in 1828. When the townsfolk tried to communicate with him, it turned out he had spent his entire life locked away in a dark dungeon, tied to the ground with his belt. Like many of the characters in my films, Kaspar emerged from the blackest night. He arrived never having had any contact with or understanding of human beings; food was pushed into his cell every night while he was sleeping. He was unable to walk properly, had no idea what a house was, knew nothing about table manners and thought the belt around his waist was a natural part of his anatomy. It's fascinating to read some of Kaspar's own writings, where we learn he was even frightened by birdsong. His mind was unable to co-ordinate what it was hearing because he had no conception of the world. A couple of years after being taken in by the town, and once he had learnt language, word got out that Kaspar was writing his autobiography. Soon after came the first attempt on his life, followed by his murder. It was about two and a half years since he had been found in the town square. To this day no one knows who killed him.
When we hear the story of Kaspar Hauser, we think about how civilisation manipulates and remodels, always bringing us into line. His problems are our problems, the anxiety and difficulties we all have in adapting to the world, in connecting and communicating with others. Kaspar is the most intact person in this unnamed town; he has the kind of genuine intelligence you sometimes find in illiterates. But everything spontaneous in him is systematically deadened by this philistine society. Kaspar is propelled into the world as a young man who hadn't experienced society in any way, and is doomed from the instant he arrives in town. The stultifying and staid existence of the people surrounding Kaspar reveals itself very potently within the historical setting of the Biedermeier era, the most intensively bourgeois period of German history, with its interminable rituals and rules. There's a scene in the film when a young child holds a mirror up to Kaspar's face; it's the first time he has ever seen his reflection, and he immediately feels confused and shocked. This is what Kaspar is doing to everyone around him: forcing them to confront their day-to-day existence with new eyes. He is the stumbling block over which society trips.
At one point Kaspar spontaneously starts weeping after being given a baby to hold, then says, " _Ich_ _bin von allen abgetan_ " ["I am so far away from everything"]. In another scene, a professor of logic tests him by explaining there is one village inhabited by people who tell only the truth and a second where people tell only lies. A man is walking between the two villages. What is the only question, the professor asks Kaspar, that can be asked of this man to determine whether he is from the village of truth-tellers or the village of liars? In terms of strict logic, the only solution to the professor's problem is the one he gives Kaspar, but Kaspar's answer – that you can ask the man if he is a tree frog – is also correct. In the autopsy scene, the townspeople are like circling vultures as they feverishly attempt to find some physical aberration in Kaspar, and are overjoyed to discover that apparently he has a malformed brain. Finding this physical difference between themselves and Kaspar makes them feel better about how they treated him when he was alive. There is an inevitability about someone as uncivilised and uncultured as Kaspar not being able to survive that environment, and if the real Kaspar hadn't been murdered, I would have killed him at the end of the film anyway. In terms of a coherent cinematic narrative, he has to be finished off.
_How much historical research did you do?_
When the film came out, I was asked if I used Jakob Wassermann's novel _Caspar Hauser_ as the basis of the story, though to this day I've never read it. I did look at Peter Handke's play _Kaspar_ , about the origins and distortions of language, and there is also a beautiful poem by Verlaine called "Gaspard Hauser chante". I took time to read a volume of original documents and essays that included the first part of Anselm von Feuerbach's report, alongside the poetry and autobiographical fragment Kaspar wrote, and details of his autopsy. Various things in the film – like Kaspar's toy wooden horse, him being carried to a hilltop where he is taught to walk, his extremely tender feet, him spitting out food in disgust but delighting in bread and water – come from this source, as well as the text of the letter found in Kaspar's hand read by the cavalry captain and Kaspar's own beautiful line, " _Ja, mir kommt es vor, dass mein Erscheinen auf dieser Welt ein harter Sturz gewesen_ _ist_ " "Well, it seems to me that my coming into this world was a terribly hard fall"]. The Kaspar Hauser archives are in Ansbach, the town where he was killed, but I never went there. A thousand books and more than ten thousand articles and research papers about Kaspar have been published; I asked myself whether I really needed to involve myself with such extraneous scholarship. The vast majority of this material focuses on the criminal case and frames the facts as a detective story or a police thriller, or digs into Kaspar's origins, speculating on whether he was Napoleon's illegitimate son. A film version of the story even suggested Kaspar was a prince from the royal house of Baden,[‡ a theory disproved when a German magazine did a DNA test on the blood from the shirt Kaspar was wearing when he was killed and compared it to blood taken from a living member of the house of Baden. It's everything beyond these things that is truly interesting about Kaspar.
As with _Aguirre, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ doesn't purport to be a factually correct retelling of history. The film tries to reach a more profound truth than that of everyday reality, something made clear with the visualisations of Kaspar's dreams. Only the most basic factual elements of his life as we know them are contained within the story; the rest is invented. As far as we know, he was never exhibited in a circus, he never talked to a professor of logic and never spoke about the Sahara. The real Kaspar – having escaped the attempt on his life – said that he had, in a flash, recognised the assassin as the man who had brought him from the cellar and taught him to walk, which is why I used the same actor in both roles.
_Like_ Fata Morgana, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser _has elements of science fiction to it_.
If you strip away the story and look only at the dream sequences, you would be left with something that feels like _Fata Morgana_ , just as if you strip away the story of _Signs of Life_ and keep the shot of the windmills. I always felt that _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ is almost _Fata Morgana_ with a narrative. The tale of this boy is almost a science-fiction story similar to the idea of aliens arriving on our planet, as with the original conception of _Fata Morgana._ They have no human social conditioning and walk around confused and amazed. The real question is perhaps anthropological: what happens to a man who has crashed onto our planet with no concept of the world, no education or culture? What does he feel? What does he see? What must a tree or horse look like to him? How would he be treated? What interested me was the story of someone who was uncontaminated by society and outside forces. There is a moment when Kaspar sits calmly as a swordsman lunges at him, because he has no understanding of danger. In another scene he burns himself on a flame because he has never seen fire before. When Kaspar was first found by the townspeople, he spoke only a few words and a handful of phrases he clearly didn't understand, including, " _Ich_ _möchte ein solcher Reiter werden wie mein Vater einer war_ " ["I want to be a gallant horseman the way my father was"]. He spoke the sentence like a parrot.
Some of the shots in the film are held for an unusually long time, like the one near the beginning of the rye field blowing in the wind. I want audiences to empathise with Kaspar by looking anew at certain things and seeing them through his untainted eyes. The music – Pachelbel's _Canon_ – represents Kaspar's awakening from his slumber. What contributes to the power of this moment are the words that appear, from Büchner's _Lenz_ : "Don't you hear that horrible screaming around you, the screaming men call silence?"
_The literal translation of the film's German title is "Every Man for Himself and God Against All."_
The evening I finished the screenplay I watched a Brazilian film called _Macunaíma_ , directed by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, in which one of the characters says, "Every man for himself and God against all." I jumped out of my seat because I knew it was the perfect title for Kaspar's story. I wrote a sequence for the film but never shot it, a discussion between the priest and Kaspar after the first attempt on his life in which Kaspar says, "When I look around at people, I truly have the feeling God must have something against them."
_Is casting something you always do yourself?_
It has always been an essential part of my work. When you have a good screenplay and a good cast, you barely need a director. Whoever said that casting was 90 per cent of the director's job was right. I am extremely careful when casting even minor roles; whoever steps in front of my camera is royalty. You can't throw actors together and expect a film to coalesce; they have to complement each other and create a certain chemistry and – at times – friction. One lousy performance can contaminate the entire film.
Sometimes there are difficulties in persuading others that your choice is the right one. My efforts to cast Bruno S. in _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ are a good example. I first encountered him in _Bruno the Black_ , a film by a young student called Lutz Eisholz about marginal figures – street performers and singers – in Berlin. It was a lucky coincidence for me, because after writing the screenplay I had no idea who I might find to play Kaspar. When I saw Bruno on screen I was immediately fascinated by him, and literally found myself getting up out of bed and standing in front of the television set, staring intensely. The next day I asked Eisholz to put me in touch with Bruno, and the following week we both went to his apartment. He was mistrustful of everyone he met, and when he opened the door wouldn't even look me in the eye. It took about half an hour before he would even make eye contact with me and start to confide certain things, but once we had established a rapport we maintained it throughout the production. Our conversations were always complex and invigorating, and on several occasions I put into the film things I heard him say, like the line, "The people are like wolves to me."
Everyone doubted whether Bruno would be able to play the lead character in a feature film. They all told me it was impossible to direct a man like that, so I did something I had never done before and have never done since: I assembled a full crew and a 35mm camera to shoot a screen test, on a lake near Berlin, with Bruno in full costume alongside another actor. Immediately things were uncomfortable, and I had a feeling it would all end up in embarrassment because Bruno was so stiff and nervous. But when I looked at the footage I only saw my mistakes, not Bruno's, and realised exactly how to handle him in the future. When I showed the screen test to ZDF [Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen], the television network that was putting up much of the budget for the film, I sank deeper and deeper into my chair. The lights went up in the screening room and there was a nasty silence hanging in the air. The network executive stood up and said, "I'm against Bruno for the part. Who is with me?" The hands of everyone – all thirty people – shot up into the air. I sensed there was a hand not raised next to me. It was Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, my cameraman. "Jörg," I asked, "are you for Bruno?" He grinned and nodded. His inner fire had somehow prevailed.
I'm not in favour of numerical democracy in voting, so I looked at these people against Bruno, then turned to Schmidt-Reitwein and said, "We have won the ballot." It was like in mediaeval times, when, if a group of monks were against some innovation or a reform of monastic life because of indifference, and only a couple of them had the feverish knowledge that these changes had to be made to advance the cause of faith, then out of the enormity of their wish these two would declare themselves the _melior pars_ – the "better part" – and win the ballot. Intensity wins the battle, not strength in numbers. "Bruno is going to be the one," I announced to everyone in the room, and asked the ZDF executive to declare himself either with me or against me. He looked into my face for a long while, then said, "I'm still on board." His name is Willi Segler, and I love him for his loyalty. It was a great moment for me. In situations like this, dig in your heels and budge not a single inch. We went into production almost immediately.
_Why did you choose to keep Bruno's identity secret?_
He asked us to, and he was right to do so. When he was four years old, his mother, a prostitute, beat him so hard he lost his speech and used this as a pretext to put him into an asylum for retarded and insane children. Bruno told me about his time in an institution during the Nazi era, something he talks about in _Stroszek_ , the second film we made together. If he wet his bed at night, he had to stand with his arms stretched out holding the sheet in front of the other children, until it was dry. If he lowered his arms, he was beaten. Eventually, at the age of nine, he escaped and spent the next twenty-three years of his life in and out of institutions and prisons. He also picked up a number of minor criminal convictions for things like vagrancy and public indecency.
Bruno was aware that the film we made together was as much about how society had destroyed him as it was about how society had killed Kaspar Hauser. Maybe for this reason he wanted to remain anonymous, and for many years I called him the "Unknown Soldier of Cinema." _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ is his monument; I even considered calling the film _The Story of Bruno Hauser_. I felt he shouldn't be removed from his environment for long, nor should he be exposed to the press or regaled as a film star, but he was excited when he heard about the Cannes Film Festival and said, " _Der Bruno_ wants to transmit [ _durchgeben_ ] his accordion by playing to those people." He referred to himself in the third person, and never said "act" or "do," always "transmit." I was wary about taking him to the meat market out there, but he really wanted to go. "My whole life I was excluded," he said. "I could never involve myself in anything. Now we have done something beautiful, I want to be a part of it." The press is so intrusive at Cannes, but he was extraordinarily grounded when confronted by them, pulling out his bugle and giving a signal. One time he stood up in front of an audience with his accordion and said, "I will now play all the nuances of the colour red." He drew so much attention, yet remained completely untouched by it and wasn't the least bit concerned by the hordes of photographers. At the press conference for the film Bruno impressed everyone. He said he had come to look at the sea for the first time, and marvelled at how clean it was. Someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. "When the world is emptied of human beings," he said, "it will become so again." If you watch him in certain scenes in Stroszek, you can hear the extraordinary sweetness in his voice. Although he had been systemically trampled upon throughout his life, Bruno was a genuinely warm-hearted man.
_How did he acclimatise to being on a film set?_
Without the mutual trust quickly established between the two of us, I wouldn't have stood a chance. With Bruno there was always physical contact. He liked it when I held his wrist; not his hand, just his wrist, as if I had my fingers on his pulse. But he could also be unruly, and whenever he would talk about the injustices of the world I tried to give him the space to say whatever he wanted. I got angry with a soundman who, after a few minutes of ranting, opened a magazine and started to read. "You're being paid to listen," I told him. Eventually Bruno would see that everyone was looking at him, and say, " _Der Bruno_ has talked too much. Let's do some good work now." I repeatedly said to him, "Bruno, when you need to talk and speak about yourself, do it. It's not an interruption for us. It's very much a part of what we're doing here. Not everything needs to be recorded on film."
Bruno liked the character of Kaspar so much that he refused to take his costume off. One day he overslept for breakfast, so I knocked on his door. There was no answer. I pushed it open and it immediately banged into something. It was Bruno, sleeping on the floor, right next to the door, fully clothed, with a pillow and blanket. In a split second he stood upright in front of me, wide awake, and said, "Yes, Werner, what is it?" It really broke my heart when I saw this. "Bruno, you've overslept," I said. "Did you really sleep here on the floor?" "Yes," he said, " _Der Bruno_ is always sleeping next to the escape." That's where he felt safe. In the past, whenever Bruno would break out of a correctional institution he would go into hiding, and because of this was always on high alert, ready to be recaptured.
Shooting the film was tiring for him, and whenever Bruno was exhausted he would say, " _Der Bruno_ is going to take that one," before having a nap for a couple of minutes between takes. It was his way of removing himself for short periods of time. At the end of each shot we would record a minute of ambient sound. Every interior and exterior has its own atmosphere and tone of silence, and for continuity in editing it's always useful to get a recording. But with Bruno around this wasn't always possible because five seconds after calling "cut" he would be snoring. Sometimes I had to cut in the middle of a scene because he was farting so loudly. Much of the dialogue was written while I was sitting on set, literally as the lights were being positioned, because at that point the actors needed something to say. Giving them their dialogue at the last minute obviously meant they weren't able to learn anything by heart, which I came to realise was important when it came to working with Bruno. About a week before we were due to shoot Kaspar's death scene, I talked him through the moment when he is mortally stabbed, and he immediately started making notes to himself. A few days later he said, "Werner, finally I know what to transmit." He stood there and said, very seriously, "I will transmit the cry of death!" before screaming wildly like a bad theatre actor, then thrashing about and falling to the ground. Bruno envisioned himself playing the scene that way, so twenty minutes before shooting I did a rewrite. It would have been too difficult to persuade him otherwise, and in the film you see Kaspar stumbling into the garden having already been stabbed. From then on I went out of my way to make sure that Bruno wasn't able to mull over the script in advance.
Something else to deal with was the fact that Bruno didn't speak pure German, or even grammatically correct German, rather a dialect from the Berlin suburbs. In the end we were able to take advantage of this because his slow and careful recitation of dialogue somehow elevates the acting to a level of stylisation. It adds to the power of Bruno's performance because his speaking voice and articulation produced a beautiful effect, as if he is discovering language for the first time.
_Did Bruno become more confident as the shoot progressed?_
He was an intelligent and streetwise man, not at all defenceless, even if the character he played was fundamentally unable to protect himself from the world. I made it clear to him before we started work that on the most primitive level this was to be an exchange of services. "You act in the film and I'll pay you," I explained. "But there's more to it than that, because you'll be able to fill this character with more convincing life than anyone else in the world. There is a considerable responsibility on your shoulders." It was a challenge he accepted without hesitation. He quickly became used to how we did things on set and worked hard, which included refusing to eat lunch because he said it disturbed his concentration. For the scene where Kaspar learns to walk, it was Bruno's idea to put a stick in the hollow of his knees, then sit for two hours and numb his legs, after which he was unable to stand.
Bruno also had moments of real distrust of us all, especially me. He was always going into bars, throwing his money around and getting drunk, so I suggested we open a bank account for him, which would be a hurdle to him spending money so easily. He was immediately convinced there was a conspiracy to steal his wages. No one – not even the bank manager – could persuade him it was impossible for me to take money from his account unless I had his personal authorisation in writing. He even accused me of hiring a stooge to play the manager. But the times when he did trust what we were doing were important and quite moving. He would talk incessantly about death and wrote a will. "Where shall I put it?" he asked me. "My brother will kill me, or I will kill him if I see him. I can't trust my family. My mother the whore is dead, my sister the whore is dead." I told him to put it in a safe in the bank or to give it to a lawyer. "No, I don't trust them," he said. Two days later he handed me the will and asked me to take care of it.
We found an old-fashioned, genuine autopsy table made of solid marble for the death scene. Bruno was so fascinated with death and this table that once shooting was over he desperately wanted to have it. "The name of this table is Justice," he would say in a strange tone of voice. "This is where the rich and poor end up." He wanted to take the table, but I explained that we had rented it as a prop from an antique shop. I think I even suggested it probably wasn't the kind of thing he wanted to own. "No, _Der Bruno_ must have it!" he said. "When I saw myself lying on this table, I knew that the cause of death was _Heimweh_ [homesickness]." I took his request seriously only when he gave me some paintings he had done of the table, which were basically self-portraits of him lying on this thing. A speech bubble from his mouth had the words "Cause of death: _Heimweh_." A few months later I asked him if he wanted any stills from the film or photographs taken on the set. "The only one I want," he said, "is a photo of the scene of the autopsy. The table is Justice." After that I felt he should have the table after all. I bought it from the shop and gave it to him.
Our work together gave Bruno a certain confidence, and helped him within his own social milieu. People who lived in his Berlin neighbourhood would drag him into the pastry shop and buy him a treat, and the local barber would give him a free haircut and shave. I was careful to ensure that he held onto his job as a forklift driver in a steel factory; we filmed during his vacation, and because he got only three weeks off every year I asked for additional unpaid holiday time for him. He had been treated like a freak there, but after the film was released I called the factory and asked to speak to Bruno. The secretary would say, "Sorry, our Bruno isn't on the factory floor at the moment." Before they would never have used the word "our," but now they were genuinely proud of him. Apparently every employee of the factory went to see the film. People took him seriously and he was given real responsibilities.
I was aware that none of this could solve the fundamental problems Bruno's catastrophic life had showered on him. During shooting he would sometimes express utter despair about his life and what had happened to him. I told him what he already knew, that working together for five weeks could never repair the damage so many years of imprisonment and catastrophe had caused. I know that in the long term his involvement with the film helped Bruno come to terms with his experiences. It was a unique opportunity for him to reflect on his own life, though there were things he still didn't understand. Why, when he walked down the street, dirty and neglected, did the girls have no time for him? He would grab one of them and cry, "Why don't you kiss me!" Bruno earned a good sum of money for his work, which we helped him put to good use, so on the primitive level of economics Bruno benefited from the experience. When I first met him, his apartment was a single room piled high with rubbish. By the time we made _Stroszek_ , he was living in a bigger place, which he proceeded to fill with things he pulled out of the garbage.
I had the feeling that _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ was some kind of summing up after so many years of work, and several characters from earlier films appear in various scenes: Hombre the dwarf sitting on a throne; Walter Steiner as a drunken peasant; composer Florian Fricke as a piano player, the same role he plays in _Signs of Life_ ; and Hombrecito from _Aguirre_ , played by Kidlat Tahimik, a Filipino director, speaking in Tagalog. There's also a young Mozart, the remnant of a project I never got off the ground. It was as if I were drawing a line with the scene, summarising my work up until that moment, seeing where I should go from there. I felt as if I were exploring new directions without constraints, which I continued to do with _Heart of Glass_.
_For which you hypnotised the actors._
Cinema per se has a hypnotic quality to it. I often find myself in an almost unconscious state on the film set, having to ask the person doing continuity what scenes have already been done and what work remains. What a shock to be told it's already the third week of filming. "How is this possible?" I ask myself. "Where has all the time gone? What have I actually achieved here?" It's as if I were at a drunken party and somehow arrived home without being aware of it. The next morning three policemen are standing at my bedside, accusing me of having killed someone the night before.
The story of _Heart of Glass_ was loosely adapted from a chapter of a novel called _Die Stunde des Todes_ [ _The Hour of Death_ ] by Herbert Achternbusch, who played the chicken hypnotiser in _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_. The book was based on an old folk legend about a peasant prophet in Lower Bavaria who – like Nostradamus – made predictions about the cataclysmic end of the world. The story is about an inventor of a special kind of ruby glass who has died, taking his secret with him to the grave. No details can be found in his home, and after a smelter tries in vain to recreate the formula, the local factory owner sends for the herdsman Hias, known for his prophetic gifts. Hias proves to be of little help, and the factory owner eventually comes to believe that the blood of a young virgin must be added to the glass mixture, so he stabs his housemaid to death. When he announces he now has the knowledge to formulate ruby glass, a euphoric, crazed celebration breaks out in town. Hias has apocalyptic visions because he is able to see further into the future than anyone around him. In his trances he imagines a new world; he foresees the people around him becoming insane and the destruction by fire of the town's glassworks. The owner burns his own factory down, as prophesised, and the glassblowers search for a culprit. They mistake the prediction of evil for its origin, and Hias is blamed for the fire.
Although at the time I knew very little about hypnosis and it had never crossed my mind to use it in a film, I started to think about the story I had before me, this tale of collective madness, of people aware of an approaching catastrophe yet who do nothing. After all, the idea of people walking into a foreseeable disaster is an unfortunately familiar situation in German history. I wondered how I could stylise the actors, creating sleepwalkers with open eyes, as if in a trance. I wanted performers with fluid, floating movements, which meant the film would depart from commonplace behaviour and gestures. I wanted it to have an atmosphere of hallucination, prophecy and collective delirium that intensified towards the climax. The identities of the actors would remain intact under hypnosis, but they would be stylised. Maybe the title _Heart of Glass_ makes more sense in this light; for me, it refers to a sensitive and fragile inner state, one that has a kind of transparent glacial quality. I wondered if a hypnotised person could open their eyes without waking up, and if people under hypnosis would be able to communicate with each other. Both turned out to be possible. In fact, if you put two hypnotised people in a crowded room, they are intuitively drawn to each other, and learning dialogue is easier because in many cases memory functions better while under hypnosis.
Two films encouraged me to push on with my ideas. One was _The Tragic Diary of Zero the Fool_ ,§ featuring a theatre group from a lunatic asylum in Canada; the other was Jean Rouch's _Les Maîtres fous_ , shot in Ghana and featuring the annual ceremonies of the Hauka tribe, who – while in trance and heavily under the influence of drugs – enact the arrival of the English governor and his entourage. Rouch's boldness and depth of insight into human nature have forever stayed with me; I consider _Les Maîtres fous_ one of the greatest films ever made. It virtually stopped my heart the first time I saw it, and has forever inspired me to venture into the abyss of the human soul in ways most people would never dare.
_Did you do the hypnosis yourself?_
During pre-production I put an ad in a newspaper asking for people who wanted to take part in a film project involving hypnosis, and about six hundred people responded. I spent more time on casting _Heart of Glass_ than for any other film I've made, before or after; there were sessions once a week for six months. We selected about forty people according to the types needed for the story, and also, crucially, based on their receptivity to hypnosis. We were careful to choose individuals who were emotionally stable and genuinely interested in what we were doing. Being hypnotised isn't about just sinking into the unconscious, it's about concentration. There is a certain proclivity for being hypnotised; just as some people can ride a bicycle without any training, some are able to be hypnotised very easily. Everyone's susceptibility is different. Some people immediately slip into an apathetic state and become wholly disorientated; they lose much of their ability to control themselves physically, so obviously we didn't select them. Others are so normal in their reactions that you can hardly distinguish them from the non-hypnotised. Everyone is different, and one of the actors we selected – the old man playing the factory owner who laughs throughout the film – had no interest in waking up once he had been hypnotised, resisting whenever I tried to bring him out of it.
We had a hypnotist who was supposed to act as some kind of assistant director, but he turned out to be a New Age creep who claimed hypnosis was a cosmic aura that only he, with his special powers, could attract and radiate. His whole approach disgusted me; he would babble on about how hypnosis was a direct link to the supernatural. Years later I put some of these more ridiculous ideas into the script of _Invincible,_ when Hanussen is performing on stage. The neurological difference between being awake and being asleep, and being asleep and being under hypnosis, is more or less the same. Hypnosis is surrounded by an aura of mystery, but it's really an ordinary phenomenon; science just hasn't yet furnished us with a sufficient explanation of the exact physiological processes at work when someone is under hypnosis. It has nothing to do with metaphysics or any kind of evil power, even if the country-fair hypnotist has forever tried to convince his audience otherwise. The way hypnosis works is by the hypnotist giving life to the act of self-hypnosis via mind and speech rituals. It's all about auto-suggestion. The fact is that anyone with natural authority and a certain intensity of suggestion can become a hypnotist, and after two rehearsal sessions I ended up doing it all myself.
_Did some people suspect it was just a gimmick?_
Of course, but there was a very clear purpose to it. The potential for visionary and poetic language is revealed through hypnosis. I wanted to provoke poetic language from people who had never before been in touch with such things, just as the nightmarish _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ , the ecstatic _Woodcarver Steiner_ and the films I made with Bruno S. and Fini Straubinger were attempts to render on screen, for everyone to see and experience, certain inner states.
The aim of rehearsals was to work out a catalogue of suggestions that would result in the kind of stylised somnambulism you see in the film. What counted was the way things were suggested to the actors, and soon they were able to feel non-existent heat so intensely they would break out in a sweat. They could hold conversations with imaginary people, and two hypnotised actors could even talk coherently to a third imaginary person. I hypnotised one woman and told her she was no longer able to speak. When I woke her she had such difficulty talking, even asking for a glass of water, that I hypnotised her again and told her, "You are slowly regaining the gift of speech. When you wake up, you will be able to speak like a great orator." She immediately began to talk with great eloquence. The timing of the movements and speech of the actors was often very peculiar, and once they had been brought out of their states many had only a vague recollection of what they had been doing. If there were a pause of more than two minutes between takes, I would wake them up because it isn't healthy to keep someone under hypnosis for very long. After working with the actors for several weeks, it usually took only ten or fifteen seconds to put them back under again.
Rather than give specific directions per se, it was more important to get the actors into the right mood. Instead of asking them to walk across a room, I said something like, "You move as if in slow motion because the whole room is filled with water. You can breathe easily, like a scuba diver. You are drifting, floating." Or, "You see your partner but look through him, as you look through a window," and "You are an inventor of great genius working on an insane, beautiful invention. When I put my hand on your shoulder, tell me what this thing is and how it works." I wanted each actor to write a poem, but what they came out with depended on the quality of the suggestion, so I never asked someone just to write a poem. Instead I told them, "You're the first one for centuries who has set foot on a foreign island. It's overgrown with jungle and full of strange birds. You come across a gigantic cliff, and on closer inspection discover the rock is actually green emerald. Hundreds of years ago a monk took a chisel and hammer and engraved a poem into the wall. You open your eyes and are the first one to see it. Read out loud what you see." One actor with no formal education whose day job was tending the horse stables of a Munich police squad stood there and apologised. "I didn't bring my glasses," he said. I told him to move closer, then everything would be in focus. He stepped forward and in a strange voice said, "Why can we not drink the moon? Why is there no vessel to hold it?" On it went, a very beautiful reading. Sometimes, of course, hypnosis triggers only banalities. I told the same story to one young man – a law student who had dropped out of his studies – who took one look at the wall and said, "Dear Mother, I'm doing fine. Everything is all right. I'm looking to the future now. Hugs and kisses, Your Son."
The only actor in the film not put into trance was Josef Bierbichler, who played Hias, the only clairvoyant among the townsfolk. The workers in the glass factory, who were all authentic, professional glassblowers, also weren't under hypnosis because it would have been too dangerous, as liquid glass has a temperature of more than a thousand degrees. They were also drinking a fair amount of beer because of the heat. It's intensive work; they literally have no tools except a long pipe and a pair of pliers. Certain things they do could never be achieved with mechanical devices. One particular shot – a glassblower creating a figurine of a horse – is truly extraordinary to watch. I have never met anyone who understands physical materials as these people do. Nothing is more rewarding than observing real artists working at close quarters.
During the scene in the bar, with all the men sitting around, every time I told the cameraman Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein to take one step to the left, all the actors did too. I ended up using two voices with different intonations during shooting: one for the technical crew, the other for everyone in front of the camera. Years later, on the set of _Invincible,_ I trained Tim Roth in hypnosis for the part of Hanussen. At one point during filming I looked up and saw camera man Peter Zeitlinger staggering backwards. He was so close to Tim – who in the film has a wonderful demonic quality to him and was speaking almost into the lens of the camera – that he had become semi-hypnotised himself.
_Was it important for audiences to know the actors were hypnotised?_
I never made a fuss about it and hoped the whole thing could be done as unobtrusively as possible; it was only the media who dug their teeth in. They made certain statements I felt I should respond to, and at one point a journalist showed up at a rehearsal without making himself known to me and proved to be a disruptive force. It was suggested by the press that I was using hypnosis because I wanted more control over the actors, but I certainly wasn't looking for a bunch of performing puppets for the film. It's a common mistake to assume that someone under hypnosis can be manipulated in certain ways, but this absolutely isn't the case because their hard core remains untouched. Murder under hypnosis is a myth; if I ask a hypnotised person to take a knife and kill his mother, he would refuse. Hypnotised people also have a tendency to lie, which means my plans had nothing to do with a desire for control. Another misconception about the power of hypnosis is that it can reconnect people to their former lives. During the first few days of casting, the creepy hypnotist put some of the participants into a trance and told them they lived in ancient Egypt. Some of them spoke in a strange language about their former lives in eras long ago; one woman even described living in Alexandria as a dancer on a high platform from which she could see the Nile. But it was all obvious nonsense. No branch of the river's delta passed near Alexandria at the time, and the language she spoke was meaningless babble, not unlike what you hear in Southern Baptist churches, with people speaking in tongues.
When I talk to people who have no idea I used hypnosis on the actors, they speak of the film's "dreamy atmosphere." The opening images of the waterfall are there almost to help put audiences into a trance. Staring directly into the moving water and listening intensely to the suggestions of the voice in German – reading the English subtitles doesn't really do the job – makes you feel as if the waterfall is standing still and it's you who are floating upwards. The experience isn't unlike staring from a bridge down into a fast-flowing river. All of a sudden the river seems to stop moving, and you start to float. There's a line from one of Hölderlin's poems: " _Man kann auch in die Höhe fallen_ " ["One can even fall upwards"]. I once showed _Aguirre_ to a hypnotised audience. To keep everyone under hypnosis for an hour and a half, I played a piece of music by the band Popol Vuh – one that appears in the film – before the screening. I told the audience that whenever they heard this music, they would sink into a deep hypnotic state. I spoke to some of them afterwards. One man believed himself to have been in a helicopter, flying around Aguirre, evading his gaze. A handful of people had fallen asleep, though when I questioned them about this they insisted they had seen the entire film. When I asked them to tell the story back to me, they embellished what they had missed in very imaginative ways.
It's actually possible to hypnotise someone from a screen. The original idea was for me to appear in a prologue to _Heart of Glass_explaining, directly into the camera, that if the audience wanted to, they could experience the film under hypnosis. "If you follow my voice now and look at the object I'm holding and focus on it, you can become hypnotised and be able to see this film on a different level." At the end of the film I would reappear and softly wake them up without any anxieties. I would have advised anyone in the audience who didn't want to participate to avert their eyes from the start. "Don't listen, don't follow my advice." I dropped the idea when I started studying more about hypnotism. A newsreader could conceivably hypnotise part of his audience every evening just by speaking to them, but clearly there are potential dangers. An audience should never be left unattended in a hypnotic state. Such things have to be done responsibly.
Heart of Glass _was filmed amidst archetypal Herzog locations_.
With its indefinable landscapes, the film seems to be set in something like the late eighteenth century. This is a loosely defined, pre-industrial past. We shot in Bavaria, close to where I grew up, Switzerland and Alaska, near Glacier Bay. It was all familiar-looking terrain, and in the film I declare all these landscapes Bavarian. One of the finest images I have ever created appears at the start of the film: a river of clouds floating through a valley. We filmed it in Bavaria, near the Czech border, and since we had no machine to do the job automatically, everyone sat around together on the mountaintop for hours, singing and taking turns to click frame by frame, by hand, every ten seconds, adjusting the aperture according to the changing light.
The final sequence of the film might be the best thing I have ever done; it's so powerful that I can't breathe when I watch it. We filmed amidst the ecstatic landscape of Skellig Michael, a massive slab of rock a few miles off the southwest coast of Ireland. It rises like a pyramid more than seven hundred feet out of the ferocious Atlantic, where in the eighth century a group of monks built a tiny monastery so they could get a good view of the impending apocalypse. Marauding Norsemen plundered the place for years, throwing some of the monks into the sea and selling the rest into slavery. You can get to Skellig only during good weather because otherwise it's too windswept; the breakers rise a hundred feet and crash down onto the rock face. It wasn't easy getting the shots of the rowing men because of the violent waves and torrential rains. Whenever the cameraman Thomas Mauch was ready to shoot, the actors were vomiting over the sides, and whenever they were ready to shoot, Mauch was wretching. I was busy throwing pieces of bread into the air to attract the gannets. The locals told us we were the first people for years to make the journey in such small boats. You can still visit the original thousand-year-old monastery at the top, comprised of several buildings all in excellent condition and accessible thanks to the staircase of six hundred stone steps, expertly carved by monks.
Hias has a vision of a man standing up there, someone who still believes the Earth is a flat disc ending in an abyss somewhere far out in the ocean. For years he has stood staring out over the sea, until several men – who have also yet to learn we live on a spherical planet – join him. One day they resolve to take the ultimate risk and row out to sea in a small, fragile boat. These men are some of the few who have the courage to explore; they need to see where the world ends. They voyage into grey, open waters, battling against the waves, in search of the truth. In the last shot of the film, as music from Martim Codax plays, we see the ocean growing dark under heavy clouds.
_Words appear: "It may have seemed like a sign of hope that the birds followed them out into the vastness of the sea." Did you write that?_
I did. And somehow, maybe, I want to be that man seen from a distance, looking to the horizon, staring beyond the raging ocean into the unknown, who decides to set out and discover the shape of the earth for himself.
* Adapted from the last lines of Walser's "Helblings Geschichte" (1914): _"Ich sollte eigentlich ganz allein auf der Welt sein, ich, Helbling, und sonst kein anderes lebendes Wesen. Keine Sonne, keine Kultur, ich nackt auf einem hohen Stein, kein Sturm, nicht einmal eine Welle, kein Wasser, kein Wind, keine Strassen, keine Banken, kein Geld, keine Zeit und kein Atem. Ich würde dann jedenfalls nicht mehr Angst haben."_
† On _Aguirre'_ s photography, for example, which "never transcends mere adequacy," Simon wrote: "If this was a matter of insufficient funding, my condolences to Herzog; if a deliberate notion of minimal art, the back of my hand to him." "German and Gimcrack," in _Something to Declare_ , p. 334.
‡ _Kaspar Hauser_ (1996), written and directed by Peter Sehr.
§ _The Tragic Diary of Zero the Fool_ (Canada, 1969), directed by Morley Markson, who describes the film as "an experimental improvisation. I remember entering it into the Toronto Film Festival but it failed to qualify for entry because, they said, it's simply 'not a movie.' I liked that a lot." See _Monthly Film Bulletin_ , March 1971.
# Legitimacy
_You claim not to be part of the German Romantic tradition._
Years ago I was in Paris shortly after an exhibition of the work of German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. Every journalist I spoke to seemed to have seen the exhibition and insisted on viewing my films – especially _Heart of Glass_ and _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ – within the context of this knowledge they had suddenly acquired. Then, after a similar exhibition of German expressionism a few years later, everyone told me how many elements of expressionism could be found in my work. One year it was inconceivable to them I hadn't imbued my films from start to finish with elements of German romanticism, the next they were even more incredulous that there was no preconceived notion of expressionism in my work. Those are the only two movements in German art the French have ever heard of, so I must have been influenced by one or the other. It's a fire I have never been able to extinguish. When it comes to Americans, who have generally been good to my films over the years but have little knowledge of either romanticism or expressionism, for them the only question is, "Is this film in line with Nazism or not?" Or, occasionally, "Does this film relate in any way to Brecht's theories and principles?"
You can't get a more contrary position towards the Romantic point of view than mine. Go back and listen to what I say in _Burden of Dreams_ – the film Les Blank made on the set of _Fitzcarraldo_ – about nature being vile and base, lacking in harmony, full of creatures constantly fighting for survival.* Anyone who understands such things knows those could never be the words of a Romantic. If you're interested in what I think about nature, take a look up into the night sky and consider that it's a complete mess, full of recalcitrant chaos. The overwhelming quality of the universe is monumental indifference and lack of order. It's a statistical improbability we're even on the planet, this miniscule speck surrounded by a myriad of uninhabitable, hostile and lethal stars that boil in nuclear rage. Look at the solar system from a satellite and see how utterly insignificant Earth looks. The universe couldn't care less about us, and I hope I never have to call upon it for assistance. What do they care, these stars out there, ten thousand times larger than Earth, billions of miles away? In Timothy Treadwell's footage, as seen in _Grizzly Man,_ we are witness to his sentimentalising of wild nature and his idyllic portrayal of bears living in perfect harmony with their environment, something that doesn't go uncontested for a second. "Here I differ with Treadwell," says my voiceover, as I explain my views on the subject, which are diametrically opposed to his pseudo-romanticism.
While almost everything about romanticism is foreign to me, Caspar David Friedrich is someone I do have great affinity for. In his paintings _Der Mönch am Meer_ [ _The Monk by the Sea_ ] and _Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer_ [ _The Wanderer Before the Sea of Fog_ ] a man stands alone, looking out over the landscape. Compared to the grandeur of the environment surrounding him, he is small and insignificant. Friedrich didn't paint landscapes per se, he revealed inner landscapes to us, ones that exist only in our dreams. It's something I have always tried to do with my films.
_What art has been most influential on you?_
Matthias Grünewald, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel come to mind, alongside Caspar David Friedrich. There is also a seventeenth-century Dutch artist I feel close to, a virtual unknown called Hercules Segers. He was one of those clairvoyant and independent figures hundreds of years ahead of his time. Little is known about his life, and only a few of his works have survived. The man was an alcoholic and considered insane by those around him; he was so poor he printed on anything he could find – including tablecloths and bed sheets – and when he died many of his prints were used for wrapping buttered bread. Rembrandt was one of the few who took him seriously; he owned at least eight Segers prints. He also bought one of Segers's oil canvases and immediately "improved" it by adding some clouds and, in the foreground, an ox cart. It isn't unintelligently improved, but the resulting painting – which can be found in the Uffizi in Florence – is very much like the conventional paintings of the period. Segers's prints, on the other hand, feel far ahead of his time, outside of history itself. Encountering these images was as if someone had reached out with his hand across time and touched my shoulder. His landscapes aren't landscapes at all; they are states of mind, dream-like visions full of angst, desolation and solitude. Things emanate from deep underground and rocks that aren't physically there, yet seem present nonetheless. Hardly anything is recognisable; his work is so surreal it looks like an alien descended to our planet. Human figures rarely appear, and when they do show up are tiny specks, like sleepwalkers. Entire mountaintops – flying in the atmosphere – seem not to comply with gravity. Segers's images are hearsay of the soul. They are like flashlights, held in our uncertain hands, giving off a frightened beam that opens breaches into the recesses of a place only partially known to us: our selves. It's an outrage that I haven't met a single art student who has even heard of Segers.
_Musical influences?_
These have always been strong, maybe the strongest. People might think it strange that music could make such an impact on a filmmaker, but it's quite natural to me. I like the early composers, like Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Heinrich Schütz and Orlando di Lasso. Or let's go back even further, to Johannes Ciconia, the troubadour Martim Codax, Francesco Landini and Pierre Abelard, before we arrive at Bach's _Musikalisches Opfer_.
_Literature._
I find great consolation when moving through the dark with certain poets. There are works of German literature upon which I can only gaze in awe, like Büchner's _Woyzeck_ , Kleist's short stories, the poetry of Hölderlin, who explored the outer limits of language. He became insane after travelling on foot from Bordeaux to Stuttgart, and spent the last thirty-five years of his life locked in a tower. He understood language to the point of self-destruction, and I find his attempts to use poetry to hold himself together deeply moving. When I read Hölderlin, I have the sensation of the Hubble telescope probing the depths of the universe. Johann Christian Günther, Andreas Gryphius, Friedrich Spee and Angelus Silesius, poets of the baroque epoch, are also important to me. I appreciate work by Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard – though they are both Austrians – and Swiss author Robert Walser. I would rather read the 1545 Bible translation of Martin Luther than any of the German Romantics, and who can walk past Joseph Conrad's short stories or Hemingway's first forty-nine stories – especially "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" – without experiencing something phenomenal? The first real modern writer in English is Laurence Sterne, particularly his wonderful _Sentimental Journey,_ though I also recommend _Tristram Shandy,_ which is such a thoroughly modern novel. The narrative – with its wondrous jumps and contradictions and wild ranting – still feels fresh today, two hundred and fifty years later. If I were caught on a desert island, without a doubt I would want all twenty volumes of the _Oxford English Dictionary_ to keep me company. Such an incredible achievement of human ingenuity, one of the greatest cultural monuments the human race has created. Thousands of scholars have contributed to it over one hundred and fifty years.
_Film._
I think about what an extraordinary cultural upheaval would have taken place throughout the world if cinema had been discovered a few hundred years earlier, if Segers, Kleist, Hölderlin and Büchner had expressed themselves through film. Of the filmmakers with whom I feel some kinship, Griffith – especially his _Birth of a Nation_ and _Broken Blossoms_ – Murnau, Buñuel, Kurosawa and Eisenstein's _Ivan the Terrible,_ which isn't so beholden to his theories of montage, all come to mind. I always saw Griffith as the Shakespeare of cinema, though everything these men did has a touch of greatness. I like Dreyer's _The Passion of Joan of Arc,_ Pudovkin's _Storm Over Asia_ and Dovzhenko's _Earth,_ while Mizoguchi's _Ugetsu Monogatari_ contains wonderful poetry, and no one who appreciates film can fail to recognise Satyajit Ray's _The Music Room_. The opening sequence, with a wealthy aristocrat surveying his land from the roof of his crumbling palace, is astonishing. The film – completely lacking in sentimentality – could end after four minutes and we would already know everything about this character. Figures like Tarkovsky have made some striking films, but he is, I fear, too much the darling of French intellectuals, something I suspect he worked towards. I also like the aesthetic and political cinema of Cuba, especially Humberto Solás's _Lucía,_ and always felt that the _Cine Nõvo_ movement in Brazil, with directors like Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Ruy Guerra and Glauber Rocha, was important. I knew Rocha slightly and spent a few weeks with him in California in the early seventies. We were both staying at the home of Tom Luddy, the co-founder of the Telluride Film Festival, where he would knock on my bedroom door at three in the morning and rave about some wild idea of his.
I have rarely seen films of such power as those of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, which have left an indelible mark on me. In _Where Is the Friend's Home?_ a boy has mistakenly taken home with him the exercise book of the lad who sits next to him in class, and does everything he can to return it. He knows the teacher has threatened to throw this other boy out of school for failing to do his homework. The boy has domestic chores to do – like buying bread and keeping an eye on the baby – but in breach of the iron discipline he lives under he runs off and disappears over the hill in search of his classmate. It's a heartbreaking and arrestingly simple film, though you immediately sense that Kiarostami's films are rooted in five thousand years of Persian poetry. Take a taxi from the airport into Tehran, and the driver will likely recite Khayyám, Firdusi and Hafez to you. There is a scene in Kiarostami's _Close-up_ – one of the best films ever made about filmmaking – where all of a sudden the narrative stops for a few seconds as we watch a spray can roll down a hill until it comes to a stop. It's audacious stuff.
Then there are essential films, things like kung fu, the car chases and smashes of _Mad Max,_ a good porno – more watchable than a pretentious, artsy-fartsy film – and the ingeniousness of Russ Meyer, who captured the vilest and basest instincts of our collective dreams on celluloid. "Movie" movies, so to speak. Fred Astaire might have had the most insipid face, but his dancing is the purest in all of cinema. Buster Keaton was a true acrobat and one of my witnesses when I say that some of the best filmmakers have been athletes; he moves my heart more than anyone of the silent era. The message of all these films comes from how the moving image itself exists on the screen. I love this kind of cinema because it doesn't have the falseness and phoniness of films that try so hard to pass on a heavy idea to the audience, and has nothing to do with the fake emotions of most Hollywood product. Astaire's emotions were always wonderfully stylised, and compared to a good kung-fu film someone like Jean-Luc Godard is intellectual counterfeit money. Anyone who claims that cinema is "truth twenty-four times a second" hasn't an ounce of brain. He isn't even French, but tries to out-French the French.
_Animation._
Sometimes at a festival, after five bad films in a row, an audience will rhythmically chant for Woody Woodpecker. At such dire moments I might encourage this kind of behaviour, though I'm not much into animation.
_Are you an artist?_
Never. All I've ever wanted to be is a foot soldier of cinema. My films aren't art. In fact, I'm ambivalent about the very concept of "the artist." It just doesn't feel right to me. King Farouk of Egypt, in exile and completely obese, wolfing down one leg of lamb after another, said something beautiful: "There are no kings left in the world any more, with the exception of four: the King of Hearts, the King of Diamonds, the King of Spades and the King of Clubs." Just as the notion of royalty is meaningless today, the concept of being an artist is also somehow outdated. There is only one place left where you find such people: the circus, with its trapeze artists, jugglers, even hunger artists. Equally suspicious to me is the concept of "genius," which has no place in contemporary society. It belongs to centuries gone by, the eras of pistol duels at dawn and damsels in distress fainting onto chaises longues.
_What are your films, if not art?_
Poetry. I'm a craftsman, and feel closest to the late-mediaeval artisans who produced their work anonymously – like the master who created the Köln triptych – and never considered themselves artists. To remain anonymous behind what you have created means the work has a stronger life of its own, though today, in our increasingly connected world, it's an illusion to think you can remain hidden. Along with their apprentices, artisans had a genuine understanding of and feeling for the physical materials they worked with. Every sculptor before Michelangelo considered himself a stonemason; no one thought of himself as an artist until maybe the late fifteenth century. Before that they were master craftsmen with apprentices who produced work on commission for popes or _Burgermeisters_. Once, after snow had fallen in Florence, a particularly idiotic member of the Medici family asked Michelangelo to build a snowman in the courtyard of the family villa. He had no qualms about stepping outside, without a word, and completing this task. I like this attitude of absolute defiance.
_Any thoughts about film festivals?_
The financial strictures under which most directors work mean a film isn't alive unless an audience sees it, and these days one of the only places many films are shown is at a film festival. But be cautious about which ones you submit your work to; there is no wisdom behind the criteria that decide which films are accepted and which win prizes. People always look upon festivals as if they were proof of a film's quality, but both _Aguirre_ and _Nosferatu_ were rejected by the competition at Cannes. Many filmmakers have a healthy mistrust of the incestuous festival circuit. I was head of the Berlin Film Festival jury one year, which only confirmed my belief that judging films isn't quite kosher. Out of the twenty films up for awards, fifteen were garbage. Festivals have become self-serving entities, too structured around cliques and – even worse – prizes, which have never had any importance for me, aside from the fact that they are sometimes accompanied by money. A film is never better or worse because it has or hasn't won an award; those things are best left to dog shows and cattle at agricultural fairs. I wonder if a festival will ever have the nerve to announce that not a single film is good enough to qualify for an award.
These days I find the culture of festivals irritating, especially when some young filmmaker buttonholes me and puts on a show about how exceptional they and their work are. At Sundance one year, in the middle of a conversation, the young woman I was talking to pulled out her cellphone to take a call while introducing me to her business manager and agent. I had to flee. The startling proliferation of festivals in recent years means there is an ever-growing arena for the mediocre, mundane and undeserving. There are four thousand film festivals out there and in a good year four films worth seeing. The imbalance is stunning; it's a vicious discrepancy. Don't trust in festivals and agents or reviewers, only in your own abilities. Be wary of praise offered on someone else's terms.
Even back in 1968, the first time I was at the Berlin Film Festival with one of my films, I found it ossified and suffocating. I felt the festival should be opened up to everyone and screen work in other cinemas around the city, so I took the initiative, got hold of some prints by young filmmakers and rented a cinema for a few days in Neukölln, a working-class suburb of Berlin, which at the time was populated largely by immigrants and students. The free screenings at this parallel venue were a big success and generated intense discussions between audiences and filmmakers, which were exciting to witness. The whole thing was my rebellious moment against the Establishment, which I saw as being unnecessarily exclusive. I told the festival organisers they needed to have more free screenings and open the festival up to the wider public, which shortly afterwards they did. Having said all that, I can't deny that some festivals – like Venice and Cannes – are important platforms, where it's possible to present a film on a worldwide stage and thereby overnight generate publicity that might otherwise take months. In the early years I met people at festivals who became lifelong friends. There is usually a good man behind a good film.
_Do you ever go to the theatre?_
Theatre has been so disappointing for me that I stopped going a long time ago. The few productions I have seen were an affront to the human spirit. I find stage acting – all that yelling and door-banging – completely unbelievable, not credible at all, somehow dead to the world. It pains me to watch the overdramatic forms and fake passion of actors on a stage, and when I watch a film I can immediately tell if an actor hails from the theatre. I always prefer to read plays – especially the work of hard-drinking Irish author Brendan Behan – than see them performed because it means I can create everything in my mind. I did once translate a play into German, Michael Ondaatje's _The Collected Works of Billy the Kid_. My sister is a theatre director and wanted to stage the play in Germany, though it's almost impossible to translate because at times Ondaatje seems to destroy grammar. Carl Hanser Verlag wanted to publish the Ondaatje novel of the same name and, because there was overlap between that text and the stage play, asked me to translate it. I asked Ondaatje what certain things meant, but in some cases even he didn't know, so like him I invented words. After watching a production of _Uncle Vanya_ , I once thought about directing a play in which the actors would stand with their backs to the audience throughout the entire performance. Let me say it even more drastically: the time of theatre is over; it has exhausted itself. Theatre audiences think and function in a different way to me; you would get me watching WrestleMania before you could drag me into a theatre. I'm much more comfortable with the vulgarity of that crowd. There is more honesty in WrestleMania's fakery than in traditional theatre.
In 1992 I staged a variety performance at the Hebbel-Theater in Berlin. The composer Mauricio Kagel was celebrating his birthday and decided he wanted to have his music performed, with him conducting and various acts staged in parallel. He asked me to create a series of vaudeville performances – which included Bablu Mallick, the Indian shadow puppeteer – that corresponded to the rhythms and characteristics of the compositions. The following year some of these acts appeared in a show I staged in Vienna called _Specialitäten_. I brought together a group of phenomenal performers, the best of the best – and many with extraordinary physical agility – like British mime artist Les Bubb, whose signature act is pretending there is a balloon stuck in mid-air that he can't dislodge by even a single millimetre. I loved what Les did so much that a few years later I cast him in _Invincible_. Other acts included the Russian comedy magicians Buba and Buka, ventriloquist André Astor, the young German juggler Oliver Groszer, South African trapeze artists the Ayak Brothers and Borra, "King of Pickpockets." He pretended to be an usher as the audience entered the auditorium, and then suddenly, in the middle of his act while he was on stage, would say, "Mr Wilson. Yes, you in row N, seat 23. I believe it's your birthday in three days. How would I know that? Perhaps you should check your wallet." Mr Wilson would search around and discover that it had been removed from his pocket before the show had even started. "Would you like it back?" Borra would ask. Mr Wilson would walk up on stage, and while he was being handed his wallet, Borra would take Mr Wilson's wristwatch and necktie. He could steal suspenders, shoes and the glasses from someone's face without them noticing. The most ingenious performer I have ever worked with.
_Ballet and dance._
All foreign to me. I also dislike concerts because I don't do much listening when sitting in front of an orchestra. I'm too interested in watching the bassist's hands shoot up and down, and never actually hear what's being played. I could stare at something like that for an hour without taking my eyes off it. Although I'm a great lover of opera music, I generally dislike seeing other people's productions. I often see a whole world when I listen to an opera and am inevitably disappointed when confronted with someone else's vision. Let me put it this way: when I see an opera performed, I see images out there that are in direct contradiction to those in my head. The whole experience is miserable for me.
_Museums._
They intimidate me, and anyway, nothing ever feels truly alive when hidden away under glass. There is a worrisome permanence about things in museums, and I rarely visit such places, though one time I did go to the British Museum because I wanted to see the Rosetta Stone. The decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics was an extraordinary achievement. I have been to Athens many times, starting at an early age, but only on my most recent trip did I muster the courage to visit the Acropolis.
I hardly ever go to exhibitions and dislike the world of the _vernissage;_ those crowds are the most repulsive of all. These days most art is too conceptual for me, with long descriptions pasted up on the walls of galleries. "Art" should reveal itself to audiences without written explanation. Most of what I see is garbage, sometimes literally so, like an installation with a few cardboard boxes thrown into a corner, an empty beer can and a dirty sleeping bag. This apparently represents the desperate fate of the homeless. I see an absence of dignity in contemporary art. There is too much emphasis on concept, not craft. Just as religion has been watered down by television evangelists, so has art. What makes me particularly suspicious is the speculative art market. A whole set of values is being continuously invented and manipulated, and vast amounts of real money are being paid out. A criminal conspiracy has developed between auction houses, galleries, artists, curators, museums and even those big, glossy magazines. It all reminds me of the prices attached to mediaeval relics, when fortunes were spent to acquire a nail from the True Cross of the Christ, or the bone of a saint. All this is wrapped in "art speak" – an abomination in itself – which makes the whole charade even more unbearable.
_Photography._
I once had a pinhole camera, and more recently used a Deardorff – a large-format mahogany camera with bellows and plates – to take photos of ski flyers at the gigantic ramp at Kulm in Austria. This is the moment of absolute judgement for them. But generally, if something is worth photographing, I remember it in my head. None of those Japanese tourists snapping away before the aeroplane has even landed truly see the world around them. Real life – the birth of a child, for example – should never be viewed through a lens. In recent years I have developed a familiarity with photography because my wife is a professional photographer and has her own darkroom in our home. I marvel at the alchemy of the process, but generally don't look at things in still images. I see them in terms of scenes and movement.
_Restaurants._
Waiters in tuxedos intimidate me. It's misery for me when being waited on; I'm literally close to panic. I would rather sit on the sidewalk munching potato chips than eat at one of those chic restaurants. I often stay in hotels on my travels, but for years avoided that world whenever I could. In Berlin I used to sleep on my son's floor rather than stay in a hotel. It had nothing to do with money or physical comfort; I lived on a raft for weeks while shooting _Aguirre._ Today, ever older, I have reconciled with hotel rooms, though the little chocolates they leave on my pillow every evening exude an aura of despair, the same feeling that overwhelms me during the presentation of the official mascot of the Olympic Games, or when a film star becomes a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN.
_Zoos._
I enjoy visiting them with children, otherwise I find zoos very sad places.
_Hobbies._
I have no hobbies.
How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck... _was shot in Pennsylvania, at the World Championship of Livestock Auctioneers_.
I was fascinated by livestock auctioneers and had the feeling that their incredibly fast speech was the true poetry of capitalism. Every system develops its own extreme language, like the ritual chants of the Orthodox Church, and there is something final and absolute about how auctioneers speak. How much further can it go? It's almost like a ritual incantation, frightening but quite beautiful at the same time; there is real music in their delivery, the sense of rhythm these people have. One of the auctioneers told me he trained himself by reciting, over and over again, "If it takes a hen and a half a day and a half to lay an egg and a half, how long does it take a broken, wooden-legged cockroach to kick a hole in a dill pickle?" Another was the only one in his family who would milk the cows, and as a young man practised out loud while sitting on a bucket in the stables. The jury of the competition was judging how wildly the auctioneers could accelerate their speech, but this was also a real auction, and at all times the auctioneers had to look carefully into the crowd for bidders. That might sound easy, but the buyers were competing among themselves. No one wanted anyone – except the auctioneer – to know they were bidding, so their gestures were minuscule, perhaps just a flick of a finger or a quick blink of an eye, and had to be recognised instantly in a sea of three hundred people. Within two or three hours on that day in June 1976, $3 million and over a thousand head of cattle changed hands. My dream ever since has been to do _Hamlet_ with livestock auctioneers in under fifteen minutes. The auction takes place in New Holland, which to this day is one of the centres of cattle farming in the United States and home to an Amish community which tills the soil, raises cattle the biblical way and rejects capitalism and competition, making it the very antithesis of the auctioneers.
_Is America an exotic country?_
Take a look at those beauty pageants for four-year old girls and you realise it's more bizarre than exotic. What I love is the heartland of the country, the so-called "flyover" zone, like Wisconsin, where we filmed _Stroszek_ and where Orson Welles was from. Marlon Brando came from Nebraska, Bob Dylan from Minnesota, Hemingway from Illinois, these middle-of-nowhere places, to say nothing of the South, the home of Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. I like this kind of terrain, where you can still encounter great self-reliance and camaraderie, the warm, open hearts, the down-to-earth people. So much of the rest of the country has abandoned these basic virtues.
I like America for its spirit of advancement and exploration; there is something exceptionally bold about the place. The idea of everyone having an equal chance to succeed, no matter who they are, is impressive. If a barefoot Indian from the Andes had invented the wheel, the patent office in Washington would have assisted him in securing his rights. I once visited a company in Cleveland that had two thousand employees and a twenty-eight-year-old boss. That would be unthinkable in Germany. When I made _The Wild Blue Yonder_ I discovered an extraordinary cache of footage shot by NASA astronauts in outer space, and was told that because it was filmed by federal employees, the material was "property of the people." I asked, "Can I, a Bavarian, be considered one of the people?" Such images, it turns out, according to American law belong to everyone on the planet. This is a unique and astounding attitude to the world. Naturally there are things in the United States I'm ambivalent about, just as there are when it comes to Germany. I could never be a flag-waving patriot. But there are many reasons why I have been in America for so many years. The country has always had a capacity to rejuvenate itself, pull itself out of defeat and look to the future. There has always been space there to create real change. I could never live in a country I didn't love.
_Is_ Stroszek _about the decline of the American dream?_
It came out of nowhere. At the time I wanted to make _Woyzeck_ and had promised the title role to Bruno S.; he didn't know Büchner's play, so I told him the story and he liked the idea. But two months before we were due to start shooting I realised this was a big mistake. It was clear to me that Kinski should play the part, so without hesitation I called Bruno to let him know. There was a kind of stunned silence at the end of the line. "I have already booked my vacation, plus some unpaid time," he said. "What am I going to do?" It was clear that being in the film meant a lot to Bruno. I was ashamed of myself and wanted to sink into the ground because of embarrassment, so out of the blue I said, "We'll do another film instead." He said, "What film?" I told him, "I don't know yet. What day is it?" "Monday," he said. "By Saturday you will have the screenplay," I said. "I will even give it a title now which sounds like _Woyzeck_. It will be called _Stroszek_." I felt relieved, but after hanging up found myself on Monday at midday with a title and the task of writing a story for Bruno, which I ended up delivering on schedule. I still consider it one of my best pieces of writing and one of my finest films. The title comes from the name of the lead character in _Signs of Life_ , which in turn came from someone I vaguely knew years before. I was enrolled at university but hardly ever showed up for class, so asked a fellow student to write a paper for me. "What will you give me in return?" he asked. "Mr Stroszek," I said, "I'll make your name famous."
_The character Bruno plays in the film is close to his real self._
_Stroszek_ was built around Bruno. It reflects my knowledge of him and his environment, his emotions and feelings, and my deep affection for him. For that reason it was easy to write the screenplay, though even today it pains me to watch certain scenes of _Stroszek_. The sequence in the apartment when the two pimps beat up Eva Mattes and throw Bruno over the piano reveals how he really would have reacted to such treatment, the kind doled out to him for years when he was a child. "Don't worry," he told me before we shot the scene. "I've been hurt much worse before." There is such magnificence in his performance.
The scenes in Berlin of him singing and playing the accordion show exactly what he would do every weekend. Bruno knew the courtyards and alleyways of the city, and some of the songs he sings in the film he wrote himself. The place where he goes immediately after leaving prison is his local beer cellar, where everyone knew him, and all the props he uses in the film – including the musical instruments – were his own. Although _Stroszek_ was scripted from start to finish, some scenes were improvised and based on Bruno's real life, like the one where he talks to Eva Mattes about his mistreatment as a child. "When we start rolling," I said to him, "go ahead and tell Eva about your feelings, your thoughts, your past. Do it any way you want." The less I gave Eva to work with, the better she was. All I said was, "Make Bruno stick to the point. He has a tendency to rant about Turkish guest labourers and God knows what else." She was so good in the scene because all she did was listen intently and gently encourage him. Often all she had to do was get Bruno to mention certain things and trigger specific responses. I didn't really have to direct either of them.
The idea of writing a critique of capitalism didn't enter my head. Lines like Bruno talking about being in America came about because that's where we were, though the film does reflect my experiences of Pittsburgh, where I saw the nation's underside. I say that with great affection for the place. The film doesn't criticise the country; it's almost a eulogy to the place. For me _Stroszek_ is about shattered hopes, which is clearly a universal theme, and it wouldn't really matter if the characters move from Berlin to France or Sweden. I simply felt familiar enough with America to set the second part of the story there. I love the way we captured the country on screen, and when I watch _Stroszek_ today it hasn't aged for me, unlike many films from that period. One of the most important scenes has nothing to do with America, when Bruno goes to the hospital and talks to the doctor, who was played by my eldest son's real doctor. I was fascinated by the fact that premature babies have an ape-like grip reflex and can support their own body weight, something the doctor demonstrates by having a baby hang from his two fingers. Apparently we lose certain instincts soon after being born, including this reflex, but premature babies retain the ability. You see a remnant of it when a baby born at nine months takes hold of your finger.
_What did Bruno think of America?_
He loved it. New York was a revelation for him, just as it is for everyone who experiences the city for the first time. The sequences there were all filmed in a single day because we had no shooting permit. We improvised a scene, then disassembled the camera, packed it up, carried it to the next spot, reassembled it, then filmed for a few minutes, at all times trying to dodge the police. The shots on the observation deck of the Empire State Building were quickly done by Thomas Mauch before the guards up there spotted us. From the deck we saw a boat arriving at the pier and decided to have the three characters arrive in the country like classic European immigrants, so we rushed over there and got a shot with the boat behind them, as if they had just stepped off. The shot of them driving on the New Jersey Turnpike was done with Mauch and me strapped to the hood with a rope; we didn't have another vehicle to film from. The first time the police stopped us I told them, "We're just a bunch of crazy Kraut film students," and they let us go. Half an hour later the same cop caught us again. I bamboozled him out of his wits and we avoided being arrested.
_Where did you find Clemens Scheitz, the old man who appears in the film?_
I needed extras for _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ and looked rapidly through various card indexes. I had seen more than two hundred faces when I found his. The agency suggested I choose someone else. "Although we work in the interests of our clients," they said, "we should warn you that Herr Scheitz is no longer completely right in the head." I told them I didn't mind, that I wanted him anyway. I liked Herr Scheitz so much that I kept asking him to stay for one more scene after another, to the point where he basically appears throughout the film. I even rewrote the ending so he would have the final word.
Although he was always complaining that Bruno smelt, Herr Scheitz was a charming old man, full of fantasies, able to explain in between gulps of coffee that he was in the process of writing a magnificent oratorio and at the same time working on a major scientific work that he would never write down in case it was stolen. He would talk about how he would never dare fly to Berlin, which at the time was deep inside East Germany. "Both the KGB and CIA would kidnap me and torture my secrets out of me," he insisted. Apparently he had constructed a rocket that could hit a target dead on after a thirty-thousand-mile flight, and just by writing a few numbers on a restaurant tablecloth could prove that the moon landing was faked, Einstein was a fool and Copernicus a fraud, though apparently Galileo had some useful things to say about the universe. Newton was also an imbecile because in his colour scheme green was a colour, though every five-year-old knows that green is just blue and yellow mixed together. Herr Scheitz had his own scheme where the name "green" didn't exist. I asked him what name he would give the colour, and he said, " _Feilgau,_ " which is as meaningless in German as in English. It's an invented word. I tried to create his character in _Stroszek_ around his eccentricities and ended up putting him in both _Heart of Glass_ and _Nosferatu._ The scene in _Stroszek_ where he talks about animal magnetism was my idea, but it's close to what he really believed. We were in the middle of nowhere when a couple of hunters, who had driven in from Milwaukee, pulled up. I asked if they would appear in the film. They kept saying, "But we're not actors." I told them all they had to do was listen to Herr Scheitz talking in German, and when they had heard enough get into their car and drive off. They didn't understand a word he said, but played along wonderfully. The whole scene was basically shot in real time. There was one quick change of camera position while we ran around to the other side of the car, but otherwise what you see is exactly what happened. The two men drove off. I never knew their names and never saw them again.
_Who play the pimps?_
Norbert Grupe was a wrestler and heavyweight boxer who called himself the "Prince of Homburg." He lost a bout against the Argentinian boxer Oscar Bonavena in 1969, and became famous after appearing on a live sports talk show on German TV the following day. When asked by the interviewer about his crushing defeat, Grupe sat there in silence, staring ominously at this man throughout the entire broadcast. The situation became so dangerous that given one more question you knew he would have killed the interviewer; it was one of the most stunning moments I have ever seen on television.
Before we filmed _Stroszek_ , Grupe would drag me around, night after night, introducing me to all his pimp friends in Berlin, showing me the darkest depths of his life. He had been in prison a few times and was very dangerous, so other pimps would bring him along to settle fights. Many of his insults in the film – like "I'm going to bury that runt up as deep as he'll go" – come directly from him. At one point during filming one of the crew was going to be celebrating his birthday. He was very into sports and we often played football together, so I said to him, "On your birthday I'm going to rent a gym with a boxing ring and go three rounds with the Prince of Homburg. As a present to you, I promise I'll still be standing at the end of round one." The Prince and I laughed about this, but two days before it was meant to happen he took me aside and said, "Werner, this is utterly stupid. You'll be knocked down within thirty seconds at most and end up in hospital. It's not worth it." He was no dummy, though sometimes a very frightening man. I'm sure he was genuinely drunk in the scene where they beat Bruno up in his apartment. The other pimp is Burkhard Driest, a writer, filmmaker and actor who started out as a law student. Two weeks before his final exam he committed a bank robbery and hid the loot in his girlfriend's apartment. She turned him in and he spent three years in prison, where he started writing. His book _Die Verrohung des Franz Blum_ [ _The Brutalisation of Franz Blum_ ] was quite successful, and by the time of his release he was a well-known character.
Once Herr Scheitz, Bruno and Eva get to America, we meet the character of Herr Scheitz's nephew, a mechanic, played by Clayton Szlapinski. Clayton, who I had encountered a year earlier, really was a mechanic. I was driving from Alaska to meet Errol Morris in Wisconsin and needed to get my car repaired, and discovered Clayton's wreckage yard about a mile and a half out of town. I immediately liked him and his chubby Native American assistant. When I returned to the area to film _Stroszek_ I went straight to the garage because I wanted them both in the film, but the assistant wasn't there. I asked Clayton about this and described the young man to him, but he had no idea who I was talking about. It turned out Clayton had hired him the morning I had shown up a year before, then fired him that same evening. We eventually tracked him down and asked him to be in the film.
I don't make a distinction between "professional" and "non-professional" actors. There are only two kinds of actors: good and bad. If an audience finds a performance credible, then it's a good performance, and if an actor is good on screen then he or she is a professional. The same thing applies to technicians. A professional is anyone good at his job. I once spoke to the manager of a football team who said he could tell in sixty seconds if a player was gifted and could be of use to the team; he didn't need two weeks of training. The first thing is to see how the player runs, then what the ball does with the player, then what the player does with the ball. When I direct actors I focus on what they do to the camera as much as what the camera does to them. Interactions between "professional" and "non-professional" actors can be interesting, but in my experience things work best when the former are in some way debriefed and told to do as little as possible, and the latter are given only the vaguest instructions.
_You thank Errol Morris in the opening credits of_ Stroszek.
Errol, at one time in his life, was deeply involved in researching mass murderers. He had collected thousands of pages of the most incredible material and was planning on writing a book. Errol had spent months in Plainfield, Wisconsin, and kept telling me about this tiny town in the middle of nowhere with less than five hundred inhabitants. What's so extraordinary about Plainfield is that, within a period of five years, five or six mass murderers emerged from the place, for no apparent reason. There was something gloomy and evil about the town, and even during filming two bodies were found only ten miles from where we were working. I felt it was one of those focal points where every thread converges and is tied into a tight knot. You have these places, these knots in the United States – Las Vegas, Disneyland, Wall Street, San Quentin prison – where dreams and nightmares come together. I count Plainfield, Wisconsin, among them.
Errol was interested in the town because it was where Ed Gein – who inspired the Norman Bates character in _Psycho_ – had lived and committed his murders. Errol had spoken to the sheriff and townspeople and even to Gein himself, and had hundreds of pages of interview transcripts, but was stuck with one puzzling question. Ed Gein had not only murdered several people, he had also dug up freshly buried corpses from the cemetery, used human skin to make a lampshade and cover some chairs, and decorated his bedposts with skulls. Errol discovered that the graves he had dug up formed a perfect circle, and at the centre was Gein's mother. Errol wondered whether or not Gein had actually dug up his own mother. "You'll know only if you go back to Plainfield and dig there yourself," I said to him. "If the grave is empty, Ed was there before you." We excitedly decided to meet there with our shovels. At the time I was in Alaska, shooting a couple of sequences for _Heart of Glass,_ and on my way back to New York crossed the border from Canada and headed down to Plainfield. I waited for Errol, but he chickened out and never showed up. I figured it was probably for the best. The act of asking a question is sometimes more valuable than scrambling for an answer.
I loved being in Wisconsin and went back later to film there. The scenes in _Stroszek_ of Eva working at the truck stop were shot in the middle of the day at a real truck stop near Madison. I just went in there and asked if we could film. "Sure thing," the owner said. "We love having you Krauts around!" We told the truckers to be themselves, and Eva went round pouring coffee. Ed Lachman, the second cameraman, became an especially important part of the production because he explained to the townsfolk and truckers precisely what was going on and what sort of things they should say. In the film we called the town Railroad Flats because Plainfield was still kind of Errol's terrain. He even accused me of stealing his landscape, which for Errol was a serious crime indeed. In a pathetic attempt to appease him I thanked him at the start of the film. I think he's forgiven me by now.
_There is an almost total absence of sex in your work._
There are only a few kisses in all my films, and some of the sexual relationships – like Bruno and Eva in _Stroszek_ – are implied but never seen. All I can say is that it's better to experience sex in person, and that love between people never seemed too interesting a theme for me as a storyteller. As to the question of why there are so few women populating my work, I can offer only a vague response, which is that the characters in my films are somehow reflections of myself, so most are men. Let's say no more on the matter, though let me add here, if it even needs to be said, that I'm very fond of women; from my earliest childhood they played an enormous part in my life. I moved to the United States in 1995 for one reason only: Lena, the Siberian-born woman who became my wife four years later, was there. When I left Vienna, where I was living at the time, I gave up every one of my earthly possessions, as well as my language. A customs official at San Francisco airport wondered why I had no luggage and only a one-way ticket. He looked at me suspiciously and asked, "Did you forget to pick up your bags from the carousel?" When I told him I had only a toothbrush, I was questioned for two hours. For the first few months in our little apartment, Lena and I had only two plates, two sets of cutlery and two wine glasses. Guests were requested to bring their own kitchenware when they came for dinner. Such was our domestic bliss.
Allow me to vent here about the prevalent image of masculinity in mainstream Hollywood films, which seems to be post-pubescence, actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Where are the manly men of times gone by? The last one standing is Clint Eastwood, who hails from the likes of Bogart, Brando, Bronson, John Wayne, Richard Widmark and Gary Cooper. Collective female dreams have shifted significantly over the years, and today this kind of hero seems to be out of fashion, but I have no interest in the boymen. Things will eventually revert to the manly men. Today hardly anyone has a beard, but I predict that within a few years most men will be wearing them.
La Soufrière _was filmed on a Caribbean island as you waited for an "unavoidable catastrophe._ "
There is a definite element of self-mockery in the film; everything that looks dangerous and doomed ultimately ends up in utter banality. In retrospect I thank God on my knees it wasn't otherwise. Fortunately the film is missing its potentially violent climax. It would have been ridiculous to have been blown sky high with two colleagues while making a film.
I was editing _Stroszek_ when I heard about the impending volcanic eruption, and discovered that the island of Guadeloupe – population eighty thousand – had been evacuated, though one person refused to leave. I immediately knew I wanted to talk to him and find out what kind of relationship this man had with death. He is the reason I headed to the island and made the film; I assure you we didn't go because we thought it would be fun to sit on an exploding volcano. I'm not in the business of suicide. I telephoned the television executive with whom I had worked on various films, including _The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner_. He was in a meeting at the time, so I asked his assistant to drag him out of there for only sixty seconds, no matter where he was, what he was doing or how important the people he was with. "Tell him Herzog has to talk to him for one minute." Everything had to be put in place immediately because if we didn't leave within hours, the whole thing might be over; the volcano would explode and the film would be no more. In less than a minute I explained the situation to him. "Just get out of here and do it," he said. "How do we do the contract?" I asked. "Come back alive," he said, "and we'll do the contract." I love the man for his faith. Let me name the horse and rider: Manfred Konzelmann, a true believer.
Ed Lachman came from New York, and I flew from Germany with Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein. We met up in Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe, which is a twin island with a narrow isthmus between the northern and southern part. The entire southern part was evacuated. The first thing you notice in the jungle is the sound of birds, but they had all fled from the island and the place was deadly silent. All the snakes had slithered down from the slopes of the volcano, then drowned in the ocean, and were being washed back on shore. The traffic lights were still working, switching from red to green and back again, but the streets in Basse-Terre were deserted. Even as we were driving past roadblocks up the side of the volcano I repeatedly asked Lachman and Schmidt-Reitwein if they wanted to continue, and made it clear that everyone had to make his own decision. There was no question I was going to walk to the top of the volcano. "I'm definitely going, but you have to make up your own mind," I told them. "I need a single camera, and if necessary can shoot it all myself." Schmidt-Reitwein immediately said yes; there was no doubt he was always going to come along. Ed was timid and had some initial hesitations, as any normal human being would. He thought about it for a few minutes, then meekly asked, "What will happen if the island blows up?" "Ed," I said, "we'll be airborne." This encouraged him and he picked up his camera. I love a crew bold enough to step outside the norm. We left a camera in the far distance on time lapse, clicking single frames throughout the day, so if things had gone badly there would at least have been images of us shooting upwards.
We approached the mountain from the leeward side and had a real fright when the wind changed; all of a sudden toxic fumes came wafting down towards us. We ended up standing on a deep fissure that had been ripped open right at the top of this steaming volcano. The next day Ed realised he had left his glasses up there, so we went back for them, but discovered there had been so many shockwaves that the whole landscape had been ripped apart and the mountaintop looked completely different. The glasses were now buried under thirty feet of rock and mud. Schmidt-Reitwein and I were actually rather disrespectful of the volcano. We went up to the edge and took a leak into it.
_All something of a risk, wouldn't you say?_
I can't deny that flying out to an island that might not exist the following morning to make _La Soufrière_ was a blind gamble, as well as a transgression of normal family life. It's not the sort of thing that should be done if you have a wife and young child at home. We made our decision to travel to Guadeloupe in the knowledge that shortly before there had been a series of unbelievably powerful earthquakes across the world. Many thousands were killed in Guatemala, a quarter of a million people died in China and a major quake hit the Philippines. Experts insisted that an explosion on Guadeloupe was guaranteed with almost 100 per cent certainty. The signals the volcano was emitting were identical to those of Mount Pelée on the neighbouring island of Martinique just before it erupted so violently in 1902, killing thirty thousand people. It was determined that La Soufrière wouldn't erupt and just spew lava everywhere. It was going to blow with the force of several Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, so if it had gone up and we had been within a five-mile radius, there would have been absolutely nothing we could have done. For me, the whole thing was compounded by the fact that I was unable to move as quickly as I wanted because a few weeks before I had injured my ankle playing football and had only recently cut off the cast myself. The film's full title, _La Soufrière: Waiting for an Unavoidable Catastrophe,_ suggests the absurd nature of our task.
I can laugh about it now, but all we wanted to do was get out of there with a film. There was no element of bravado about the experience, though I knew if I could escape from this one alive I would be able to joke about it afterwards. I saw myself as the captain in the joke about Italian soldiers in the First World War trenches. For weeks they're being bombarded, day after day, until their captain grabs a rifle and shouts, "Up, men! Attack!" Enemy fire cuts him down before he has gone two steps, and he falls back into the trench, stone dead. The soldiers, none of whom have followed and who are quietly sitting around smoking, immediately applaud and say, "Bravo, _capitano_!" Thankfully _La Soufrière_ was one of those moments when we weren't mowed down. There was a deep sense at the time that making the film was the right thing to do, though today, looking back, I'm not so sure, and admit that with _La Soufrière_ we were playing the lottery. The second we shot our last roll of film we jumped in the car and fled. You never feel as afraid of things when there is a camera in your hand; somehow it acts as a protective shield. I remember thinking that the volcano didn't feel real to me, that it was just a projection of light on a piece of celluloid.
_A few years after you made the film, you told an interviewer: "I hate the whole life-insurance thing. Keeping everything secure is destroying our civilisation._ "
Let's face it, the world is impossibly risk-averse these days, and panics are almost always completely out of proportion to reality. Years ago, during the mad-cow crisis, it was obvious to me that more people would die crossing the road getting to the butcher than ever would from eating contaminated meat. These days six-year-old children have five different kinds of helmets: one for roller-skating, one for baseball, one for bicycling, one for walking in the garden, one for God knows what. Parents these days even send their children to the sandpit with a helmet. The whole thing is repulsive. I would never trust in a man who has had multiple helmets by the age of five. Wall-to-wall protection is devastating because children are conditioned not to be intrepid; they will never grow up to become scientists who jump across boundaries into the unknown. And every time I walk past a hand sanitiser – those bottles attached to walls everywhere across America these days – I want to tear it down. They are an abomination. I never use antibiotics and have taken maybe ten aspirin in my entire life. Such things will be the death of us all. A civilisation that uses pain relief at every turn is doomed; we can't know what it is to be truly human without experiencing some level of discomfort and physical challenge. When you read in a travel book that the author has taken a snakebite kit on his journey into the jungle, you know the paperback in your hand is fit only for feeding the campfire. Life knows no security. The only certainty is that we all die despite helmets and life-insurance policies. These days people cut their finger or graze their knee and consider it a life experience.
_Your next film was a remake of Murnau's_ Nosferatu.
Although I have never truly functioned in terms of genres, I knew that making a film like _Nosferatu_ meant understanding the basic principles of the vampire genre, then modifying and developing them. It was like my approach to adventure films when I made _Aguirre_. For me "genre" means an intensive, almost dream-like stylisation on screen, and I consider the vampire myth one of the richest and most fertile cinema has to offer. The images it contains have a quality beyond our usual experiences as film-goers; there is fantasy, hallucination, dreams and nightmares, visions and fear. Although my film is based on Murnau's, I never thought of _Nosferatu_ as being a remake. It goes its own way with its own spirit and stands on its own feet as a new version. I wasn't trying to rewrite _Hamlet_. I like what Lotte Eisner said: that Murnau's film was reborn, not remade. It's like Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson, who both made films about Joan of Arc; one is hardly a remake of the other. My _Nosferatu_ has a different context and a somewhat different story.
I set out to connect the film to Germany's genuine cultural heritage, to the best of German cinema, the silent films of the Weimar era, to filmmakers of the past whose vision was brought to an abrupt end by Nazism. A filmmaker can't function without some connection to his culture. Continuity is vital. Although the Second World War shattered Germany's cultural identity, there wasn't a complete void because important literature was being published after 1945, and other forms of expression picked up pace within the ruins and debris. But cinema remained a barren desert for a quarter of a century, and to speak about German film after the war is to dig into pathetically uninteresting work. When I finished _Nosferatu_ I remember thinking, "Now I'm connected. At last I've reached the other side of the river." The film acted almost as some kind of bridge for me; the ground under my feet felt much more solid. This might have all sounded incomprehensible to British, Italian and French filmmakers at the time – countries that kickstarted film production after the war with relative ease – but it was something that impacted on many young German filmmakers in the seventies. We all carried a certain weight that had to be cast off.
Coming of age in the early and mid-sixties, we young Germans looked around for a point of reference. But our fathers' generation either sided with the barbaric Nazi culture or had been chased from the country. With a few exceptions – directors like Wolfgang Staudte and Helmut Käutner – there had been no legitimate German cinema since 30 January 1933, the day Hitler came to power. As the first real post-war generation, we were orphans with no fathers to learn from; we had no active teachers or mentors, people in whose footsteps we wanted to follow. This meant it was the grandfathers – Lang, Murnau, Pabst and others – who became our points of reference. At the time I felt strongly about finding my roots as a filmmaker, and chose to concentrate on Murnau's masterpiece, knowing full well it would be impossible to better the original. This wasn't nostalgia or me trying to emulate a particular filmmaking tradition. I was just expressing my admiration for the heroic age of German cinema, one that gave birth to _Nosferatu_ in 1922. Many of my generation shared a similar attitude to Murnau and his contemporaries: cinema as legitimate culture.
_Lotte Eisner gave you the support you needed._
Just as Charlemagne had to travel to Rome to ask the Pope to anoint him, we couldn't just issue a self-empowering decree. In the case of German film, we were fortunate to have Lotte, who could give her blessing. She was the missing link, our collective conscience, a fugitive from Nazism and for years the single living person in the world who knew everyone in cinema from its first hour onwards. She was a veritable woolly mammoth, one of the most important film historians the world has ever seen and a personal friend of the great figures of early cinema: Eisenstein, Griffith, von Sternberg, Chaplin, Renoir, even the Lumière brothers and Méliès. She alone had the authority, insight and personality to declare us legitimate. It was an important moment when she insisted that what my generation was doing in Germany was as important as the film culture Murnau, Fritz Lang and the other Weimar filmmakers had created all those decades before. When Lang said there would never again be anything of substance in German cinema, Lotte told him to see _Signs of Life_ , and even sent him a 35mm print. "You told me Germany would never have a film culture, not after Hitler," she told him. "But look at this film by a young unknown who is only twenty-five." Lang watched the film and said, "Yes, I have hope now." I always found Lang's work too geometrical, but appreciated what he said about _Signs of Life_.
For ten years it was Lotte's affirmation and support that gave me the strength to continue; she was the first person to recognise my work and offer whatever assistance she could. I met her because of her voice. Lotte gave a lecture at the Berlin Film Festival in the mid-sixties, the first time she had returned to Germany since 1933. I walked past the half-open door of this auditorium, heard her speaking, and was instantly drawn in; it was so magnetic I could do nothing but listen. She was an archaeologist by training, though she always had an interest in film and literature, and a sharp appreciation for things of substance. When Lotte was eighteen, a friend brought her a notebook that contained the draft of a play. "I met this young man and he claims to be a poet," her friend said. "You understand poetry. Read it and tell me what you think. If it's any good, I might have an affair with him." Lotte read the drama and next day said to her friend, "Have the affair. He will be the greatest poet in Germany." The drama was _Baal_ and its author was Bertolt Brecht. Being outspoken and Jewish, Lotte was on the Nazi hit list. The rabid National Socialist newspaper _Der Stürmer_ [ _The Attacker_ ] insisted – even before Hitler was voted into power – that if heads were going to roll, Lotte's would be one of the first. She left the country for France weeks after Hitler became chancellor, and a gap in German film culture of thirty years opened up. When I spent time with Lotte, at her home in Paris, we would usually speak German, but sometimes we lapsed into English because the sound of her original language had become too painful for her.
A few years after I saw Lotte in Berlin, I discovered that she had seen _Signs of Life_ and wanted to talk with me. "Lotte speaks so highly of you but doesn't dare meet you," a friend told me in 1969, "and you speak so highly of her and you don't dare to meet her either, so I'll get you together." One of the most memorable things about the shooting of _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ was that Lotte was there for some of the time.† For her to show up on the set of one of my films was a great honour, and very significant for me. She didn't ask questions or talk to many people; she just sat there with a pleased look on her face. It gave me confidence, and a few years later she visited the set of _Nosferatu_. I vividly remember sitting with Lotte in her Paris apartment at a time when I was sure there were no audiences out there for my films. "I just can't go on," I told her. In between a sip of tea, munching on a biscuit, without even looking up, she said, quite calmly, "You aren't going to quit. The history of cinema won't permit you." Then she went on about her noisy neighbours, or something like that. The casual nature of how she brushed off what I was saying has always been with me. It was one of the key moments of my life. Lotte encouraged me by making clear that I didn't have the right to abandon my work.
_Was your script for_ Nosferatu _based on Murnau's film?_
I could probably have made a vampire film without the existence of Murnau's film, but there's a certain reverence I tried to pay to his _Nosferatu_ – whom he called Count Orlok – and on one or two occasions even tried to quote him literally by matching the same shots he used in his version. In this respect certain elements of my film are clear homages to Murnau. I went to Lübeck – where he shot the vampire's lair – and among the few houses there not destroyed during the war, I found the ones Murnau had put in his film. They were being used as salt warehouses. Where in 1922 there had been small bushes, I found tall trees.
The reason Murnau's film isn't called _Dracula_ is because Bram Stoker's estate wanted so much money for the rights, so Murnau made a few unsubtle changes to his story and retitled it. By the time I made my film, Stoker's book was in the public domain, so I changed some of the names, including turning Count Orlok back into Count Dracula. Although there are some interesting things in Stoker's book, it's a rather dull piece of writing. It was published in 1897 and is a compilation of all the vampire stories floating around from Romantic times. What I find intriguing is Stoker's foresight in somehow anticipating our era of mass communication. His epistolary novel encompasses many of the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, and telegrams and voice recordings on Edison cylinders play an important part in the story. There may well be something similar taking place today, with the shift to the digital age and the explosive evolution of means of communication; in both cases an uneasiness exists in society. At their heart vampire stories are about solitude. They accumulate in popular culture during times of restlessness, which is perhaps why there has been a recent resurgence of interest.
_Kinski plays the vampire._
In Murnau's film the creature is frightening because he has no soul and looks like an insect, but Kinski's vampire has a real existential anguish. I tried to humanise him by presenting the vampire as an agonised, sad and lonely creature, desperately thirsty for love, but terrifying at the same time. I wanted to endow him with human suffering, with a true longing for love and, importantly, the one essential capacity of human beings: mortality. "It's cruel not to be able to die," he says. He is deeply pained by his solitude and inability to join with the rest of humanity, by his profound terror of forever remaining undead. The vampire isn't realistic, but he is human. Kinski was apprehensive about taking on the role, but once he agreed – two months before filming started – he immediately shaved his head. In the film he played brilliantly against his appendages: the long spider-like fingernails and snake-like fangs, his seven-inch heels and those pointed ears. After two minutes the audience sees beyond the horror of these things. Kinski was extraordinary at expressing utter satisfaction at drinking Lucy's blood, like a baby that has just been fed, and there's a clear sexual element when the vampire enters her bedroom. Lucy's face takes on a new expression as he bites her neck, and she almost tenderly holds on to the vampire. Thanks to her, Kinski's vampire becomes an erotic figure. Kinski wanted to shriek during his death scene, but I said, "Inhale! Suck the death and pain into you. Inhale the light that's killing you." Listen to his wheezing as the creature expires.
The character of Lucy is an ambiguous figure, at the same time attracted to and repelled by the vampire. In Murnau's version she gives herself to Dracula in the hope that her husband will be saved, but in mine Lucy's sacrifice is in vain. The plague has already devastated the town, and though she is unaware, her husband has already transformed into a vampire. The creature is also some sort of prophet of change, with victims leaving behind their bourgeois lives and sensibilities. As the plague spreads, people gather in the main square, where there is a kind of great joy in the air. From historical testimonies of the fourteenth century we know that during the last stages of the plague, a town would experience moments of jubilation in the midst of all the desolation and death; a strange freedom and euphoria – almost redemption – took over. There was dancing in the streets, wild drunken revelries, and all sense of ownership would fragment. Townsfolk happily burnt their furniture and threw money into the canal, almost in celebration.
_How was Kinski to work with?_
For almost the entire shoot he was happy and at ease with himself and the world, though he would throw a tantrum maybe every other day. He resisted using any make-up as the vampire, but eventually relented and would sit with Reiko Kruk, the make-up artist, for hours at a time, listening to Japanese music as she sculpted him every morning, putting his ears and fingernails on, fitting his teeth and ears, and shaving his head. Seeing him so patient was a fine sight. I would walk in and sit with him for fifteen minutes. We wouldn't talk; we just looked at each other in the mirror and nodded. He was good with the project and with himself. Although the film is close to two hours and Kinski appears for maybe seventeen minutes in total, his vampire dominates every scene. The finest compliment I can give him for his performance is that there is a palpable sense of doom and terror and anxiety even when he isn't on screen. Everything in the film works towards those seventeen minutes. We will never see a vampire like Kinski again.
_Roland Topor plays Renfield._
I was at the Cannes Film Festival and heard maniacal laughter behind me, so turned around but there was nobody there, only a closed-circuit television broadcasting the press conference for the film _La Planète sauvage_. Topor – a filmmaker, actor, illustrator and novelist – was incapable of saying anything without laughing, and I kept him in mind. My original idea was to have Valeska Gert, a German cabaret artist and dancer of the grotesque, play Renfield, but she died three days after signing a contract, and I immediately remembered Topor. I showed up at his apartment in Paris with a case of German beer and persuaded him to be in the film. Topor and his family had survived the war by hiding out in the French countryside. Perhaps that was why he was unable to finish a sentence without this strange laughter, as if Creation – having required him to run for his life from the Nazis as a young boy – could be nothing other than a complete farce.
_You let loose ten thousand rats loose in Delft during filming._
I was looking for a northern German or Baltic town with boats and canals. A Dutch friend of mine suggested Delft, which has remained unchanged for centuries, and as soon as I saw the town I was fascinated by it. Delft is so tranquil, bourgeois, self-assured and solid, so tidy and well ordered; it looks like a stylised film set, and I knew it would be the perfect place to shoot this story. The entire cast and crew – except Kinski, who always gravitated towards five-star hotels – lived communally in an abandoned convent. Filming in town wasn't easy because our work involved a certain amount of disruption of daily life. The two scenes shot in the town square with the rats were done early in the morning, when we had less than three hours to set everything up and film. I asked for sympathy from the citizens of Delft, and some responded positively, like the local cinema enthusiasts who organised a retrospective of my films and circulated petitions to gather support. The sequence of the boat arriving, bringing Nosferatu to town, was filmed in Schiedam, a few miles away, because there are too many bridges in Delft and the canals are too narrow.
I knew the horror and destruction of the vampire would show up most effectively in such an uncontaminated town. _Nosferatu_ is about a community invaded by an anonymous terror, something signified very provocatively by rats. Our fear of the creatures probably stems from the fact that for every human being on the planet there are three rats. Before we started shooting I explained to the town council in Delft exactly what I had in mind. Many residents were nervous because the place is full of canals, and for decades there was a serious rat problem that had only recently been eradicated, so I showed them our detailed technical plans and precautionary measures to prevent a single animal from escaping. Before we released them in the town we sealed off every gully, side street and doorway. We fixed nets along the canals to prevent the rats from getting into the water, and even had people in boats down in the canal to collect any creatures that might escape. During filming in the town square we had a movable wooden wall just behind the camera and another in an alley at the end of the street. When the signal was given, both walls were pulled out of their hiding places and brought towards each other, trapping the rats in an ever narrower space so they could be caged. We never lost a single one, and I sold them once filming was over.
We stored the rats in a farmhouse just outside of town. Money was sent to the owner, who was to feed and take care of the animals, but for some reason this payment never arrived. When I went over to pick up the rats, this man was absolutely enraged. I explained that of course he would be paid immediately, but he prevented us from gaining access. There was no arguing with him, so I picked the lock and opened the barn doors. When he saw this, he went wild, started his Caterpillar and drove directly towards one of our trucks, onto which we had loaded a couple of thousand rats. I lay down in front of this massive vehicle but quickly realised that was a stupid idea because the bastard would have run me over. He drove the massive shovel of this Caterpillar through the window of our truck, at which point I grabbed an iron bar and swung it at his seat, with the intention of just missing him. "The next blow will hit you," I told him. "Give me the keys." I still have them, a kind of souvenir of the film's production.
_Where did you get the rats?_
From a laboratory in Hungary. Customs officials checked the medical certificates at every border, and somewhere en route one of them opened a box to check the contents and promptly fainted. When we bought the rats, they were snow white, so I decided to have them all dyed grey. There was a huge factory in Germany that produced shampoo and hair dye, and they always tested their products on rats because the texture of rat hair is similar to that of humans. I visited this place along with Henning von Gierke, a painter and art director who did the set design for the film, and Cornelius Siegel, a special-effects expert who taught at the University of Bremen. Cornelius was the one who set the glass factory on fire in _Heart of Glass_ and single-handedly built the clock in _Nosferatu_ , with all its moving parts. After talking to the people at this factory, Cornelius designed a massive conveyor belt. We put the rats into wire cages, dipped each cage into the dye for a second, washed every rat with lukewarm water, then dried them all using a system of hair dryers, otherwise they would have caught pneumonia. Even today there are claims floating around that the rats were mistreated and that some died while being transported to Delft, even resorting to cannibalism because they were so hungry. The fact is that we ended up with about five hundred more than when we started. There were also allegations that we submerged each rat into a bucket of boiling grey paint. I hereby offer the even wilder truth of the matter: we boiled the rats for such a long time that they volunteered to turn grey.
_What language was the film shot in?_
We had people of multiple nationalities on set, so English was the common language. As a filmmaker a choice has to be made, not just to ensure that communication between cast and crew is as easy as possible, but also for the sake of international distributors. As with _Aguirre_ and _Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu_ was originally shot in English, but after a number of preview screenings it was clear that audiences were confused because of all the different English accents. We decided to dub the film into German, which for me is the most convincing version. I wouldn't dare to speak of the "better" version, but for me it's the more culturally authentic one. Pre-production took four or five months, and we shot for about eight weeks. I had final cut, but after Twentieth Century Fox – the studio that had bought the distribution rights for the United States – saw the film they asked me to shorten a few things for the American version, and I made some other minor modifications. After several previews it was clear that for some audiences the film dragged a little, so I cut it by a couple of minutes, though no one at the studio insisted on this.
_Where did you shoot the sequences at the vampire's castle?_
Whatever you see of Transylvania was shot in the former Czechoslovakia, much of it in Moravia at Pernštejn Castle and in the High Tatra mountains. I wanted to shoot in Transylvania proper, in Romania, but wasn't allowed to because of restrictions imposed by the Ceauşescu regime. I never actually received a direct refusal from the authorities, but did get word from some Romanian filmmakers, who advised me not to wait for permission, as it would never come so long as Ceauşescu was around. At the time Dracula was a sensitive subject for Romanians because there was a campaign to rehabilitate the historical figure of Count Dracula as an esteemed leader in the history of their country. Not much is known about him, but in the fifteenth century he was an important force against the Turkish armies. After a battle, so the legend goes, he impaled twenty thousand prisoners, which is probably where the motif in every vampire film comes from, that you can kill a vampire only by driving a stake through his heart. Parliament had bestowed upon Ceauşescu the title of the new Vlad Dracul, the historical defender of Romania, which in contemporary terms meant he was protecting the country from the Soviet empire. He heaped all sorts of honours on himself; I think he had the world-record number of honorary doctorates – something like sixty or seventy – and every school hailed him as the Great Creator of Paradise. It turned out these local filmmakers were right, that to the authorities it was unthinkable that Vlad Dracul was a vampire, so I left the country, though not before I had a wonderful time searching for locations, methodically travelling every path of the Carpathian mountains.
_Five days after you finished shooting_ Nosferatu _work began on_ Woyzeck, _with the same crew and lead actor_.
Today _Woyzeck_ – which took seventeen days to film and five days to edit – seems like a little hiccup after _Nosferatu_. I would have started shooting the day after we finished _Nosferatu_ , but we had to let Kinski's hair grow for the role. It was mainly for bureaucratic reasons that we continued with the same crew on a new film, because at the time obtaining shooting permits in Czechoslovakia was an endless saga. We ended up filming the second half of _Nosferatu_ in Moravia and other places in the eastern part of Slovakia, and I figured it was best to continue shooting _Woyzeck_ but tell the authorities we were still working on _Nosferatu_. Actually, we started filming the day after _Nosferatu_ was completed. I just shot around Kinski's part.
Kinski was never an actor who would merely play a part. After _Nosferatu_ he remained deep in the world we had created together, something apparent from the first day he walked onto the set of _Woyzeck._ He loved playing Woyzeck and was very much in balance with himself during the shoot, but also exhausted and somehow broken and vulnerable, which was precisely the condition required of the role. It meant his performance had a rare and profound quality. He truly captured the spirit of the part; there's a smouldering intensity to him, and from the opening scenes of the film he seems fragile. Look at the shot of him immediately after the title sequence, where he stares into the camera. Something isn't quite right with his face. When he does his push-ups during the title sequence, the drill major kicks him to the ground. The person who did the kicking is Walter Saxer, my production manager on many films, who a couple of years later was screamed at by Kinski on the set of _Fitzcarraldo,_ something you can see in _My Best Fiend_. "He's not doing it right," Klaus said to me. "He has to really kick me. He can't pretend." The two of them always had an antagonistic relationship, so Saxer had no problems giving Kinski what he was asking for. Kinski was pushed so hard into the cobblestones that his face started to swell. "Klaus, don't move," I said. "Just look at me." He was panting, still exhausted from doing his push-ups, but looks into the camera with such power that it establishes the atmosphere for the rest of the film.
_This was clearly a project that had been on your mind for a while._
The character had forever been burning inside me. I don't believe there is a greater drama in the German language than Büchner's _Woyzeck;_ it's a work of such stunning actuality, like an undefused bomb. The first time I read it I felt as if a lightning bolt had shot through me. The play is actually only a fragment, and there has long been a debate among scholars as to which order the loose, unpaginated sheets should go in. I used an arrangement of scenes that made the most sense as a continuous story, one that is used in the majority of theatrical productions. In my opinion there is no completely satisfying English translation of the play. The film is my most direct connection to the best of my own culture, even more so than _Nosferatu_.
I structured it around a series of four-minute-long shots, the length of a roll of 35mm stock, which means there is a much greater reliance on the acting and text than on the camera. I will probably never achieve a film of such economy again. What made the whole approach exciting is that the cinematic space is created not by cuts and the camera's movement, but by the actors within the frame, by the force of their performances. It was my way of giving due deference to Büchner's words, though it wasn't easy to maintain this style because no one was permitted any mistakes. Look at the scene where Woyzeck tries to flee from the drum major, where he moves directly into the lens of the camera and is pulled back at the last moment. In a shot like that Kinski creates a space far beyond that of the camera; he shows us there is a whole world behind, around and in front of the lens. You feel he is crawling desperately towards you, even into you. I like filmmakers willing to let their pants down, daring enough to show a whole sequence in a single shot lasting three or four minutes. Some directors move the camera about for no reason; they use flashy tricks and an excess of cuts because they know the material isn't strong enough to sustain a passive camera. It's a giveaway that I'm watching an empty film. If you want to use stylistic tricks and gimmicks, they can never be added as a whim. Embed them firmly in the storytelling.
_You once said that cinema comes from the "country fair and circus," not from "art and academicism."_
On the table in front of us is a pile of academic articles about my films that you brought over for me to look at. The minute you leave here today, it will all be thrown into the trash. The healthiest thing anyone can do is avoid that impenetrable nonsense. My response to it all is a blank stare, just as I respond to most philosophical writings. I can't crack the code of Hegel and Heidegger; it isn't the concepts that are alien to me, but I get my ideas from real life, not books. When I hear the kind of language used by zealots and film theorists, Venetian blinds start rattling down.
You rarely find people in universities who truly appreciate literature. At school we sliced through Goethe's _Iphigenia_ and _Faust_ , vivisecting and layering them with incomprehensible theoretical babbling, the kind of thing that goes on at universities today with ever more pathetic fury. It was so bad that I'm still unable to read _Faust_. My love of poetry was almost entirely eradicated when I was young, but thank God I managed to keep my genuine sense of wonder intact. The best example of agitation of the mind that literature can offer comes from my wife, who as a teenager living in Siberia wrote out in longhand a samizdat copy of Bulgakov's _The Master and Margarita_ and secretly circulated it to her friends. As for film, the theoreticians have dedicated their lives to the very opposite of passion. Our feelings for cinema should be like those during an eclipse or when we see a close-up of the sun, with those protuberances – thousands of times larger than our own planet – shooting out, or the same fascination I felt as a child when I looked through a telescope and saw the mountains and craters of the moon, or those instances of special intensity in a piece of music, when suddenly you hear something so startling that it rails against the most basic rules you're accustomed to. I remain in awe when I think back on those moments. Academia stifles cinema, encircling it like a liana vine wraps round a tree, smothering and draining away all life. Construct films, don't deconstruct them. Create poetry, don't destroy it. Whenever I encounter film theorists, I lower my head and charge. Thankfully cinema remains in robust shape. There has yet to be a lethal dose of intellectualism.
Reading about cinema is of little use to aspiring filmmakers, and as for those people who write about film, rather than reading endless books on the subject they should study something like the deciphering of Assyrian cuneiform texts or the Jacobi constant, which dates back to the nineteenth century and is concerned with the movements of objects around planets. Horizons need to be broadened at all times. I've never read a single book about cinema. Actually, I did read some chapters of Lotte Eisner's work, and when it first came out I looked at Amos Vogel's _Film as a Subversive Art,_ which contains hundreds of extraordinary images. But that's it. I always felt that if you really love cinema, the healthiest thing to do is ignore books about it. I prefer the film magazines with their garish colour photos, snippets of celebrity news and nauseating gossip columns, or the _National Enquirer._ That kind of vulgarity is far healthier.
* "The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing, they just screech in pain... It's a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It's the only land where Creation is unfinished. Taking a close look at what's around us, there is some sort of harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. We in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgement."
† See Eisner's essay "Herzog in Dinkelsbühl," _Sight and Sound_ , autumn 1974.
# Defying Gravity
_How did you end up in Berkeley, publicly munching through your footwear, as documented by Les Blank in_ Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe?
In the seventies I spent time in Berkeley with Errol Morris, who was a graduate student, when we were both hanging out at the Pacific Film Archive. When you meet Errol, you immediately sense that everything around him is aflame, that he is absolutely original in his thinking, with his relentless questioning mind and extraordinarily lively spirit. He is an important comrade-in-arms, someone who has found his own unique way to explore the paths that lead as far as possible away from _cinéma-vérité_ and fact-orientated film. As a young man Errol had great talent as a cellist, but he suddenly abandoned the instrument, and dropped his book project after collecting thousands of pages of conversations with serial killers. Then he said he wanted to make a film, but complained about how difficult it was to find money from producers and that all the subsidies had dried up. I made it clear that when it comes to filmmaking, money isn't important, that the intensity of your wishes and faith alone are the deciding factors. "Stop complaining about the stupidity of producers. Just start with a roll of raw stock tomorrow," I told him. "I'll eat the shoes I'm wearing the day I see your film for the first time." Eventually he made an extraordinary work called _Gates of Heaven,_ about a pet cemetery in California. I'm a man of my word, so en route from pre-production of _Fitzcarraldo_ in Peru I stopped off at Chez Panisse in Berkeley to pay my dues.
I could have worn light track shoes, but cowards have never impressed me, so I made a point of bringing the same shoes I had worn when I made my vow to Errol: ankle-high Clarks desert boots, with a sole that melted away like cheese on a pizza. When I cooked them, that day Chez Panisse had duck as a main course. There was a huge pot of duck fat, which I reckoned would come to boiling point at about 140ºC, a much higher temperature than water, so I thought I would be better off cooking the shoes in that rather than water. I added a red onion, four heads of garlic and some rosemary. Unfortunately, the fat caused the leather to shrink, which made it even tougher. Friends of mine seriously debated whether I should be allowed to go ahead with it at all. There was no way to eat the leather unless I used a pair of poultry shears and cut it into tiny fragments, then swallowed it down with beer. I couldn't tell you what it tasted like because I was already too drunk by the time I started eating. I do remember being up on the stage of the UC Theatre in Berkeley having consumed an entire six-pack, then staggering out of the place. But don't worry, leather is easy to digest, and Tom Luddy, who was up there on the stage with me, distributed small pieces to the audience in solidarity.
I had a tacit agreement with Les Blank that his footage of the event was something strictly for the family album. Maybe the events he documented are too personal for me to acknowledge that _Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe_ should ever have been seen publicly, but Les is such a good filmmaker that I forgive him anything. Today I'm glad he captured it all on film. These days you hear about things like shoe-eating out of context and it sounds ridiculous, but to me it made perfect sense. I did it as an encouragement for anyone who doesn't have the guts to make films. And anyway, a man should eat his shoes every once in a while. Errol recently suggested that next time I should eat my foot. At the New York Film Festival screening of _Gates of Heaven_ someone asked him a question, the first ever thrown to him at a press conference. "Mr Morris, I think your film would be twice as good if it were cut in half." "So would you, madam," said Errol, without missing a beat.
_During pre-production on_ Fitzcarraldo _you made two shorts in the United States_.
I first encountered televangelist Dr Gene Scott years before I made my film about him. Whenever I was in America I would always switch on his programmes, and quickly became addicted. As wild as he might have been as a public figure, there was something heartbreaking about him that moved me. He could never have been a friend of mine, but I still somehow liked him. His was basically a one-man show, on screen for up to eight hours every day. The way he raged at his audience was extraordinary, as he insisted that "God's honour is at stake every night!" and that it was merely a case of "Six hundred miserable dollars, and you sit there glued to your chair!" He would threaten and intimidate the people at home watching him, saying things like, "I'm going to sit here in silence for the next ten minutes. If $20,000 isn't pledged during that time, I'll pull the plug!" On one day when we filmed with him, more than a quarter of a million dollars were pledged.
Scott was a controversial figure; when I made the film, there were something like seventy active lawsuits against him. The charges ranged from embezzlement and blackmail to slander and tax evasion. The authorities had seized his assets, claiming he was running a television channel, not a church, and in protest Scott barricaded himself in the studio for two days. He was a polarising force, and his audience was anything but indifferent. People either loved or hated him. He was an intelligent man but also, I felt, deeply unhappy. There was a compulsion to him; he was all alone up there, talking to the camera, day after day, and would interrupt his flow only because he needed to go to the bathroom. His singers would perform some phoney religious tune while he was backstage. How can anyone keep something like that up for so many years? I saw nothing of him once the film was finished, but heard that before he died he went completely bonkers, abandoning many of his explicit Christian teachings, and on his show would sit in a glass pyramid talking about pyramid energies. Scott somehow appeals to the paranoia and craziness of our civilisation. He took issue with the way he came across in _God's Angry Man_ and asked me to change the original title, which was _Creed and Currency_.
_Huie's Sermon_ was shot in Brooklyn, New York. I bumped into Bishop Huie Rogers and asked if I could make a film about him. The end result needs no discussion; it's a pure work about the joys of life, faith and filmmaking. There is great joy in the image of Huie as he starts completely harmlessly, gradually whipping up his flock into an extraordinary elation. He would rail against the immorality of society and man's corruption, but I always felt that with his wondrous ecstatic fervour he outdoes even Mick Jagger. I cut away from Huie to the surrounding streets a couple of times only because we had to change the magazine in the camera.
_Did you expect such intense media interest when you started work on_ Fitzcarraldo?
What I didn't expect was walking down the street in Munich a few months after the film was released, seeing a man running frantically towards me, then watching as he leapt up into the air, kicked me in the stomach, picked himself up from the ground and screamed into my face, "That's what you deserve, you pig!"
Many of the problems we experienced during _Fitzcarraldo'_ s production stemmed from the fact that there were things going on in the area where I wanted to make the film that had nothing to do with us, including a border war that was steadily building between Peru and Ecuador. All around us was an enormous and increasingly threatening military presence, and at every second bend of the river there was a chaotic military camp swarming with drunken soldiers. Oil companies were busy exploiting natural resources in the area, and they had – with great brutality against the local population – constructed a pipeline across the Indians' territory and the Andes all the way to the Pacific. When we showed up on location in the jungle, with full permission from the local Indians, all these unsolved problems somehow started to revolve around our presence. We had real media appeal because Mick Jagger was scheduled to be in the film alongside Claudia Cardinale, with Jason Robards – who I had seen in _The Ballad of Cable Hogue_ – as Fitzcarraldo. I had no interest in becoming the dancing bear of the media circus, but all of a sudden here was the exotic concoction of Claudia and Jagger, plus the mad Herzog, a bunch of Native Indians, a border war and a military dictatorship. Fortunately it was easy to rubbish the claims the press made, not least because a human-rights group sent a commission down to the area and concluded there hadn't been a single violation. I was sure that the wilder and more bizarre the legends, the faster they would wither away, and after two years of being criminalised by the press that's just what happened.
_Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald adores Caruso and wants to build an opera house in the middle of the jungle so he can invite the world-famous tenor to the opening night._
Years before I thought of the story, while working on another film and searching for locations, I took a drive along the Brittany coast. At night I reached a place named Carnac and found myself in a field covered with menhirs – huge prehistoric stone slabs, up to thirty feet high and some weighing six hundred tonnes – stuck in the ground. There were thousands of them, parallel rows going on for miles inland across the hills. I thought I was dreaming. I bought a tourist brochure and read that science still has no clear explanation of how, eight or ten thousand years ago, these huge blocks were brought overland to this spot and set upright, using only Stone Age tools. The brochure suggested it was the work of ancient alien astronauts. This itched me, and I told myself I wasn't going to leave until I had worked out how I, as a Stone Age man with the available tools – simple hemp ropes or leather thongs and levers and ramps – would have moved a menhir over a distance of a couple of miles.
This is what I came up with. I would need a group of men to dig a series of trenches under the menhir. Then I would push hardened oak-tree trunks into the trenches and dig away the rest of the earth, so the menhir would be resting on the trunks. Once this is accomplished, the stone could be moved on these "wheels" with ropes and levers. The real task ahead would be to construct a ramp – a mile long, almost horizontal – on an almost imperceptible incline. For that, I would need two thousand disciplined men. The ramp would lead to an artificial mound twenty feet high, with a crater dug into it. To move the menhir up the ramp would take far fewer men and could be done in only a few days. They would use levers and a primitive pulley system with turnstiles, finally tipping the stone into the prefabricated hole. Once it tilts into the crater with its pointed end down, you basically have an upright menhir, and all that needs to be done is to remove the earth, the mound and the ramp. If _Fitzcarraldo_ had a passport, Carnac would be listed as its place of birth.
Years later José Koechlin, a friend of mine from Peru who had helped raise part of the budget for _Aguirre_ , came to visit me in Munich and suggested I return to the jungle and make another film. "Everyone's waiting for you there," he said. I knew I couldn't go back without the right story. José then told me the true tale of Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, a fabulously wealthy real-life rubber baron from the late nineteenth century who had a private army of four thousand men and drowned at the age of thirty-five in a boating accident. The history of the rubber era in Peru didn't interest me, nor was Fitzcarrald a particularly compelling character; he was just another ugly businessman. It was thin stuff for a film, save for one detail José happened to mention: Fitzcarrald had once dismantled a boat into hundreds of pieces and, over a period of several months, carried it overland from the Ucayali River to the Madre de Dios River, where he set about reassembling it, which is how he was able to bypass a series of rapids and take control of a territory almost the size of Belgium. That absolutely fascinated me. Inspired by the rubber barons who built the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus just before the turn of the century, I came up with the idea of Fitzcarraldo wanting to finance the construction of his own opera house. When I wrote the screenplay and listed the characters on page one, the first name wasn't Fitzcarraldo, it was Enrico Caruso, though you only ever hear his voice in the film. I eventually pieced these three elements – Fitzcarrald, Caruso and Carnac, which became a ship moved overland – together into a single story. The question was: how do I move a steamboat, all 340 tonnes of it, in one piece for more than a mile across a mountain, in the primeval forest, several hundred miles away from the nearest town?
I was working with Twentieth Century Fox on _Nosferatu_ at the time, and after reading a seventeen-page treatment the studio wanted me to sign a contract for a package deal that would have included _Woyzeck_ and _Fitzcarraldo,_ especially once Jack Nicholson expressed interest in playing Fitzcarraldo. I was certain that a Hollywood studio would never get involved in anything as wild as moving a steamboat over a mountain in the middle of the jungle; it was too far outside their horizon of thinking. The executives even suggested I use a miniature boat and fake mountain, and film in the botanic gardens in San Diego. But using models was out of the question for me. _Fitzcarraldo_ is set in an invented geography, but I knew I had to do it for real. For months I sat through insufferable and endless meetings with financiers in Los Angeles before deciding to start pre-production with my own money, which was enough to get things moving. I knew that the way to carry through a project of this size was to pull the train out of the station so everyone could get an idea of its scale, speed and direction. Once there was some momentum, people would jump on board. The film ended up costing $6 million, much of which hadn't been secured by the time shooting began.
_Even before filming started you had been in the jungle for some time._
Pre-production took more than three years. In the film you see a rusty old boat that Fitzcarraldo fixes up. We found it in Colombia, but it had sat on dry land for twenty-five years and had such huge holes in its hull that it was beyond repair. We tugged it to Iquitos in Peru with six hundred empty oil drums stuffed into its belly to keep it afloat, and used it as the model for two identical boats we set about building. One had to be constructed in such a way that it wouldn't break apart while being pulled over the mountain. While it was sitting on the mountainside, we could be shooting with the other boat in the rapids, which we had to reckon might sink. Constructing the identical twin ships was a long and arduous procedure because there wasn't a single dock in Iquitos where we could work, so we had to build a primitive wharf. We also had to construct a camp for hundreds of extras and a small crew. I spent a lot of time either in the jungle or travelling up to America or Europe to collect things we needed, or trying to raise more money, which is why pre-production took so long.
Then, once shooting finally started and we had shot about 40 per cent of the film, which took about six weeks, Jason Robards became ill with amoebic dysentery. Before shooting had begun, his lawyer had requested we install a second radio station and a heart–lung machine in the camp, then fly in an American doctor with modern medical equipment and have an aeroplane ready at all times to be able to get him out of there quickly. It was all utterly ridiculous, not least because the kind of machinery they requested would never have functioned properly in the jungle because of the humidity and unreliable electricity. Beyond that, our financial situation would never have permitted it. Robards went back to the United States, and the entire production came to a halt while we waited for him. Then, after a few weeks, his doctor categorically forbade him to return to the jungle. Although the insurance company accepted our claim, this was an absolute catastrophe for us. Practically everything we had in the can included Robards, so none of it was of any use.
In the meantime, Jagger – who played Fitzcarraldo's devoted and deranged sidekick, an English actor named Wilbur who forever spouted Shakespearean soliloquies, including the opening lines from _Richard III_ – had to honour his commitment to a Rolling Stones concert tour, so I decided to write his character completely out of the story. Mick Jagger is, after all, irreplaceable. I liked him so much as a performer that anyone else in the role would have been an embarrassment. Jagger is a truly great actor, something few people have noticed. I was backstage at a Rolling Stones concert many years ago and saw him talking with someone about a particular brand of whisky he liked and that should have been in his dressing room, but wasn't. All of a sudden, in the middle of this argument, there was an announcement on the loudspeaker: "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Rolling Stones!" I watched Jagger stop in mid-sentence and leap a few steps onto the stage, where, in front of a crowd of thousands, he gave the most demonic performance I have ever seen.
I appreciated Mick's attitude during the filming of _Fitzcarraldo._ On the first day of shooting there was a general strike in Iquitos, so things were at a standstill. Everyone was afraid to leave the hotel, but Mick had a car we rented for him which he insisted on using to drive actors and extras to the location. He knew how important that first day was for everyone. I liked that he knew the value of real work; he's a professional in the best sense of the word. Everything was a great adventure to him, and having to make the film without Mick is one of the biggest losses I've ever experienced as a director. Robards didn't have the intensity of Kinski; he was more of a warm-hearted Fitzcarraldo, so the two versions would have been different. I like the film today, but would also have liked the Robards/Jagger version.
_With Robards gone you thought about playing the role of Fitzcarraldo yourself._
I would have played the part only as a last resort, and would have been a credible Fitzcarraldo because what he has to do in the film was almost exactly what I had to do as its director. There wasn't much of a borderline between this fictional character and me. I wouldn't have been undignified in the role, but would never have been as good as Kinski. Thank God he did it. It was actually Mick Jagger who advised me not to play the part. I flew out from the jungle, completely exhausted, and met with Kinski in a hotel in New York. I was devastated by everything that had been going on in Peru and thought he was going to scream at me, but he was very supportive and opened a bottle of champagne, saying, "I knew it, Werner! I knew I would be Fitzcarraldo! When does filming start? When can I try on my costume? When do we leave for Peru?" I had contemplated Kinski playing the role from the start, but reached a false conclusion, the same one everyone else probably had, which came from the fact that in every one of his films Kinski never showed a spark of humour. I also decided against him because I knew he had no stamina. Today, when I look back, it's unthinkable that anyone else might have been Fitzcarraldo.
I truly liked Kinski for the attitude he brought to that hotel room, though once he arrived at the site where the boat was to be pulled over the mountain and saw how steep the terrain was, his heart sank. He was convinced it couldn't be done, and became the strongest negative force on the film. At one point, when the river was swollen and I was sitting in my hut, gazing at the fast-flowing current, watching the water level rise, a small delegation arrived that had obviously been sent by Kinski. They told me to be calm, that they were here to protect me from my own madness and folly, that I should abandon the film, or at least continue to flatten out the mountainside. We had already turned a gradient of sixty degrees into one of forty. "I'm the only one who's calm," I told them. For a time not a single person was on my side. The question I kept hearing was, "Why don't you just rewrite the script and cut out this whole thing of pulling a ship over a mountain?" My response was always the same: to do so would mean losing the central metaphor of my story.
_In an interview from the time you said that if you were to make a film like_ Fitzcarraldo _again, "there would be only ashes left of me."_
One of the cameramen asked what I would do if the entire negative were lost in an aeroplane crash. I told him I would start all over again tomorrow, that I would go through everything once more.
With Robards and Jagger gone and production halted, it was vital to get the film up and running as quickly as possible. We had already booked the opera house in Manaus, where several key sequences of the film were to be shot, and if we didn't get going immediately the boats would have been immovable because of the imminent dry period. There were other things to deal with, like making it clear to the five hundred Indians who had already spent two months working on the film that their efforts hadn't been for nothing, and the fact that our encampment was at risk of being devoured by termites. About ten days' voyage further up Río Camisea from where we were working lived the Amahuacas, a nomadic tribal group who had repelled all attempts by missionaries and the military to contact them. That season was the driest in recorded history and the river had virtually dried out. A group of Amahuacas were forced to move downriver, further than ever before, probably in search of turtle eggs. In silence and total darkness they attacked three locals who were extras in the film and who were fishing for our camp, shooting gigantic arrows through the neck and leg of one of the men, something you see in Les Blank's documentary _Burden of Dreams_. The man's wife was also hit, in her abdomen, with three arrows, leaving her in critical condition. It was too risky to transport them anywhere, so we performed eight hours of emergency surgery on a kitchen table. I assisted by illuminating her abdominal cavity with a torch, and with my other hand sprayed repellent at the clouds of mosquitoes that swarmed around the blood. Thirty of our native extras left on a retaliatory raid to push the Amahuacas back into their own territory, but they never made contact. My hut was on the edge of the camp and was the most exposed, so the Indians insisted on posting six guards with bows and arrows at the foot of my bed and beside my hammock.
There were also inevitable complications with getting the boat up the mountain, not least because every spare part – as well as everything from generators, sinks, refrigerators, an entire makeshift radio station, ovens and kitchen equipment, to material for costumes, sewing machines, food, livestock and crates of mineral water – had to be shipped in from Iquitos. Then, once we actually got the boat to the top, there was no water in the tributary on the other side, so it sat there for six months. I hired a family with five children and a couple of pigs to live inside it until we returned, at which point we spent a couple of weeks getting shots of the ship moving down the other side of the mountain. Filming in Iquitos was difficult because there was no infrastructure. Phoning long distance was practically impossible, there were power cuts twice a day, and the dirt road from town to our offices was basically a swamp, so most taxi drivers refused to make the journey. Those who did had cars which were rusted through and falling apart. We held on to the doors to keep from falling out, and instead of a steering wheel some of them used a pair of pincers to steer.
_By pulling a real boat over a real mountain were you after realism?_
When the boat is crashing through the rapids it jerks the gramophone, and we suddenly hear opera playing. The realistic noises fade away to reveal Caruso singing, and the whole thing becomes a dream-like event. Once the boat starts to move up the mountainside, there are fewer and fewer people in shot; it's almost as if the boat were gliding by its own force over the top of the mountain. Had we shown anyone in frame, the endeavour would have been realistic, an event of human labour. As it is, in the film the whole thing seems to have been transformed into an opera of fever dreams and pure imagination, a highly stylised and grandiose fantasy, part of the vapour sweat out by the jungle. The film challenges the most basic laws of nature; boats aren't meant to fly over mountains. Fitzcarraldo's story is the victory of weightlessness and fantasy over heaviness and reality, and the elation that follows. He defies gravity head on, and by the film's end I hope audiences feel lighter than they did two hours earlier.
_You set yourself a daunting engineering task._
Some people expressed doubt about what we were doing, and one of the loudest accusations against me was that I risked people's lives during production. The fact is, I was careful about everything. I hired a team of engineers from the University of Bremen who travelled to Peru and examined the condition of the soil, the gradient of the mountain and tractive power of the boat. They made calculations and drew up plans, but their solutions – one of which was to place the ship on inflated air cushions – weren't feasible. I then hired a Brazilian engineer who supervised the logistics of dragging the boat; he's the one in _Burden of Dreams_ who says we have a 30 per cent chance of pulling the boat over the mountain. He quit the production because once in the jungle, he said that a twenty-degree angle was all the technology would allow for, insisting there was a real danger that our dead post – drilled into the ground to take the weight of the boat – would be pulled out of the ground if we went ahead. He was convinced the whole thing was a disaster waiting to happen. When he left, I took things into my own hands and halted production for two weeks. I had a much more stable hole dug for the dead post and sank a huge tree trunk about thirty feet into the ground, letting it stick out by only two feet. It isn't difficult to calculate the force of physical objects, like the boat against this post, which by the time we had finished could have comfortably held something like ten times the weight of the steamship. We also brought in a heavier and more substantial pulley system. The margin of safety was extravagant.
I wish we had recorded everything in Dolby stereo because the noises the ship made when moving over the mountain were stunning. Steel cables sound unhealthy and sick when close to breaking point; no sound engineer could ever have invented what we heard on location. An overstressed cable glows red hot inside from the pressure. The only thing to do is to release as much tension as possible and get out of the way, because when it snaps under such circumstances it becomes a gigantic, deadly whip. I was careful not to allow anyone to stand next to the ship – particularly behind it – when it was being pulled up the mountain. The Native Indians demanded that if they had to be close to this enormous object for a particular shot, then I had to be there as well, which I acceded to immediately. The rear of the ship was sealed off from the rest of the set, and if the cables holding the boat had broken, it would have slid down the mountain without harming anyone. No one was ever at risk while it was moving. No one means no actor, no technician, no extra.
We had seven hundred Indians who provided pulling force by revolving the turnstiles we had constructed, but I also imported a Caterpillar bulldozer from Texas that spent weeks clearing a path up the mountain. The power of the turnstiles operated by the Indians was real, but more symbolic than anything else; the largest amount of physical power came from this Caterpillar. There are primitive physical laws behind what we did on that mountain. Given the fact that we had a pulley system with a ten-thousand-fold transmission, theoretically speaking I could have dragged the boat over the mountain with my little finger. It would have taken very little strength, though I would have had to pull the rope about five miles to move the boat five inches. I think it was Archimedes who said it's possible to hoist the earth off its hinges if you have a pivotal point and lever sticking far enough out into the universe. The real Fitzcarrald moved a far lighter boat from one river system to the next, but he disassembled it into little pieces, then had engineers reassemble it. There was no precedent in technical history for what we did. The obvious problems were the steep inclination and landslides caused by torrential rains, which meant the boat kept on sinking into the mud. No one will ever need to do again what I did. I'm a Conquistador of the Useless. Actually, a few years ago I was in the archive of the Vatican library and discovered that the obelisk in St Peter's Square was erected in the same way I pulled the ship over the mountain. I devised my own method all those years ago, but it turns out the same ideas were being used back in 1586.
_People still believe Indians were killed when the boat was dragged up the mountain._
There is a shot in _Fitzcarraldo_ where the boat finally starts edging up the side of the mountain before slipping back again and crushing a couple of Indians. I'm proud the scene is so well staged that some people think the Indians really died and that I had the audacity to film their bodies, deep in the mud underneath the boat. Thankfully Les Blank got that shot he used in _Burden of Dreams_ , where we see them emerging from underneath the boat, laughing, then washing themselves in the river. Some of the wilder accusations were triggered by images that looked too convincing.
Several accidents occurred during filming, but none of these were directly related to the actual shooting of the film. Many of the Indians had come from the mountainous areas and couldn't swim. I would sometimes see them taking our canoes out into the middle of the river, so I decided to move the boats up to higher ground and even chain them together. One day I was coming round a bend of the river in a speedboat and saw a great tumult on the riverbank. I immediately knew something had happened and realised that a canoe had capsized just moments before, so I dived down and tried to find the two young men who were in the water. One of them reached the shore, but the other drowned. Three days later, after consulting with the tribal chief, his fifteen-year-old wife remarried. Soon after that one of our aeroplanes was taking off from the jungle runway when its wheels tossed up a branch that became stuck in the tail section, immobilising altitude control. The aeroplane continued to climb very steeply until it stalled. Everyone survived, but some people sustained serious injuries. At our infirmary, where we had a doctor who specialised in tropical diseases, we were able to treat over a thousand locals who had nothing to do with the film, though an elderly woman and two children died of anaemia.
Naturally there are some things I have to take responsibility for. During the filming of the scene where the boat moves through the rapids, the assistant cameraman Rainer Klausmann was sitting, with a camera, on a rock in the river covered with moss and surrounded by turbulent water. It hadn't been easy to reach this spot, let alone stabilise a camera there. We got the shots we wanted, during which the boat smashed against the rocks so violently that the keel was completely mangled. Just past the rapids the boat ran aground on a sandbank, and we frantically tried to free it because the dry season was approaching and we knew the water level would sink even further, preventing any kind of rescue of the ship. We all had a lot on our minds and eventually made it back to camp for the night. Next morning at breakfast I couldn't find Klausmann, and asked if anyone had seen him last night. No one had. We had forgotten him on that rock the day before. I jumped into a boat and went over to the rapids as fast as I could, and saw him just sitting there, shivering with cold, hanging on to this rock. He was very angry, rightfully so. Klausmann had attracted bad luck even before that. Near Iquitos there was a dead branch of the river, the kind of place where normally you would find piranhas, but because all the townsfolk and children would go there to swim, we did too. One afternoon we were in the water and all of a sudden I heard a scream and saw Klausmann scrambling to shore. A piranha had bitten off the top of one of his toes. He was on crutches for weeks.
At one point I had a deep scratch on my finger; in _Burden of_ _Dreams_ you see I have white gaffer tape wrapped around it. Soon afterwards a red streak appeared under the skin, running from the finger past my elbow all the way to the armpit. Our doctor casually asked, "Are you allergic to penicillin?" I told him I didn't know. "Let's test it," he said, and scratched my skin with a needle. Immediately I had a wild reaction; my entire body was covered in red patches the size of large coins and my ears turned purple and swelled up. He would have killed me on the spot with an injection into a vein. Later, one beautiful day I was walking on the deck of one of the boats, looking out into the jungle, and leant on a section of railing that had been recently repaired but not properly screwed back on yet. It gave way and I fell directly into the water, right in between the hulls of the two identical ships, which were about thirty feet apart. At that same moment an eddy started pushing them together. I swam out of there as fast as I could, otherwise I would have been crushed.
_Claims about your treatment of locals were made during the extended period of pre-production._
Months before we had even brought the cameras down into the jungle, the press tried to link me to the military regime and make me out to be a major force in the exploitation of local Indians. In fact, the soldiers were constantly arresting us because for a time I had no official permits to move the ships along the River Marañón. I didn't have this paperwork because I felt it was better to ask the Indians who actually lived on the river, rather than the government in Lima, for permission. When we got to Wawaim – which was in the vicinity of where we wanted to pull the ship over the mountain – we talked at length to local inhabitants who were happy to help. They signed a contract that detailed what was required of them and how much each person would be paid for this basic exchange of services. They earned about twice as much as they would have working for a lumber company.
At the time there was a power struggle going on within the larger communities of Indians in the general area; there were opposing political factions, and our presence became the pretext for each side to claim areas of influence. The main opposition to us came from some distance away, from an unofficial tribal council of Aguarunas [Consejo Aguaruna y Huambisa] that insisted it represented all the indigenous groups in the area, though many Indians where we had established our camp had no idea the council even existed, and those that did wanted nothing to do with it. There was never one voice for the Aguarunas, despite what this council said, which tried to make a name for itself by blaming us for the oil pipeline and generally being responsible for the military presence. They spread bizarre rumours, including that we planned to cut a canal between the two river systems and leave several communities stranded on an island, and wanted to take everyone back with us to Europe. They also said we wanted to do things like rape the women and use their bodies for grease. It didn't help that almost from the start the press said we were smuggling arms and had destroyed the Indians' crops during filming. But at that point we were in the early stages of pre-production, and this was all months before a single frame had been shot.
_Outsiders arrived, trying to incite the Indians against you._
A political propagandist from France turned up and showed the local Indians photos of Auschwitz victims, piles of skeletons and corpses. He was one of several activists who flocked to the area, the kind of doctrinaire zealots and left-wing ideologues of the 1968 revolution who make up the Diaspora of Shattered Illusions, still hoping to fulfil their failed dreams. One of the Indian leaders showed me material given to them and explained that the Frenchman had tried to convince the Indians that this is how Germans treat everyone.
After several months of pre-production, the military build-up on the border had become scary. One time we passed downriver near one of the army's encampments and a shot was fired over our heads, so we rowed to shore and were held captive for a few hours. This was the first time I had real doubts about whether we should stay in this area; I eventually made the decision to abandon the camp we had built and find another shooting location, which meant going in search of a specific and rare configuration of geography, because I had precise requirements when it came to locations for the film. Most of the tributaries of the Amazon are something like ten miles apart, with 8,000-feet mountains in between, but I needed two rivers that ran parallel, almost touched each other and had a mountain in between them that wasn't too big, but not too small either. We looked at aerial shots and spoke to pilots and geographers, concluding that there were only two suitable places in the whole of Peru. The first was the site we had just evacuated; the second was more than a thousand miles to the south, in the middle of the jungle, about eight hundred miles south of Iquitos, where Río Camisea and Río Urubamba are divided by an elevation more than six hundred feet high. I hadn't actually found the second location before I moved out of the first camp, but could see that our presence was becoming the focus of something unpleasant, even dangerous. We definitely didn't belong.
A few people stayed in the first camp, and I maintained our medical outpost for the locals because I felt that as long as I could pay for a doctor, one should remain there. I also hoped that by doing so things would fall into place, but after the camp was almost entirely evacuated a group of Aguarunas from the tribal council, who lived some distance away, set the place on fire. They brought press photographers along with them; it was clearly a media stunt. Around that time – I don't recall whether it was before or after – the border war between Peru and Ecuador broke out in the immediate vicinity.
_A tribunal in Germany attempted to try you,_ in absentia, _for your crimes_.
They accused me of torturing and imprisoning Native Indians, which were such bizarre accusations that even some of the press who normally loved this kind of stuff weren't interested in what was being said. There were suggestions that we had occupied an area where Indians had never been exposed to the white man, but it was obvious to anyone who cared to look that we hadn't invaded a tribe of untouched natives. The Aguarunas were relatively sophisticated and, politically speaking, the best organised tribal group in Peru. At one point they expressed their concern to me about the film because they didn't want the world to see an outdated representation of Native Indian life. None of them was surprised by the technology we brought down there. They communicated via shortwave radio, watched kung-fu videos and smoked Lucky Strikes. Most of the men had served in the army and flown in helicopters, and a good number spoke Spanish. In _Burden of Dreams_ you see some of the Aguarunas wearing John Travolta disco-fever T-shirts.
The only serious lingering allegation was that I had four Indians arrested by the military, so I went to the town of Santa María de Nieva to uncover the facts for myself. It turned out all four men existed, but none had even the remotest contact with the production of the film. One of them had been imprisoned for about a week because of his unpaid bills in every bar in town. I asked Amnesty International to look into reports of human-rights abuses, and they spread word that I wasn't the cause of any problems, though the media didn't take much notice. Typical of the climate was a report in _Der Stern_ magazine. A photographer was sent to the jungle set, where he took at least a thousand pictures, none of which were published. Instead, the magazine ran photos from their archives of naked Amazon Indians spearing fish, hinting we had intruded into a sanctuary of "uncontaminated" natives. The fact is that had we been the cause of even a single arrest, I would have scrapped the whole film during pre-production.
_You said earlier that the best way to fight a rumour is with an even wilder rumour._
At one point the Italian press exploded with a story that Claudia Cardinale had been run over by a truck and was critically injured. A journalist from Italy somehow reached me on the phone in Iquitos; it sometimes took forty-eight hours to place a call down there. He was hysterical, so I calmly told him I had just eaten dinner with Claudia and she was fine, but the rumour mill kept grinding and reports of her injuries started spreading globally. Two days later the same journalist reached me from Rome yet again. "Sir, please don't repeat what you've written so far," I said after a flash of inspiration. "The truth is actually much more serious than that. Not only was Claudia Cardinale badly injured when she was hit by the truck, the driver was a barefoot drunkard who raped his unconscious victim in the presence of onlookers." There were twenty seconds of silence, then he hung up, and from that moment on there wasn't another word about any of it.
_Hopefully this book will help demolish certain untruths._
No, let this book serve other purposes. I can best argue against the stories with the film itself. There is a moment when Fitzcarraldo tells of a lonesome trapper and frontiersman who was the first white man to see Niagara Falls, at a time when the Pilgrims had only just arrived. Upon relating what he had seen, the man was called a liar. "What's your proof?" he was asked. His answer was simple: "My proof is that I have seen them." I – and many others – were eyewitnesses to what happened during the making of _Fitzcarraldo_. We know the truth. In almost every story the media came up with, I was acquainted with a Werner Herzog who had very little to do with the real me. So be it.
In recent years there has been a slew of these other Herzogs, sometimes dull, occasionally rather intelligent: from a fake and quite awful impersonation of me reading a children's book, to an equally fake but amusing pastiche involving me reading a letter I wrote to Rosalina, my cleaning lady. Although the recorded voice is a poor rendering and the author of this piece actually identified himself, a good number of people asked if it really was me. No matter how wild the caricature, I never deny such things – which are proliferating at speed thanks to the Internet – and in the case of the cleaning lady I explained I was actively pursuing her deportation back to Nicaragua. I feel safe from the world knowing that between the rumours and me is a strong shield of false Herzogs. The parodies and misperceptions protect and serve as unpaid bodyguards, so I do my best to keep the rumours alive. Let them sprout and grow, let the mythology mushroom. I want more of these doppelgängers, these stooges, however crazed, to do battle out there. They take the brunt while I get on with my work.
_There are shots in_ Burden of Dreams _of you and Kinski on the boat as it moves through the rapids_.
At one point the fourteen steel hawsers broke simultaneously under the enormous thrust of the water, and the boat – with two people on board, the cook and his pregnant wife – took off through the rapids with nobody to steer it. Unfortunately no camera had been set up to film this, so over a period of several days we winched the ship back into position. We set up three cameras and filmed it careening through the rapids again, this time without anyone on board. There was no one to steer, and it crashed into the rocks left and right. I was watching from the cliffs and decided it looked safe enough to do it again with people on the ship. It was, in fact, some members of the crew who strongly suggested we do another round of filming through the rapids. Kinski was immediately eager; he always had good knowledge of what would work well on screen, and knew this was a moment he should be involved with. I was hesitant, and in this case he actually pushed me.
Seven of us got on board, with three cameras. Les Blank was also with us. We used two belts to strap Jorge Vignati and his camera to the wall behind the helm; when we hit a rock he was jolted into his straps so hard he broke a couple of ribs. Beat Presser hit his head on the second camera, which was screwed to the deck, and suffered a concussion. Thomas Mauch and I were with Kinski. One impact was so violent that the lens flew out of the camera like a bullet. I tried to hold Mauch with one arm, and with the other grabbed onto an open doorframe, but we flew through the air. Mauch was still hanging on to his camera and banged his hand down onto the deck, splitting it apart between two fingers. Two days before, all our anaesthetic had been used during emergency surgery on the two Indians hit by arrows. As we had hired a group of Peruvian lumbermen and oarsmen, we were advised by a local missionary to have two prostitutes stationed in our camp, otherwise the men would chase after the women in the next settlement. While we sewed up Mauch's hand without anaesthetic, one of these women consoled him in his agony. She buried his face between her breasts and told him how much she loved him.
Once the boat had passed through the rapids we all got off, and almost immediately it dug itself into a gravel bank. The anchor pierced the hull, and the keel twisted up like the lid of a sardine can around its key, but the boat was so solidly built – with its reinforced steel lining and protective air chambers – that it didn't sink. We tried to pry it loose from the sandbank, but had to face the fact that the boat couldn't be moved until the next rainy season, which was half a year away. We were prepared for something like this to happen because it wasn't all that unlikely the ship would sink in the rapids. The speed of the water was more than forty miles an hour and there were whirlpools everywhere. Our back-up was the second boat sitting on the mountain, which we planned to bring down the other side into the river, then continue filming with it. Unfortunately the water level had dropped to the lowest ever recorded, from forty feet to two feet, which meant we couldn't drag the ship down into the other river because there was literally no water there. All of a sudden both ships were immobilised until the next rainy season.
_Why do the Indians help Fitzcarraldo?_
They are on a mythic mission, one Fitzcarraldo never quite comprehends. For much of the film the audience is left in the dark about their true motivations; we never really understand why they are toiling and going to all this trouble to tow the ship over the mountain. Only when it hurtles through the rapids does everything make sense. The Indians are as obsessed as Fitzcarraldo; they just have different dreams. While his is to build an opera house, they want to rid themselves of the evil spirits inhabiting the rapids, and are convinced that sacrificing the boat by cutting it loose and sending it through the rapids will lift the curse over their land. It will be their salvation. "They know that we are not gods," says Huerequeque, "but the ship has really impressed them." The Indians win and Fitzcarraldo loses, though ultimately he rises to the occasion and – through the power of his imagination and creative spirit – converts this defeat into some kind of triumph. At the end of the film, though we know that Fitzcarraldo has bankrupted himself, it's obvious he'll be up to mischief before long. This is someone who has always stood his ground, and perhaps might finally finish his trans-Amazon railway, abandoned years before.
_Did your work with the Indians have any lasting effect?_
Our presence in that part of the jungle was ephemeral yet to some degree helpful because it meant attention was focused on the problems of Native Indians in the Peruvian rainforests. When we shot the film we were conscious of wanting to do more for them than just provide financial remuneration. Some wanted to be nurses, so I asked our doctor to provide training. The younger men dreamt of buying Honda motorcycles because they loved riding them when they were in the army, but there were no roads in the jungle, so that didn't seem too useful. The Indians' canoes were too small to transport crops, including their cocoa harvests, to the nearest market. Travelling merchants would buy things from the Indians at low cost and make profits reselling this merchandise downriver, so our builders and carpenters showed them how to build larger boats.
The most important thing was recognising that oil and lumber firms had started to cast a greedy eye over the Indians' land. Wholesale encroachment and plunder had to be prevented, so I sent in a surveyor to chart the territory, which had never been properly delineated, with a view to helping the locals secure their land rights. Overcoming the legal issues wasn't easy. Even after engaging lawyers and bribing everyone I could find, I became lost in labyrinthine bureaucracy. I decided to take two elected representatives of the Indians to Lima, where we had an audience with the president of the republic, Fernando Belaúnde, who promised to co-operate and do whatever he could to help them gain the title to their land, but stated he didn't accept the Indians' argument that they had lived since time immemorial in this area. He told them that legally they had no case, though it was clear their grandfathers had lived on the land; it was all hearsay as far as Belaúnde was concerned. I told him the notion of hearsay had actually been accepted into English common law, in a case from 1916 in what is now Ghana. Some white settlers had told the jungle communities that Lima didn't exist and that there was no ocean, so I took these two Indian representatives down to the beach. Mesmerised, they waded with their new blue jeans and T-shirts into the surf, tasted the water, filled an empty wine bottle with seawater, corked it and took it home as proof.
By the time I went back to shoot _My Best Fiend,_ the Indians had succeeded in gaining the legal title to their land. On the other side of the river – which wasn't part of the Indians' territory – there was a camp and an airfield that belonged to the oil companies. The area contains one of the largest deposits of gas in the world, but to this day there has been no drilling on Indian land. They really do have control over it, so I feel we assisted them in a small way, though their moral and historical right to the territory was unquestionable.
_Twenty years after you wrote them, you published your_ Fitzcarraldo _diaries._
A decade after I made _Fitzcarraldo_ I looked at the diaries, but just couldn't handle it. For a long time I was terrified to dig into those notebooks. I wrote the text in sub-miniaturised, microscopic handwriting that no one but me could read. It can't get any smaller because no pens exist that give a finer stroke. I don't know why I wrote it like that; my longhand is of normal size. I ignored the notebooks for so long because I was unable to read the tiny letters, but eventually my wife bought me a pair of magnifying glasses – the kind jewellers wear – and told me that if I didn't edit and publish the text myself, someone would do it once I was gone. I no longer had an excuse.
When I read the notebooks for the first time after so many years, I realised how much I had forgotten. I ended up cutting the text down from a thousand pages to three hundred, skipping over an entire year that was just too painful to revisit, and published it as _Conquest of the Useless_. There is a breathless urgency to the prose, and I'm convinced the book will outlive all my films. It's a diary of the film's production only in the broadest sense of the word; more than anything this is a piece of literature, a fierce and relentless look at what was going on around me at the time and my reactions to it all. At moments I run off into wild, invented fever dreams, and put down on paper the kinds of images that occurred to me in the midst of my experiences of filming in the jungle. The more duress I was under, the more frequently these types of visions appeared to me. I would invent bizarre accidents and fantasies, describing them in writing because by doing so would somehow prevent them from happening in real life. By naming the disaster I banish it, like the boat on the sleep slope that breaks loose. Like a torpedo it shoots down until it hits a crowded ocean beach, buries itself deep in the sand and flings an ice-cream stand up into the air.
When things become difficult some people find solace in music and religion, but when I read my diaries so many years after I wrote them, what became evident was that in the turmoil of production I took refuge in language. It has forever been a powerful anchor for me, and I suspect that my true voice emerges more clearly through prose than cinema. I might be a better writer than I am a filmmaker.
_Why did Les Blank call his film_ Burden of Dreams?
Cinema emboldens us. It helps us surmount everyday life and encourages us to take our hopes and desires seriously, to turn them into reality. When things were going badly I headed back to Germany in an attempt to hold together the film's investors. They asked me if I was going to continue. "Do you really have the strength and will?" I said, "How can you ask this question? If I abandon this project, I will be a man without dreams. I live my life or I end my life with _Fitzcarraldo_." It wasn't possible for me to allow myself private feelings of doubt while making the film. I never had the privilege of despair; had I hesitated or panicked for a single second, the entire project would have come tumbling down around me. The final film ended up basically as I had always hoped it would, with the exception of the Mick Jagger character. Months later Claudia Cardinale said to me, "When you came to Rome four years ago you explained your ideas to me and all the difficulties we would have to overcome. Now I've seen the film, and it's exactly as you first described it."
If you watch _Fitzcarraldo_ and have the courage to push on with your own projects, then the film has accomplished something. If one person walks outside after watching one of my films and no longer feels so alone, I have achieved everything I set out to achieve. When you read a great poem you instantly know there is a profound truth to it. Sometimes there are similar moments of great insight in cinema, when you know you have been illuminated. Perhaps, occasionally, I have achieved such heights with my own films.
Burden of Dreams _includes scenes from the original version of_ Fitzcarraldo, _with Robards and Jagger_.
People are always asking me if they can visit my sets and shoot footage of me at work; I tell them they will experience nothing but an endless chain of banalities. I didn't invite Les to the jungle, but he was eager to come down and make a film. At first I was reluctant to have a camera around because there is something distasteful about making films about filmmakers. I don't like being recorded while working. When you cook a meal at home and there is someone staring at your hands, suddenly you're no longer a good cook. Everyone functions differently when being observed, and filmmakers are usually pathetic embarrassments when they appear on film. I include myself here.
Tom Luddy had shown me some of Les's films, and I loved them instantly, especially _Spend It All,_ which has a scene where a man pulls his own tooth out with a pair of pliers, an image I borrowed for _Stroszek_. His films document the vanishing marginals of American life in the most vibrant ways. I also loved Les's cooking and general attitude to life. He turned out to be a healthy presence in the jungle. Most of the time he was like a southern bullfrog brooding behind a beer, unobtrusive, always knowing when he should turn on the camera and when there were significant moments to capture on film. What I really liked about Les was that he wasn't just monosyllabic; often he was zero-syllabic. He hardly ever spoke a word and somehow managed to blend into the environment. I was also persuaded by his argument that however confident I was about finishing the film, if everything fell apart then thanks to his footage there would at least be some record of this foolhardy quest.
Les wasn't some court jester who adulated everyone, no matter what they were doing. He had an extraordinarily good eye and brought a considered subjectivity to what he was filming. He was just as interested in watching how the Indians would ferment yucca as he was documenting the production of _Fitzcarraldo_ , and most of the time could be found in the camp where the natives did their cooking. One time at breakfast I explained to him that later in the day there would be a real event: for the first time in months we planned to move the boat up the mountain. "I'm not here to film events," said Les, and he didn't show up. That evening he told me he had spent the day filming an ant carrying a parrot feather. I always liked his attitude, and can look back at the diaries I wrote during production and find a world of observations completely different to what Les was documenting at the same moment.
I like _Burden of Dreams,_ though certain things in the film might not project a particularly favourable image of me, and even caused problems. Les screened a few minutes of footage at the Telluride Film Festival before he had finished the film, and out of context some of my comments made me look dangerously obsessed. In the voiceover of _Burden of Dreams_ it's stated that I could have shot the entire film outside Iquitos, which would have made things easier for everyone, but as explained I needed very specific terrain, and for a thousand miles in the vicinity of Iquitos there is no elevation more than ten feet; it's as flat as the ocean. At one point in _Burden of Dreams_ I talk of how people had died during production, but Les chose not to include my explanation of the circumstances, so it sounds as if I risked lives and drove people to their deaths just for the sake of a film. It was a stench that followed me for a decade. Les immediately wanted to re-edit the film once I pointed these things out to him, but I told him not to bother. I've got better things to do than correct everyone's mistakes and misreadings. Les always had the final say; I never asked him to change things, even when I knew they might be damaging to me. It's worth knowing that Les was filming over a period of only five weeks, but _Fitzcarraldo_ took four years to make, so he captured only a fraction of what went on during production.
I never kept any footage of Robards and Jagger; the only clips in existence are those from Les's film, scraps of celluloid he grabbed before I junked everything I didn't need for _Fitzcarraldo._ For that reason alone I'm glad Les's film exists. Sometimes it's better not to have all the facts, though _Burden of Dreams_ remains the best "making of" film ever made.
Ballad of the Little Soldier _is about the struggle fought by the Nicaraguan Miskito Indians against the Sandinistas, their former allies in the revolution against Somoza_.
Allow me to correct you: it's about children fighting a war. The film was made in Nicaragua, and the dogmatic Left – for whom the Sandinistas were still a sacred cow at the time – refused to believe I wasn't in the pay of the CIA. But anyone can see that _Ballad of the Little Soldier_ isn't a political document, even though after making the film I felt I should face those who I was criticising, so I accepted an invitation to Managua a few months after it was released, where I was involved in a lengthy discussion after a screening. There was no real reconciliation in our viewpoints, though I was impressed how civilised and nuanced the debate was. In Argentina a few years earlier I would have disappeared within hours.
I made _Ballad of the Little Soldier_ because a friend of mine, Denis Reichle, was working on a film about child soldiers and asked for help. Reichle is a photographer, reporter and filmmaker who made a film in the Golden Triangle of Burma, Laos and Thailand about Khun Sa, the Burmese warlord and so-called "opium king." I immediately saw he was the kind of person who worked with great care to compile reports from inaccessible places. For decades Reichle travelled extensively and reported on oppressed minorities. From the age of two he lived in an orphanage, and at the age of fifteen was drafted along with his entire school into the _Volkssturm,_ the battalions made up of children and older men used in the defence of Berlin during the final months of the war. He was trained to lay mines and use anti-tank weaponry before being sent to the front, an experience he was lucky to survive. After the war Reichle was held prisoner by the Russians for a few weeks before escaping back to Alsace, where he was originally from. He became a French citizen and was sent to Indochina, where he spent a few months in French uniform. All this by the age of twenty. As a photojournalist working for _Paris Match,_ Reichle arrived in East Timor in 1976, just as the mass murder was starting. Nobody dared land on shore, so he swam the last half mile from a small fishing boat, holding his camera above his head. He was eventually arrested by Indonesian soldiers and deported. He escaped the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who captured him because they thought he was a Soviet spy, and was held hostage in the Philippines by Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic separatist group, before being exchanged for twenty-four Kalashnikovs. My favourite story of his took place in Angola, a country saturated with landmines. He was driving on a road outside of town and saw some boys sitting in the shade of a tree. As he advanced steadily towards them, he saw them plugging their ears with their fingers. Reichle slammed on the brakes and stopped ten feet from a landmine, preventing the boys from enjoying the moment of him being blown up.
Reichle is the most fearless and methodical man I know, instantly able to read the signs correctly, equally daring and prudent, which is why he has survived so much. He's one of the few people I have met in my life into whose hands I would entrust myself, so we decided to work together on a film about the Miskito Indians. From Honduras we took a small plane that brought us to the Atlantic coast, where we met up with the Miskitos in their training camp. To get into Nicaragua – where I spent nearly three months – we illegally crossed the border at Río Coco. At one point during filming we were planning to accompany some Miskito soldiers and film an attack on a convoy. Reichle asked whether a security team with a machine gun was being left in place to cover our retreat. It turned out there was no such plan, so he took me aside and flatly told me we wouldn't be going with them, that they had no clue what they were doing. It just wasn't safe.
_What is the political background to the film?_
Originally the Miskito Indians – who within their social structure traditionally lived a primitive form of socialism – had fought against Somoza as allies of the Sandinistas, but soon their alliance soured. A strip of Miskito land in Nicaragua, on the Honduran border, was categorically depopulated by the Sandinistas; sixty-five towns and villages were razed to the ground and violence was perpetrated against the native population. At Sandy Bay, on the eastern coast of the country, I watched six Sandinista soldiers arrive by boat, firing their Kalashnikovs into the air, acting as if they occupied the country. The entire Miskito population of the village fled into the jungle, screaming in fear. The soldiers shot the cows, then skinned them and loaded the meat onto their boat. When they left they fired a round into the air as a departing salute.
The key to the film is the human element, so to talk about it in political or military terms isn't useful. I wanted to focus on child soldiers and could have filmed in any number of countries, like Liberia, Cambodia or Iran. It doesn't matter what ideologies are in play when there are nine-year-olds – barely strong enough to handle machine guns and grenade-throwers – fighting a war. Child soldiers are such a tragedy that details of the conflict in question are unnecessary. I spoke to some of the Miskito children for hours before rolling the camera. Every one of them had volunteered for the army after a personal and traumatising experience. Many were completely silent, others responded with only one-word answers; they never elaborated. I talked to a boy in a commando unit who was clearly in a state of shock. His two-year-old brother, six-year-old brother and father had all been killed. His mother was cut in pieces before his eyes. He was still in training but wanted to go out the next day and kill. I asked him to talk more about how his brother had died. "With an M16," is all he said. Several of the children in _Ballad of the Little Soldier_ were dead by the time the film was released.
_In_ The Dark Glow of the Mountains _you speak with Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner about walking until the world ends_.
Messner talks of his desire to walk from one Himalayan valley to the next, without looking back. He says either his life or the world will stop. "Presumably it will be that as my life ends, so will the world." I like the idea of having a group of huskies loaded up with leather saddlebags and just disappearing, turning down the path and walking until everything has been left behind, continuing until there's no road left, or just floating downriver. It's how I would like to end my life. Either that or being hit by an enemy's bullet.
In the seventies Messner was one of those young climbers who brought a new approach to the sport. He was determined to climb the Himalayas alpine-style, and succeeded in reaching the peaks of all of the planet's fourteen 8,000-metre-plus mountains without large-scale expeditions and hundreds of Sherpas. He was the first to climb the Himalayas with just a rucksack and no support camps, and the first to climb Mount Everest without oxygen – by what he called "fair means" – which was considered a great achievement in the mountain-climbing community. Cesare Maestri, a famous Italian climber of the fifties and sixties, used to scale peaks by hauling himself up inch by inch with powerful motorised sledgehammers, hooks and machine drills. It would take him weeks to get to the top. A ridiculous thing to do; I could climb the world's tallest building if I had all that equipment and three months to spare. Maestri's approach was another case of the perversion of adventurism; he shamed and embarrassed every mountain he climbed. It's the opposite of the "free climbing" approach, which emerged from California, where ropes are used only to prevent accidents. Using as little technical equipment as possible meant that Messner became the father of modern mountaineering. He's a man of great survival skills, endowed not only with extraordinary technical proficiency, but also a sense of exactly what is happening around him and a knowledge of when something isn't right. I learnt a lot from him about evaluating danger. He attempted to scale Dhaulagiri twice; once he turned back five hundred feet shy of the summit because of avalanche conditions, and another time stared for days at the south face of the mountain through binoculars, watching a series of avalanches, then went home. Finally, in 1985 he and his climbing partner Hans Kammerlander reached the summit.
_The Dark Glow of the Mountains_ emerged from questions I was asking myself. What goes on inside the minds of mountain climbers who undertake such extreme endeavours? What drives them to scale these peaks? Why did Messner – a man who lost his brother and some of his toes on Nanga Parbat – feel the need to scale it for a second time? What motivates a man like this? I once asked him, "Don't you think you're a little deranged to keep climbing mountains?" His response was simple: "All creative people are insane." I always felt the man had the wisdom of the snake, sitting there coiled up, waiting for the opportunity to strike. One time he told me he was unable to describe the feelings that compel him to climb any more than he could explain what compels him to breathe.
The film was meant to be the predecessor of something much bigger I had in mind. I wanted to make a feature film in the zone of K2, the second-highest and most dangerous of the Himalayan mountains, and in preparation thought it would be a good idea to make a relatively small film as a test run. I could have written a script as quickly as I normally do, but felt the need to physically experience the environment myself. I wanted to test the situation and learn about the logistical difficulties of filming in such a place and what technical problems we might encounter. How feasible was it to get supplies for everyone up there? During filming we experienced temperatures so low that our raw film stock – which needs to be bent and fed into narrow loops inside the camera – broke like uncooked spaghetti. A gigantic avalanche hit the bottom of the glacier a mile away from us and, like a horizontal atomic explosion, the impact sent a cloud of snow towards us and wiped out our camp. I immediately adapted my plans for a feature film.
_Messner talks about his brother's death._
Messner is a media-savvy showman who has appeared on every talk show ever seen on European television. He knew that in making the film I would be digging deep and might ask questions about his brother's death. "There will be situations in which I will go far," I told him, "but you can defend yourself." Messner knew there would be no mercy for him because film per se knows no mercy.
Initially it was a problem getting him to appear on camera as himself. The first thing we shot was a sequence in the shadow of Nanga Parbat. We drove through the night, and when we awoke the next morning could see mountain in front of us; it was absolutely stunning, not a cloud in the sky. I woke Messner up and set him in front of the camera. He launched into his usual media rap, and I immediately stopped the camera. "This isn't how I want to make this film with you," I told him. "I need to see deep inside your heart." Messner looked at me with a stunned expression and fell silent. He understood how close I was to junking the entire project, and towards evening said to me, "I'll give you the whole story." It was difficult to decide whether to include the sequence of him weeping, but I eventually told him, "You've done lifeless talk shows all your life. Now, all of a sudden, something personal has been brought to light. You aren't just another athlete conquering every mountain with cold perfection. This is why I'm not going to edit out the scene." Once Messner saw the finished film, he was glad we went as far as we did.
_What mountain do they climb in the film?_
To climb an 8,000-metre mountain is considered a feat, and Messner has done them all. To traverse a mountain using one route and then climb down the other side is considered extraordinary. But what Messner and Kammerlander did during this expedition was traverse two 8,000-metre mountains – Gasherbrum 1 and 2 – in one go, which had never been attempted before. They did it without oxygen or Sherpas, a remarkable accomplishment that hasn't been repeated since. They set off at two in the morning, in pitch darkness, at a fantastic speed because they could carry only a small amount of provisions. It was clear from the start there was no way for me to follow them with a camera, so the shots of the summit in the film are taken by Messner himself. Before they left the camp he took me aside and said, "Maybe we won't survive this one. If you don't hear from us within ten days, we must be dead. It would take twenty days for help to arrive, much too long to save us. If this happens, take over the expedition and see that the Sherpas get paid with the money I deposited in such-and-such a place." He left without uttering another word.
I went only as far as the base camp, a little over 5,000 metres up, before encountering a Spanish expedition. They had some supply camps to clear out and allowed me to attach myself to their rope and climb with them for another 1,500 metres. The route they took was along a difficult and dangerous area of the glacier, with shifting slabs as big as office blocks separated by deep crevasses. The Spaniards moved up very quickly, and when we arrived at the camp I had clear signs of altitude sickness because I wasn't sufficiently acclimatised. The symptoms are easily recognisable: you become absurdly apathetic, and I sat down in the snow with my whole body slumped. It was extremely alarming to me, so I decided to go back down to the camp. The Spanish should have stopped me, but stupidly I made the trip on my own. I didn't follow the flags and took the most direct route instead, across a glacier covered in snow, almost breaking through a snow-covered crevasse three hundred feet deep. I seemed almost to step into a void.
_Are you an adventurer?_
Anyone who labels himself an "adventurer" today is a disgrace. I have never done anything adventurous for the sake of a film. There is a myth that I purposely make things more difficult for myself; it's the wrongest of wrongs. I would rather have made _Fitzcarraldo_ in the middle of Central Park, the only problem being there's no jungle in the neighbourhood. I would have directed the film from an apartment window on Fifth Avenue, just as a few years later I would rather have made _Scream of Stone_ in Munich, where I could have slept in my own bed. Mountaineers might be motivated to seek out the most difficult routes, but not me. I would never have finished a single film if I purposely sought out trouble. Filmmaking is difficult enough, and it's plain bad luck I'm drawn to characters like Fitzcarraldo, whose mission is to pull a boat over a mountain. I never seek adventure. I'm not irresponsible about things. I just do my job.
There is a difference between exploration and adventure. I'm a curious person, forever searching for new images and dignified places, but though often given the contemptible tag of "adventurer," I categorically deny the label. It applies only to men and women of earlier times, like the mediaeval knights who travelled into the unknown. The concept has degenerated since then, and today it is an ugly, pitiful embarrassment. Local mountain people, like the Sherpas, the Baltis and the Swiss, traditionally never climbed the peaks that surrounded them, thus robbing them of all dignity. They left the splendour of the mountains intact. There is a foul philosophy behind those bored English gentlemen who started climbing for the sake of it, then scampered off to make sure they were the first at the South Pole. There's nothing that interesting about the place; it's just water and drifting ice. The whole thing suggests dead fish – white, rotten, bloated, belly up – floating in dirty water, and since then the self-promoters have run the show. Modern-day adventurers speak about their travels in military terms, like "We conquered the summit," or "We returned victorious over Mount Everest." I can't stand such talk. What a big shot you were in 1910 when you came back from Africa and told the ladies how many elephants you had killed! Do the same thing at a party today and you'll have a glass of champagne tossed in your face.
I particularly loathe pseudo-adventurism, where the mountain climb becomes about exploring your personal limits. I had arguments with Messner about this because he stylised his media persona on the concept of "The Great Adventurer." I'm bracing myself for the first barefoot climber on Everest or backwards sprinter through the Sahara, the kind of nonsense the _Guinness Book of World Records_ is full of. You can even book an "adventure holiday" to see the headhunters and cannibals of New Guinea. It's the kind of absurdity pervading the degenerate concept of "adventurism" that I find so feeble. On the other hand, I love the Frenchman who crossed the Sahara in reverse gear in a 2CV, and people like Monsieur Mangetout, who ate his own bicycle. I think he also tried to eat a twin-engine aeroplane. What a guy!
_He's dead._
Really? Ah, well. There will surely be another like him.
# Going Rogue
It's possible to learn to play an instrument as an adult, but the intuitive qualities needed won't be there; the body needs to be conditioned from an early age. The same could be never said for filmmaking. A musician is made in childhood, but a filmmaker any time. At the age of about fifteen I read a few pages in an encyclopaedia about things like camera lenses, microphones and how a lab functions. I learnt about optical soundtracks and perspective lines, about what will be in frame if you're using a 24mm lens and standing here as opposed to a 50mm lens over there. Everything I needed to get myself started came from those few pages. There isn't much more anyone can teach you about filmmaking.
I always knew film school wasn't for me. I had no formal training nor had I worked as someone's assistant. My early films came from my deepest commitments; I never had much of a choice. It will never be the curriculum of a traditional film school and access to equipment that makes someone a filmmaker. Who wants to spend four years on something a primate could learn in a week? What takes time to develop is a personal vision. Knowing certain technical tricks doesn't make you a filmmaker any more than knowing how to type makes you a novelist.
_Tell me about your ideal film school._
Such a place would never exist, though there's nothing wrong with fantasising wildly. You would be allowed to submit an application only after having travelled, alone and on foot, let's say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of nearly two thousand miles. While walking, write about your experiences, then give me your notebooks. I would immediately be able to tell who had really walked and who had not. You would learn more about filmmaking during your journey than if you spent five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. Somebody who has been a boxer in Africa would be better trained as a filmmaker than if he had graduated from one of the "best" film schools in the world. All that counts is real life.
My film school would allow you to experience a certain climate of excitement of the mind, and would produce people with spirit, a furious inner excitement, a burning flame within. This is what ultimately creates films. Technical knowledge inevitably becomes dated; the ability to adapt to change will always be more important. At my utopian film academy there would be a vast loft with a boxing ring in one corner. Participants, working every day with a trainer, would learn to somersault, juggle and perform magic tricks. Whether you would be a filmmaker by the end I couldn't say, but at least you would emerge as a confident and fearless athlete. After this vigorous physical work, sit quietly and master as many languages as possible. The end result would be like the knights of old who knew how to ride a horse, wield a sword and play the lute.
_How do you keep your own flame burning?_
That's never been my problem, though one simple way is to avoid shooting in studios, which are by definition artificial places. The spontaneity necessary for the kind of cinema I want to create is easily extinguished in such sterile and controlled places. I just don't like the way they smell; I feel more comfortable waist-deep in a swamp. The green-screen shot at the end of _Invincible_ , with the boy flying up into the air, and the green-screen sequence in _Rescue Dawn_ of Christian Bale, as Dieter Dengler, in his cockpit are the only two moments I have ever shot in a studio. The opening sequence of _Bad Lieutenant_ – where we flooded an entire set – was shot in an empty warehouse rented out for film shoots. The production before us had been set in a prison and they hadn't yet dismantled everything, so I rushed over and asked if we could make use of a few pieces. The world of the studio rarely offers surprises to the director, in part because the only people you ever run into at such places are paid to be there; hardly anyone interesting ever shows up unexpectedly. There is no environment per se, only four solid walls and a roof. I have always functioned better out in the world, where a story that looked abstract on paper is finally able to engage with real life.
The other thing I'm fiercely opposed to is storyboards, the instruments of cowards who have no faith in their imagination and no confidence in their fantasies. I can see the need for them when it comes to a scene with special effects, but otherwise story boards turn everyone into marionettes of a pre-existing design. The only time I ever storyboarded a sequence was the crash in _Rescue Dawn_ , which was a single event filmed by three cameras that needed careful planning. That really is a big chunk of fuselage impacting onto a rice paddy, followed by a stunt man being propelled by a small explosion. Nothing digital was added. Walter Saxer, the driving force behind _Scream of Stone_ , insisted on preparing a series of storyboards for the more complex climbing sequences in that film, but I ignored them. You can't turn a mountain into a docile pet.
_Is there a pre-planned aesthetic behind your films?_
My dislike of perfectionists behind the camera – people who spend hours setting up a single shot – has been an eternal source of conflict with cameramen over the years. I once watched with great impatience as a world-famous cinematographer spent five hours lighting a scene that would have taken me five minutes. Peter Zeitlinger is always trying to sneak "beautiful" shots into our films, and I'm forever preventing it. Our friendship and respect for each other has grown because of this. On _Rescue Dawn_ he wanted to do radical colour correction by turning the jungle almost black and white until the blissful moment of Dieter's rescue, when full colour would blossom for the final minutes. That's a rather drastic example; Peter and I often differ in opinion, but we always resolve our differences within twenty seconds. Things are more problematic when there is a spectacular sunset on the horizon and he scrambles to set up the camera to film it. I immediately turn the tripod 180º in the other direction. Thankfully, when we were down in Antarctica making _Encounters at the End of the World_ , the sun was high in the sky twenty-four hours a day for months.
I need people who see and feel things as they are, not someone concerned with creating the most beautiful images possible. I don't give much thought to the composition of an image; I focus instead entirely on what that shot is about and how it fits into the overall story. Everything else is irrelevant. When it comes to working with cameramen, there are basic discussions about the general look of a film, but rarely about aesthetic details. I know how to articulate images on film without resorting to endless conversations about lighting or spending thousands on production design. I don't consciously reflect on aesthetics before making a film because, for me, the story always dictates such things. Of course, aesthetics do sometimes enter unconsciously through the back door, because whether we like it or not our preferences always somehow influence the decisions we make. If I were to think about my handwriting while writing an important letter, the words would become meaningless. When you write a passionate love letter and focus on making sure your longhand is as beautiful as possible, it isn't going to be much of a love letter. But if you concentrate on the words and emotions, your particular style of longhand – which has nothing to do with the letter per se – will somehow seep in of its own accord. Aesthetics, if they even exist, are to be discovered only once a film has been completed. I leave it to the philosophers to enlighten me about such things.
_I'm sure you can think of several examples in your films._
There are a small number of such moments of experimentation and stylisation, but these are isolated and specific images. Think of the tower and washerwoman from _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ , which I talked about earlier, or the clouds in the final shot of _My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done_ , which were digitally added, or certain shots in _Heart of Glass_ , where we placed an orange filter over the lens and slightly underexposed the image; then, during processing, we overexposed the film, which gave it Rembrandt-like colours. While working on _Heart of Glass_ , Schmidt-Reitwein and I studied the work of seventeenth-century French painter Georges de La Tour. I wanted to capture the same atmosphere you find in his canvases, and some of the interior sequences were filmed using only candlelight. During production on _Fitzcarraldo_ in the jungle there were only ten minutes every day when the sun was setting because we were so close to the equator, and sometimes we would wait for that perfect moment just before sunset when the light in the sky was exceptionally beautiful. Most of _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ was shot with a relatively wide-angle 24mm lens because I wanted the characters to be in focus amidst the extraordinary landscapes.
Perhaps the best example is the trance-like dream sequences in _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ , showing what looks like a newly discovered foreign world. One influence here was the experimental German filmmaker Klaus Wyborny, who I brought along when I went to the Spanish Sahara, where he shot Super 16 footage of the caravan in the desert. The finest of the dream sequences was shot by my brother Lucki when he was travelling in Burma as a nineteen-year-old. He filmed what he described as a strange and shaky pan across a wide valley full of grandiose temples. I thought it was very mysterious and absolutely tremendous, so I begged him to let me use it. I modified the image by projecting it onto a semitransparent screen from very close up, which made it the size of my palm, then filmed it with a 35mm camera from the other side, so you can clearly see the fabric of the screen. The image seems to flicker in and out of darkness because I purposely didn't synchronise the projector with the camera. I also changed the colours slightly in the lab. It's the same thing I did at the start of _Heart of Glass_ with the images of the waterfall I spoke about earlier and other landscape shots just after the opening credits.
_Light and darkness play an important role in_ Nosferatu.
That film is probably the one major exception to my lack of interest in aesthetics. I felt a certain respect had to be paid to the classical formulae of cinematic genres, in this case the vampire film. The opening shot of the bat was filmed with a camera running at several hundred frames a second, and the final image of the film is two combined shots: one of a beach in Holland, with strong winds and sand flying everywhere; the other of clouds filmed separately, in single exposures, which is why they move so fast. In post-production I flipped the shot of the clouds upside down and superimposed it on the top half of the screen so that they bulge down from a dark sky into the landscape. It gives the sequence a heavy sense of doom, as if evil were spreading out into the world from this one single point. Underneath we see Jonathan Harker – now a vampire himself – riding towards the horizon, ready to infect the landscape around him. It's a profoundly pessimistic image, and by doing it like this I can hardly deny I was attempting to create a specific stylised look for the shot. The landscapes of _Nosferatu_ , especially this one, are more mythical than geographically exact. There are no credits at the end of the film because, in some way, the story continues inside of all of us. The music is Gounod's _St Cecilia Mass_ , which gives an almost religious feeling to the whole thing. The cameraman Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein and I spent time discussing the placement of lights for various shots in _Nosferatu_ , but that was mainly because in the film the vampire has no reflection in mirrors, which meant we needed to create a number of carefully planned lighting effects, such as when the creature enters Lucy's attic bedroom while she is sitting in front of a mirror. The first shadow that appears on the back wall was cast not by Kinski, but by someone else wearing a cape, pointy ears and claws. Kinski was standing next to the camera, and only when it pans slightly to the right do we see his true shadow on the wall, then Kinski himself. It was a complex moment to orchestrate, done without technical tricks.
I worked with Schmidt-Reitwein on _Fata Morgana, Land of Silence and Darkness, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ and _Heart of Glass._ He has a strong feeling for darkness and contrast, threatening shadows and gloom, I suspect in part because he experienced prison and darkened dungeons himself. Just after the Berlin Wall went up he was caught smuggling his girlfriend out of the East and placed in solitary confinement for several months. At the time the East German regime insisted that the wall had been built as a protective barrier against the fascist intruders, though trading was still going on between the two countries. The East Germans sometimes took hostages under a petty pretext and would imprison people for years, waiting until some kind of exchange could take place. Schmidt-Reitwein had worked for a single week at the television station RIAS [ _Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor_ ] in Berlin, which was partially financed through the United States, so the East Germans insisted he was a CIA agent. He was swapped for a wagon full of butter after three years of imprisonment. I think this experience formed much of what the man is today; once these people emerge from under ground they see the world with different eyes.
For a while Schmidt-Reitwein and I shared an apartment in Munich and planned to establish something like a late-mediaeval guild, with workshops and apprentices. When one of the small film laboratories in Munich went bankrupt, we even contemplated buying it so we could strike our own prints. Thomas Mauch, who shot _Signs of Life, Aguirre_ and _Fitzcarraldo_ , is the cameraman I would go to when I needed something more physical and spontaneous, images with more innocent vitality to them. He has a phenomenal sense for the rhythm of what is unfolding before him. Sometimes there were difficult choices about which of these two fine cameramen to work with on particular films, but I think I made the right decisions over the years. If I had taken Schmidt-Reitwein to the jungle for _Fitzcarraldo_ , the camera would probably have been more static, and certain scenes would have been stylised, with more elaborate lighting.
_Do you ever plan shots before arriving on set?_
Some shots are formulated and blocked beforehand: for example, in _Invincible_ , when the strongman is dying in hospital and rises out of bed because he hears piano music. "My ears are ringing," he says. "Somebody must be thinking of me." The camera follows his gaze as he looks towards the window at his little brother, who gets out of his chair and pushes the curtain aside. Outside, through the window, we see his five-year-old sister looking at us. There is a shot near the end of _Signs of Life_ where the camera moves forward towards a window, and through it we see fireworks exploding in the sky. The whole thing was carefully planned.
But generally I function best in the unknown, and have an intuitive sense about where to put the camera and when to turn it on. Apart from what I see in my head, I usually plan nothing visually and have no advance plan of the specific shots required that day. I don't even touch the screenplay until the first day of shooting. I might go through it quickly to establish how many locations are needed, but constantly re-reading a script suffocates the life out of it. I prefer to keep things dormant, which means that when I pick up the screenplay on set – sometimes months after last looking at it – the material is as fresh for me as it is for everyone else, and I can rediscover the story again. It's like being thrown onto a distant island that no one has ever seen before and stepping onto the shore alongside a small group of survivors. I might be disorientated for a few moments, but I quickly set about exploring my surroundings with fresh eyes, determining exactly what needs to be done.
I work closely with the cameraman to determine where the camera should be, but usually only when we're on set. When it comes to these kinds of decisions, as I said, the important thing is to know your story and what the scene is about. In _Invincible_ there's a scene in the circus in which Zishe challenges the famous strongman. The person doing continuity kept asking, "How many shots are we going to do for this scene?" Eventually I looked at her and said, "At least one." I told her just to watch along with everyone else. "Let it develop. Let's see what they do and if it holds its suspense and substance." We ended up shooting four and a half minutes in a single shot; it was so good we needed only a couple of cutaways to trim it down. I explained what I wanted from the two actors, who were friends and knew each other from strongman competitions. At every moment they knew where each was leading the other and what the next move was going to be, so I let things develop naturally.
When I direct, I feel like a football coach who has given tactics to his team but knows how vital it is for the players to react to unexpected situations. Too much planning means things become stale. If a footballer worked out his every move in advance, he wouldn't be a very effective player. My approach to filming is that from the start I have a general sense of what I want, but allow the action to develop naturally without knowing precisely what camera angles and how many shots will be needed. If a scene develops differently from my original idea because of the actors or vagaries of the location, but does so without major deviation from the original story, I generally try to encompass those new elements. As a filmmaker you have to be open to opportunities, even actively encourage them. My cinema is killed stone dead without the outside world to react to. It's the same thing when I stage opera. As any theatre actor or singer will tell you, each individual performance has a life to it, and room has to be given to allow certain characteristics to emerge and develop, otherwise the vitality of the live performance dies.
There was a scene in _Aguirre_ I wanted to film near the rapids, but that day I was awoken at four in the morning to discover the river was about to flood. In a matter of hours the water had risen by ten or twelve feet. Our rafts were damaged and the set was under water. A location already established during shooting no longer existed. There was no more shore; it had disappeared. If _Aguirre_ had been a Hollywood production, this would all have been a major catastrophe, because it meant filming would grind to a halt. The crew would have stayed put, generating a massive bill, but nothing would be shot. I decided to find a more direct solution and immediately made the flood an integral part of the story by incorporating the high water into the script. I rewrote a scene where the conquistadors realise there is no way back for them, something that precipitates a row between Aguirre and Ursúa. There was no other way to overcome this obstacle to production. It had to be embraced and turned to our advantage, even acting as an accelerator on the film's narrative.
Filmmaking is a more vulnerable journey than other creative ventures. A sculptor has only a lump of rock to chisel away at, but filmmaking involves complex organisation, money, people, expensive equipment. There are so many intermediaries between an idea and its realisation, so many things that can go wrong. Problems will befall you at every turn. You can build a ship, cast five thousand extras, then plan a scene with your leading actors, but in the morning one of them might be ill and can't make it to the set. You might get the best shot of your life, but if the lab mixes the developing solution incorrectly or your hard drive crashes, the images are lost for ever. Your producers might insist there is enough money in the budget for something, but at the last minute an entire sequence has to be dropped. Everything is interwoven and interlinked, and if one element doesn't function properly, the whole venture is prone to damage or collapse. There is always the potential for a million catastrophes, even failure. People who moan about these kinds of things aren't suited to this line of business. It's the very nature of the medium. Your job is to overcome these problems, to cope with the mischievous realities that do everything they can to prevent you from completing your work, to think around corners and respond to unforeseen circumstances. You have to learn how to turn the forces of catastrophe in your favour. Filmmakers should be taught how to talk to a crew that's getting out of hand, how to negotiate with a bureaucrat so the right paperwork is signed, how to handle a producing partner who won't pay up or a distributor who won't advertise properly. Flexibility is the lifeblood of a filmmaker, and anyone unable to respond to whatever is being thrown won't get through their first day on the job. The film director has to be a lion tamer of the unexpected.
_Do you rehearse with actors?_
Only on set, never weeks beforehand in some bright, air-conditioned office in Santa Monica. The best dialogue is sometimes written on location to fit each actor's unique mannerisms and personal style of speech, as well as the physical conditions of the film set. After I hear the lines spoken, I might decide to alter them or ask how the actors would speak a particular sentence in their own words. If during this process the exact dialogue as written is modified, but the feel and spirit of the scene remains the same, I discard the original script pages. An actor might say his assigned lines and everyone cringes. In the _Rescue Dawn_ screenplay, when Dieter crawls out of the hut, Duane originally said something like, "God be with you, Dieter." I looked at Steve Zahn, who had turned purple. "I know what you're thinking, Steve," I said. "What would you say?" The line became "Good luck, Dieter." Actors should always have the liberty to bring real life into a scene. When writing a screenplay I'm conscious that things might change once we start shooting, and when I make a film I always keep things open, ready for an invasion of the unexpected.
Altering dialogue is always possible, but it has to be done within a clear framework; for me improvisation isn't an open door for the actor. Spontaneity can reveal things about characters – for example, when I worked with Bruno S. – but it's not as if I set up the camera, bring in the actors and say, "Let's improvise something." Sometimes I gave Kinski more space to manoeuvre than I would other actors, and on several occasions I figured it was better just to let him step out in front of the camera without any direction. The only thing I told him about the bell-tower sequence of _Fitzcarraldo_ before we shot it was that he had to be in complete ecstasy and fury, and shout down into the town that the church would be closed until he had constructed an opera house. Kinski himself didn't know exactly what he was going to say until the camera was rolling. At other times he needed precise guidance and restrictions, so I would physically block through the actions, reining him in where necessary. If anyone asked him about such things, of course, he would vehemently deny it, insisting he made every decision himself.
I knew I had to allow Nicolas Cage a certain freedom to add something extra to _Bad Lieutenant_ and let him be an architect of his own character. He has the keen sense of a member of a jazz quintet who takes off and improvises with great fluidity, but keeps within the melody and rhythm of the overall piece. In the scene where he intimidates the couple outside the bar, it was Nicolas's idea to fire a shot into the air. Much of the scene in which he interrogates the two women in the nursing home was ad-libbed; the old ladies were genuinely terrified. I threw out an old Bavarian saying to Nicolas – "Turn the hog loose!" – and stood there in amazement. We actually shot two versions, one with him harassing them with the gun and one without. I rarely want a second version of a scene, but had a feeling it was over the top. During editing it was immediately clear the first version with the gun was best. It became a truly extraordinary moment, establishing some kind of secret conspiracy between audiences and the film, as if we're being given the opportunity to laugh at things we have never before been allowed to enjoy. Nicolas and I had great confidence in each other; he knew I wanted him to go to unexplored limits. Sometimes he would start a scene with something in mind, but I don't think even he knew precisely what he was going to say until the moment the words came out.
_Do you ever talk to actors about "character motivation"?_
Jeremy Davies is a hugely gifted and dedicated actor who insisted on half starving himself in preparation for his role in _Rescue Dawn_. He was already very skinny, but decided he wanted to lose even more weight and seemed to eat nothing during filming; he only drank water. If he had half a line to say, he would ambush me in the hotel the night before with twenty-five pages of ideas and arguments about his character's motivations. "Jeremy," I said, "I'm too tired to read all this, and even if I weren't, I still wouldn't look at it. Just read the script and you will know everything you need to know. Tomorrow we do the scene. Tomorrow you will stand and deliver." He's deeply involved in all things cerebral and psychological, always wanting to discuss his character endlessly. If he had entered into this labyrinthine way of playing the part, we would never have finished the film. Occasionally I would show up on the set and frighten him by suggesting we shoot a totally different scene to the one he had prepared for. Thankfully, however, he's nothing like the conceited, vacuous actors that often emerge from certain theatrical traditions. Let it be said here that Lee Strasberg was a skunk. Marlon Brando would have done his best work regardless of time spent with him. Any kind of methodology when it comes to acting is an embarrassment.
There are no general rules about working with actors; everyone needs to be handled differently. I don't, as a rule, have precise instructions for performers and generally avoid showing them what I want by acting things out myself, but when I do it's usually to help set the tone. I listen to the rehearsal and might say, "It has to be softer, slower. Take your time." On _Aguirre_ I took Daniel Ades aside; he played Aguirre's henchman Perucho, who sings softly to himself just before he blows up the raft on the other side of the river, hangs Ursúa from a tree and cuts off the head of the soldier who is talking of deserting. Ades would put a melody into it, something like "La-la-LA-la-la," instead of "La-la-la-la-la." I told him not to sing. "Speak it, in only one level of pitch," I said. "It has to be dangerous and well timed. Do it in a single tone, like a telex machine rattling on in exactly the same monotone, and it will be much more menacing."
_Your early screenplays are written differently from the average script._
I don't usually slavishly fill page after page with dialogue; in my early scripts some key speeches are there, but no more than that. Rather than having dialogue on the page word for word, the script will describe in general terms what characters are saying. Some of my screenplays – like _Signs of Life_ and _Where the Green Ants Dream_ – have more dialogue than others, but my first few were written in prose form, full of detailed descriptions of action that include scene titles, like "Descent into the Urubamba Valley." I put down on paper only things seen and heard; rarely do you read about what these characters are thinking, something best left to a novel. Over the years I have been forced to write certain scripts because I was working with producers who wouldn't sign a contract unless I presented them with something in the form of a screenplay. I felt that if I had to write things down, then I should at least attempt something new with the form, so I've always tried to give my scripts a life independent from the resulting films. This is why my published screenplays appear without photos incorporated into the text, because I don't want to reference the films themselves. I have forever been trying to create a new genre of literature. Look at the opening lines of the _Cobra Verde_ script: "The light murderous, glaring, searing; the heavens birdless; the dogs lie dazed by the heat. Demented from anger, metallic insects sting glowing stones." These aren't literal images; they offer a certain mood to the reader. More than anything else it's about atmosphere, rhythm and conjuring up images in the mind. In no other professional screenplay will you find prose as you do in mine.
_Small film crews are best._
On _Rescue Dawn_ there were times when Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Peter Zeitlinger, the sound man and I would escape the rest of the crew and shoot a couple of scenes on our own. We had fourteen trucks full of personnel and equipment, constantly travelling down narrow jungle roads. It took them at least an hour to load everything and another half an hour just to turn around and drive to the next location, which meant I was sometimes able to grab a skeleton crew, jump into a van and rush over there before everyone else had even finished packing up. I wanted to work with this nucleus that I knew could take care of the essentials efficiently. By the time the trucks had arrived, we already had the scene in the can. I've never particularly enjoyed dealing with a clumsy apparatus like a big film crew. I can't stand having too many people on set; I find myself having to work around them. Sometimes you have to bypass certain things to stay dynamic, quick and lively, and get your work done.
There is a scene in Harmony Korine's film _Gummo_ where a picture is taken down off a wall and a cluster of cockroaches crawl out from behind it. Harmony told me that apart from the cameraman, every single member of the crew was absolutely disgusted and showed up on set the next day in hermetically sealed toxicwaste outfits to protect themselves from the filth. They arrived as if they were filming in a nuclear wasteland. Harmony immediately stripped down to his Speedos. Jean-Yves Escoffier, the cameraman, was equally upset and said, "Harmony, let's throw everyone out. It should just be me, you, the actors and one fucking light bulb." That's filmmaking to me. Nothing more than the essential. I can't stand this kind of larmoyant behaviour. Don't be such a wimp.
_In 1990 you made eight films for Austrian television called_ Film Lessons.
They offer hints about how my film school might be run. Every day at a fixed hour during the Vienna Film Festival – which I programmed in 1990 and 1991 – I invited a guest, including American magician Jeff Sheridan. I was fascinated by how he presented his magic and sleight of hand to audiences through his silent performances. Sometimes I think about becoming a magician myself, in direct physical contact with people in the street, playing out these little dramas with my bare hands. The trick to magic is diversion and misdirection, which are also the secrets of cinema. As a director you need to be able to push and pull the audience's attention in whatever direction the story demands, making sure everyone's eyes are focused on specific things at specific times. It's no coincidence that George Méliès, the great pioneer of early cinema, was a magician before he became a filmmaker. As Jeff said during his demonstration, the point of his job is to move beyond the logical and rational. Film might appear to be a representation of reality, but it's actually a complex illusion.
I recorded a discussion for _Film Lessons_ with Kamal Saiful Islam, a cosmologist from Bangladesh who worked at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, entitled "Fantastic Landscapes and the Algebraisation of Unthinkable Curves and Spaces." I projected details of landscapes in paintings by Segers, Grünewald, Rogier van der Weyden and da Vinci, with his _Madonna in the Grotto,_ where we see a mesmerising, ideal landscape in the distance, a bizarre flight of fancy that connects directly to our dreams. In the background of Altdorfer's _Battle of Alexander_ is an invented landscape of the mind, an island inhabited with cities, fields, harbours, ships, all teeming with life. These men were given precise orders by their patrons to paint particular religious motifs, but chose to venture far beyond. Their landscapes might be as small as my hand, but they are fantastical windows onto new worlds. I would love to publish a book of these miniature worlds of ecstasy and trance.
Kamal proved there are spaces unthinkable to our minds that can be conclusively proven algebraically; for example, a bottle with an interior but no exterior. We discussed the future directions cinema might move in, proving the existence of objects and images impossible for us to imagine today. It reminded me of what people must have thought during Columbus's time, when they were scared to travel to the other side of the earth because they were convinced they would hurtle down into empty space. Today every schoolchild can tell you why this isn't so, why the force of gravity keeps us grounded regardless of where we travel. One day a kind of cinema might be created that is as inconceivable to us today as basic gravitational physics was to contemporaries of Columbus.
It didn't matter that no more than a tiny handful of people in the audience in Vienna understood the imaginative and exotic mathematics being discussed. Kamal and I ranted and raved about questions that had intrigued me for a long time, like immovable positions within the universe. It isn't difficult to relate this to three-dimensional spaces. If you hang yourself by the neck in your attic and somebody finds your body dangling, what would this person need to do to fix you in a completely immobile position? Answer: one rope from your ankles down to the floor to prevent you from swinging and one from your belt to a wall to prevent you from spinning around your axis. I know the question isn't appropriate in a dynamic universe, but how many ropes are needed to fix yourself in a totally immovable position within the universe?
_Are there any "rules" when it comes to cinema and filmmaking?_
As a youngster, when I watched films I always asked myself questions. Why is Zorro dressed in black, which is normally the costume of the Bad Guy? Why do you never see chickens in westerns? In the final shoot-out, is the Good Guy shooting left to right or right to left? I quickly realised there is a certain grammar of filmmaking most directors adhere to. Imagine the hero of a western lying in bed, tucked under a thick eiderdown blanket. An impossibility! He sleeps next to the campfire under the open sky, with his saddle as a cushion and a crude blanket to keep warm. The only exception to this rule would be when he walks up the saloon staircase to the pretty singer's room, where a perfectly made bed is waiting for him. He lies down on the cover – never under it – crosses his legs and props his spurred boots on the brass bedrail. When the hero shows up he always appears out of nowhere, riding on horseback, and when he leaves he disappears into the landscape, moving anonymously towards the horizon. There's a vagueness about where he comes from and where he's heading. All these things point to some deep-rooted, inherent principles that have to do with nomadic versus sedentary life.
The big question is: what exactly does a cowboy eat? Whatever it is, he rarely consumes anything indoors. He is allowed a drink or two, but it absolutely must be a whisky that comes skidding along the saloon bar. Under no circumstances can it be orange juice, which is as much a no-no as eating noodles. Can you imagine a cowboy cooking spaghetti in a warm, comfortable kitchen? Forget it. It can only be beans and bacon, cooked in a pan on a crackling outdoor fire. Frying an egg would be a clear violation of the genre's iron laws, and coffee never has milk or sugar; it's always black and strong, swilled from a tin mug. These questions aren't as ridiculous as they sound. Try to discover the hidden mechanics behind such things and you'll discover countless other rules that apply to westerns and other genres.
_Your own lecture for_ Film Lessons _was entitled "Orientation in Film."_
For many families, when they sit down at the dinner table a natural seating arrangement automatically emerges. The same thing happens when going to the cinema; I feel comfortable only if I can seat myself slightly to the left of the centre of the screen, and if I'm sitting next to someone, they must be on my right. I feel cramped if I have to seat myself in a way that goes against my inner orientation.
"Orientation in Film" dealt with my own needs and interests, but also the unspoken requirements of audiences. The most obvious example is the invisible optical axis between two actors that the camera must never cross, otherwise – when cutting from one to the other – both actors would be looking in the same direction, instead of opposing each other on screen. This gets trickier if you have three people involved. A shot of a barman serving two guests is easy since the bar can serve as the axis, but what if there is no bar? A film like _Waterloo_ is a useful example to learn from, with its shots of three armies marching from three different directions towards the battlefield; we always know exactly who is who and from which direction they're coming. Much of _Aguirre_ deals with orientation; the small army moves with a clear purpose and sense of direction, but somewhere in the film it loses both, and by the end is going in circles. In the final shot all orientation is lost, and only a dizzying movement remains. The camera circles around the raft, which is more or less stationary, an image that reflects the story of a man who by this point has no hope of salvation. There were potential problems with _Aguirre_ because several scenes took place on rafts that were spinning in the water. If we weren't careful when shooting dialogue between characters – taking into account the invisible axis between them – the riverbank in the background would move from left to right in some shots and right to left in the reverse angle. To avoid confusion and keep audiences orientated, the camera pans from one character to the other rather than cutting from one to the next.
During the Second World War, Goebbels gave an order to all cameramen at the front: "The German soldier always attacks from left to right." That was it, no further explanation. Sure enough, if you look at old newsreels, the Germans always advance from the left to the right of the screen. There was some logic to this when Germany attacked Russia in the east, but what about the war against France? Even in newsreels of the invasion westwards into Europe, German forces are seen to attack from left to right. The question we need to ask ourselves is: why does the direction of their movement make soldiers look so victorious and optimistic? There must be something within us, some hidden law. The same could be said about how to show vast distances covered on film. I might have imagined it, but I remember a scene in Luis Buñuel's _Nazarín_ where Nazarín crosses Mexico on foot, walking a thousand miles with a cross over his shoulder. Buñuel used a mere three shots – each one not more than five seconds long – to give the audience a sense of the immense distance being covered. How does he manage to economise in this way? How does he compress weeks of walking into fifteen seconds? The trick is using the same set-up three times. The camera starts almost on the ground, pointing up to the sky, while the frame remains empty for a fraction of a second. Then the character steps into the image, and the camera twists and pans after him, watching him walk away into the distance. Five seconds of walking will do just fine. The whole process is repeated twice elsewhere and the three shots are cut together. We suddenly get the impression of Nazarín having walked a thousand miles. A remarkable phenomenon, how vast distances can be compressed by using an odd, twisted camera movement. I have no idea why it works, though I used the technique in _Heart of Glass_ for the scene at the start of the film where Hias descends from the mountain and walks into the valley below.
When it comes to orientation in film, my favourite example is Jean-Pierre Melville's _Le deuxième souffle_. There's a scene where a gangster is summoned to meet his rivals, and beforehand he secretly checks out the room where the encounter is going to take place. He tests the possible seating arrangements and notes where he would be pushed if threatened with a gun. The only logical place is up against a cupboard, so he stands in front of it and raises his hands, then decides to leave his gun on top of the cupboard, inches away from where his raised hand would almost certainly be. When he leaves the building he is spotted by one of the rival gangsters, who then goes up to the room to check out what this guy might have been doing up there. He walks into the room, situates himself in various positions, and finds the gun. All of a sudden orientation – and the potential configurations within the space – becomes vitally important.
_You established your own film school in 2010._
For years there has been a steady stream of young people who want to be my assistant or somehow learn from me; I seem to be a point of orientation for them. The number of people who send me things or ask for advice or a job is substantial, far more than those who get in touch with my much better known colleagues. A few years ago I spoke at a venue in London with a capacity of two and a half thousand. It sold out almost immediately, and there were still a thousand people waiting outside without tickets. There is clearly a hunger for an alternative way of doing things, of exploring avenues different from the brainless three-act structures of Hollywood storytelling. My Rogue Film School is an attempt to give a systematic response and deal with the amorphous avalanche coming at me. I have always been aware that making films is an enormous privilege, and feel I should pass on the knowledge acquired throughout my life.
I get a never-ending stream of requests from film schools to bring my Rogue seminars; buildings and facilities are offered, but I would rather head into an abandoned quarry in the Mojave desert or an open field in Ireland than link myself to an existing institution. There is no committee at Rogue to judge applications; I read every submission statement, view every film sent as part of the process and issue all invitations. I run the seminars single-handedly, and they take place sporadically – perhaps averaging one a year – over a long weekend in relatively out-of-the-way places. I assemble everyone in hotel conference rooms near Gatwick, Newark or in Koreatown in Los Angeles, instead of central London, Manhattan and Santa Monica, which would be prohibitively expensive for participants. Besides, too many people would be knocking at the door. I need only a room, a projector and fifty chairs. I could do Rogue anywhere.
_What do you teach?_
Nothing in particular. I don't hold myself up as Moses on the mountain, proclaiming the commandments. More than anything, my relationship to those who attend Rogue is like the late-mediaeval master carpenters or stone-cutters who surrounded themselves with apprentices. All I can usefully talk about is how I do my own work, and perhaps nudge participants in certain directions, helping them overcome their problems.
_What does it mean to "go Rogue"?_
The Rogue Film School is a provocation. It's about a way of life, about being bold enough to have the endurance to seize hold of your vision and the excitement that makes film possible, about giving courage to your dreams. It isn't about the technical things you need to know; for that, apply to your local film school. And it isn't for the faint-hearted. Rogue is for those with a fire burning within. It appeals to those with a sense of poetry willing to learn about lock picking and forging shooting permits, and who can tell a story to a four-year-old child and hold their attention. At one session a participant revealed himself to have worked in the wrestling business and gave us a wonderful line from former wrestler and governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura, which serves as a perfect dictum for the Rogue Film School: "Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat." When the system doesn't respond, when it doesn't accept what you're doing – and most of the time it won't – you have to become self-reliant and create your own system. There will always be periods of solitude and loneliness, but you must have the courage to follow your own path. Cleverness on the terrain is the most important trait of a filmmaker.
Always take the initiative. There is nothing wrong with spending a night in a jail cell if it means getting the shot you need. Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey. Beware of the cliché. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief. Learn to live with your mistakes. Study the law and scrutinise contracts. Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern. Keep your eyes open. That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it. There is never an excuse not to finish a film. Carry bolt cutters everywhere. Thwart institutional cowardice. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Take your fate into your own hands. Don't preach on deaf ears. Learn to read the inner essence of a landscape. Ignite the fire within and explore unknown territory. Walk straight ahead, never detour. Learn on the job. Manoeuvre and mislead, but always deliver. Don't be fearful of rejection. Develop your own voice. Day one is the point of no return. Know how to act alone and in a group. Guard your time carefully. A badge of honour is to fail a film-theory class. Chance is the lifeblood of cinema. Guerrilla tactics are best. Take revenge if need be. Get used to the bear behind you. Form clandestine Rogue cells everywhere.
_Revenge?_
Sometimes you need to respond creatively to the more obnoxious people who stand between you and your work. Although I would never encourage anyone, in a published book or elsewhere, to break the law, it must be acknowledged that a certain amount of criminal energy can be useful. My weapon of choice is butyric acid, which is unbelievably pungent. Spray it into the car of an enemy and he won't want to drive it for two years. Ask a bold chemistry student to provide you with some.
_Why is forgery a skill useful to the film director?_
During production of _Fitzcarraldo_ , soldiers were constantly denying us access to places, insisting we weren't permitted to proceed. I went to Lima and bought some old-fashioned notary paper of exceptional quality, and with great care set about piecing together an expert forgery, an extravagant four-page document full of wonderfully antiquated Spanish and covered in a series of beautiful watermarks and seals. It gave me permission to move about the country, to places I wouldn't otherwise have been able to go, areas swarming with military installations. The document was signed by the secretary of state and even the president of the republic himself, the supreme commander of the armed forces Fernando Belaúnde. We needed an ornate stamp so that the whole thing looked authentic. I used an impressive one in German that said something like, "To acquire the reproduction rights of this photo contact the author," something I knew nobody out there in the jungle would be able to decipher. This particular document, this fabrication, which did no harm to anyone, opened many doors for me. We constantly needed to navigate upriver through militarily controlled areas. When I showed the document en route to various officers and they saw _El Presidente_ 's signature, everyone immediately saluted and stepped aside. _Fitzcarraldo_ couldn't have been made without it.
Be prepared. Study how to forge a document. Carry a silver coin or medal with you at all times; if you put it under a piece of paper and make a rubbing, you can create a kind of "seal." Top that with a bold signature and you have something that looks official. There are plenty of obstacles in filmmaking, but the worst is bureaucracy. Find your own way to battle that particular menace; you have to learn to neutralise and outsmart the rampant red tape and corruption of the world. Bureaucracy loves nothing more than paper, so keep feeding the machine. It will chew on those pages until it's quiet. A grotesque forgery pleases bureaucrats like nothing else if it appears on impressive-looking paper.
_Lock picking?_
Definitely a crucial skill, requiring sensitivity and patience, as Philippe Petit revealed during his _Film Lessons_ presentation, when he showed how to pick a pin tumbler lock and escape from handcuffs. Imagine you need to get a shot of a street but a truck is blocking your view. During the filming of _Stroszek_ in Wisconsin a truck stopped right in front of the camera, so I asked the driver if he would move it. "No way!" he said, and went for lunch. Without him noticing I moved the truck a couple of hundred feet away, got the shots we needed, then drove it back to the exact same spot an hour later. Perhaps one day you'll be forced to break into your home or office because your production manager is on the other side of the world with the keys in his pocket.
Filmmaking requires a certain attitude. Liberties have to be taken now and then, and occasionally we have to step beyond the strictures of the law. Philippe Petit is the only person ever to walk on a tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a distance of two hundred feet, more than four hundred metres up. In Vienna we spoke of the years of planning and organisation required, about how he carried a ton of equipment to the top of the towers, of the documents and ID cards he forged in order to complete his task, about how he played the role of a homeless man, then a French journalist who was writing an article about the construction of the World Trade Center, and how to deflect suspicion and ensure that the authorities are looking the other way when you need them to. He talked about evading security guards when he was setting up the equipment he needed to make the walk from one tower to the other. He and a co-conspirator were about to be busted, so he started pushing his colleague aggressively, shouting things like, "You're doing a lousy job! What's the matter with you? I told you Tuesday, not Wednesday!" The two of them stormed off and the guard didn't dare say anything. No one wants to interfere with a man in the middle of a fight. Philippe pointed out that the opposite also works, that people won't bother you when you're laughing your heart out.
A participant at one Rogue session was a former hostage negotiator; he'll surely make a fine filmmaker. Another told us the story of a film he was making in Portugal about street kids. He had been filming for weeks with a group and got release forms signed by every child and parent but one. Once the film had been edited, he spent months tracking down this last kid whose signature was missing; the production company and television station insisted on it. The filmmaker never found the boy and had to cut him from the film. I assure you that if I had been involved, I would have grabbed a pen myself and solved this particular problem in no more than ten seconds. Release forms are a subtle form of censorship, which has shifted away from governments, production companies and television stations towards issues of insurance, risk aversion and fear of being sued. Errors and Omissions is the high priest at the altar of bureaucracy. That said, it can never be permissible to forge a signature if it incriminates anyone or puts them in jeopardy.
The original plan for _My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done_ was to film the flashback sequences in northern Pakistan, but it was too dangerous to take an American production there. We decided on Kashgar in western China instead, which had been an important intersection on the ancient Silk Road. The cattle market, where we filmed, is a vast, open space full of hundreds of people who look exactly as they did a thousand years ago. Obtaining a shooting permit was next to impossible, so actor Michael Shannon and I pretended to be tourists. The place was volatile, swarming with police and Chinese military; a few weeks later the Uighur uprising took place and several hundred people lost their lives. We were particularly conspicuous because Michael – who is six foot three inches tall – had a small video camera mounted on a protruding wooden arm strapped to his chest, which pointed directly at his face. I moved ahead of him, leading us into the densest crowds I could find, where the throng was thickest; everyone who saw us stared directly into the lens. We ended up near a line of twenty policemen. I had no idea if they were going to challenge us, so to pre-empt any trouble I walked directly towards them. In such situations a single policeman will stop you, but a crowd hardly ever does; everyone thinks someone else will take charge. Not making eye contact and mumbling to myself, I said, " _Hast du Harty gesehen_?" ["Have you seen Harty?"], and we walked straight past them. With airport customs officials I use another technique. I stride towards them with my gaze fixed in the distance, as if I've spotted a friend waiting for me. Very occasionally it works.
About halfway through shooting _Aguirre_ , it looked as though everything we filmed had been lost in transit to the laboratory in Mexico, where the exposed negative was to be processed. The plan was for everything to be transported to Lima, and from there to Mexico City. Our only form of communication with the lab was a telex machine, but they insisted no negative had been received. Only my brother Lucki and I knew that everything might be irretrievably lost; we told none of the actors or crew because they would have instantly freaked out. We knew it was an absurdity to continue shooting because we had no insurance, so there was no choice but to muster our nerve and carry on with our work. I thought perhaps the lab had accidentally destroyed everything, but had a hunch there was a problem with the shipping company in Lima. They insisted the material had been sent to Mexico, so I asked Lucki to head down there and told him to enter their offices, if necessary by force. He eventually scaled a high fence and found all the footage thrown away, scattered inside the sealed-off customs area at Lima airport, baking in the scorching sun. The shipping agency had bribed various airport employees to stamp the documents, which "proved" our negative had left the country. Apparently it was too much trouble to actually send the material. Lucki grabbed everything and took it to Mexico City himself. So I tell you all now: whenever you have to, Jump the Fence. And if you can't do that, barbed wire is easy enough to get through; just set about it with wire cutters. Razor wire is something else. Find a mattress to cover it before making the leap.
_What films do you screen at Rogue?_
Who said anything about watching films? I tell the Rogues to read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it. If you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker. Our civilisation is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.
I give the Rogues a mandatory reading list that has nothing to do with cinema. I tell them to read Virgil, Hemingway, the _Codex Regius_ and Rabelais' _Gargantua and Pantagruel_ , which is wonderfully debased, wild storytelling. I recommend the Warren Commission Report, the official government account of President Kennedy's assassination, an extraordinary crime story with tremendous narrative power and phenomenal, conclusive logic, one of those books that make you rush back home just so you can continue reading. I also suggest a book I discovered fairly recently: J. A. Baker's _The Peregrine_ , first published in 1967, at a time when peregrine falcons were on the brink of extinction in Britain because of the prevalence of pesticides. There were very few pairs of healthy breeding peregrines left because so many had been poisoned. The intensity and precision of observation in Baker's book is startling; it's a text of great beauty. Humans hardly feature at all. Instead, he writes with delirium about the magnificence of the falcon and how it hunts, filling the book with ecstatic descriptions of the peregrine swooping down from the sky. Baker almost becomes a bird himself; it's like a religious transubstantiation. His fervent fascination, inner involvement and enthusiasm with the natural world, and the way he sees things around him so intensely – truly capturing the essence of a single brief event in such minute detail – are wondrous. It's the same attitude required of filmmakers, who need to discover and seize upon the intensity within.
There are a few films I ask Rogue participants to watch before they arrive, including _Casablanca, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre_ and _America, America_ , all examples of great Hollywood storytelling. I also recommend Pontecorvo's _The Battle of Algiers_ , which I admire because of the acting, and Elia Kazan's impeccable _Viva Zapata!_. In no other film have I seen such a powerful introduction of the leading character, played by Marlon Brando. At Rogue I talk about how the ending of a story is just as important as the beginning. Consider how – after sitting for two hours in the darkness staring at the screen – your audience is catapulted back out into a world full of sunshine, noise and traffic. How do you create something that will linger in their souls and not immediately dissipate? Think about the dancing chicken in _Stroszek_ , which people never forget, even if they have no memory of anything else in the film.
_You discuss things at Rogue that have nothing to do with cinema per se._
I encourage the Rogues to study languages, including Latin, which means to understand the genesis of our culture and the Western world. I read them "The Catalogue of Dwarfs" from the Icelandic _Poetic Edda_ , an extraordinary collection of Old Norse poems compiled in the fourteenth century and probably handed down, in the oral tradition, a thousand years earlier. Rogue is about making clear the significance of the word just as much as the image.
Out of idle curiosity I have explored things like the mathematical proposition known as Zorn's lemma. I'm fascinated by the rules, paradoxes and structures that exist in numbers, but which few people can see. I've spent a lot of time thinking about things like the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved question in mathematics, which deals with the distribution of prime numbers. At Rogue I talk about the work of the brilliant polyglot British architect Michael Ventris, who in the early fifties deciphered Linear B, a script dating back to something like 1450 BC that was found on hundreds of clay tablets. The intellectual ingenuity, experimentation and guesswork that Ventris exercised in determining that Linear B must be an archaic form of Greek was astonishing. He created a series of complex logical grids, similar to those used to encrypt codes during the war, and assigned each of the eighty-seven signs found on the tablets with a phonetic value, making clear that the script is syllabic, not composed of ideograms. An entire culture and civilisation opened up to us thanks to Ventris – only in his late twenties at the time – though unfortunately the tablets deal with tedious bureaucracy and bookkeeping; none of them contain poetry, history or anything particularly interesting. We have inventories of who owed how much to whom; there are mentions of wool, livestock, spices, perfumes and weapons, the kind of work slaves did and how the Mycenaean military was organised, including chariot formations. Regardless, Ventris's work remains a phenomenal achievement of the human intellect. It's the kind of exploration I have always enjoyed engaging with. I wonder if he would have been able to decipher the example of Angelyne, who thirty years ago put photos of herself – with her endless facelifts and breast enhancements – on billboards across Los Angeles. Little is known about this woman because she had no profession as such. She wasn't a singer or a model or a film star; she was just Angelyne. In most cases fame and popularity stem from actually having done something – like being a mass murderer or a television chef or a footballer or a politician – but in Angelyne's case her prominence came from the fact that her image suddenly appeared around the city. It's unlikely any Rogue Film School participants would ever want to find out more about Michael Ventris, but that's not the point. He understood how to read the signs, something every filmmaker has to be able to do. If you don't keep yourself open to these kinds of fascinations, you will never be a filmmaker.
The only criterion I use when selecting books for the mandatory reading list of Rogue is that they are titles I like to read myself. Everyone ultimately has to create their own list and discover their own intellectual curiosities to dig into, their own Linear B. What distinguishes us from the cows in the field is an inherent human desire to understand the world around us. It doesn't matter that many of my interests have never been translated directly into my film work. Everything that simmers inside of me eventually finds its expression somehow, somewhere.
_You have spoken about being able to establish an instant rapport._
Filmmaking is about creating immediate and profound connections with people. I have a rather biblical-sounding axiom for you: to be a filmmaker you need to know the heart of men.
In Bodhgaya, when we were making _Wheel of Time_ , I saw a monk sitting by himself, surrounded by four hundred thousand pillows, in an enclosed area where not long before had been that many people. It was a beautiful image, something like a metaphor for the concept of nothingness. I was astounded by the seriousness of this one person still praying after so many hundreds of thousands had moved on. My instinct was to leave him in peace. I caught his eye from a hundred feet away and glanced down at our camera; it was a silent way of asking him if we could film. He nodded his permission with a slight, almost imperceptible gesture. He had such a glow that I wouldn't have done any filming around him had he not agreed to it. Ultimately his dignity was untouched by the camera, and the image of him sitting alone, sunk in prayer, is one of the most significant I have ever captured.
I filmed with Dr Franc Fallico, Alaska's chief medical examiner, for _Grizzly Man_. He was the coroner who performed autopsies on Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard. I could tell he was a thoughtful man, so I said, "Today, in front of this camera, you aren't Dr Franc Fallico. We aren't in court now and I don't want you to be matter-of-fact about this. I want to know how you felt when you saw their remains. Twenty-eight pounds of Treadwell, twenty-two of Huguenard found out there in the field, and the rest of both in the stomach of a bear. I want to talk to a human being, not a coroner." He looked at me, said, "I understand what you mean," and proceeded to give a remarkable and touching performance, which is in the film.
One of the first things I did when I set about making _The Wild Blue Yonder_ was meet with astronauts from the 1989 spaceshuttle mission. We found ourselves in a large, empty room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, them in a semicircle of chairs and me sitting opposite. For a minute I didn't know what to say, and an embarrassed silence hung in the air. Spontaneously I turned to Michael McCulley and said, "As a child in the mountains of Bavaria I learnt to milk cows with my hands. Ever since then I have been able to recognise someone who knows how to milk a cow." I looked him in the eye, pointed to him and said, "You, sir!" He slapped his thigh, made the gesture of milking a cow and exclaimed, "Yes! I grew up on a farm in Tennessee!" The ice was broken. I can tell from fifty feet away whether someone knows how to tug on an udder.
In Antarctica, during the filming of _Encounters at the End of the World_ , I spoke with David Ainley, who had been studying penguins for twenty years. By the time I met him he didn't care much for conversations with human beings and wasn't giving anything away. I set up the camera and microphone very meticulously, procrastinating as much as possible, because I wanted to take time to warm him up and establish a rapport before we started filming. I needed more than just a muffled grunt in response to my questions, so I asked if there were any documented cases of homosexuality in penguins. That got him going. He spoke about seeing a triangular penguin relationship, a case of prostitution involving one female and two males. Then I asked if there was such a thing as derangement among penguins. He told me he had never seen one of the animals banging its head against a rock, though sometimes the creatures become disorientated and end up a long way from the ocean. Who else had ever asked him such questions? He could see there was somebody sitting opposite with an imagination. I hadn't read a single book about penguins, but I had done some unusual thinking on the subject.
A few years later, during production on _Into the Abyss_ , I had only a few minutes with Reverend Richard Lopez, the death-house chaplain, whose job is to be with prisoners in the moments before and during their execution. He immediately tapped his wristwatch, saying, "I have to be in the death house in forty minutes to assist with an execution." I had ten seconds to introduce myself before placing him in front of the camera and filming him. He immediately started speaking like a phoney, superficial television preacher, about a merciful and forgiving God, about redemption for everyone and paradise awaiting us all, about the beauty of Creation. Then he mentioned how much he loves being alone on the golf course in the morning, and how he switches off his cellphone so he can listen to the sounds of nature. He wanted to experience the dew-covered early-morning grass and watch the squirrels and deer running about and a horse looking at him with big eyes. I sensed our conversation was moving in the wrong direction, that I had to put an end to these platitudes, so I stopped him and asked something that nobody else on God's wide earth would have. From behind the camera, with a cheerful voice, I said, quite spontaneously, "Tell me about an encounter with a squirrel." Immediately, within twenty seconds, he began to unravel and completely came apart. He was so shaken to his core that he started to weep, talking about the bad choices and mistakes of the many people with whom he had been during the last moments of their life. Although he was able to stop his golf cart before it ran over a squirrel, he couldn't halt the inexorable procedures of an execution. I don't know why I asked him about the squirrel; I only knew I had to crack him open. In such situations the film director has to put aside everything that is explicitly professional and rally every ounce of humanity from within.
My job as a filmmaker is to look into the deepest recesses of the soul. When it comes to such things, I have acquired the required vision thanks to certain essential experiences. What is it like to be imprisoned? To go hungry? To raise children? To be stranded alone in the desert? To face genuine danger? To walk a thousand miles? To handle a Kalashnikov? To keep a group of youngsters entertained? To be astounded by poetry? Much of what we do as filmmakers is inexplicable, but the groundwork is done without a camera and the barrier it creates. Give me the name of the film school that teaches such things.
_Do you offer Rogue participants any general advice?_
A few things come up again and again during our sessions.
When it comes to organising your set, it's important to maintain close physical contact with your crew at all times. There are often a dozen people hanging around, talking on their phones, paying no attention. I insist that all non-essential conversations take place far from the camera and actors, which means no walkie-talkies within a hundred feet of my set and no cellphones within three hundred feet. Once people realise they have to step away from the centre of activity to make a phone call, they inevitably decide most conversations aren't that important. During heart surgery nobody is standing on the periphery talking on the phone; everyone is present and paying close attention, or at a distance doing something else. Absolute concentration, quiet and focus are required from everyone, at every moment, on my set. The only way for someone to respond to unexpected things is to be completely aware of what everyone else is doing. The cameraman has to listen to what's going on around him before making his move; being able to attune his ears to his surroundings is as important as seeing what's happening. A dolly movement is often triggered by a line of dialogue, but I've seen a dolly operator move too early because he wasn't listening carefully enough. One way of creating this climate of absolute professionalism on day one, and making it clear to everyone how your set is going to function, is to start filming within ninety minutes of everyone arriving, no matter what. Roll the camera even if the gaffer is still in shot; he'll realise fast enough that he needs to get out of there. Your attitude should always be as if you have only two days to make the entire film. Think of Roger Corman, who wouldn't spend much more time than that shooting an entire feature.
During the shooting of a non-fiction film, don't show footage to anyone you have been filming with because they often become self-conscious and complain about how they look. My response to these requests is simple: I tell them I might throw the entire thing out or use just 10 per cent of what we recorded, so it would only be confusing and disappointing for them to look at it now. "Just leave me in peace and thank God you don't have to wrestle with this material. That's my job."
Within every film is some sort of unique inner timing that must be discovered and respected. What's important to understand is that this can never be established retrospectively while editing, only during shooting. You might be able to alter a film's pace during editing, but never its fundamental rhythm. Never delegate decisions down the line to post-production that should be handled on set during filming; by that point many problems can never be adequately resolved. Bad acting, to give the most obvious example, can never be fixed.
There is often a separate, parallel story playing out in the hearts and minds of everyone watching your film, which means an audience will collectively anticipate certain things and race ahead of the actual narrative building on screen. With a romantic comedy we intuitively jump to the end of story and hope that the lovers will overcome all obstacles and find each other. You have to pay attention to these parallel stories; if you don't understand and develop a sense for them, you'll never grasp the essence of storytelling for cinema. It's the same thing as the inaudible overtones beyond a musical chord. We don't necessarily hear them, but if you aren't able to listen, you'll never fully understand that chord.
One final thing. I carry two texts when I am about to embark on a film I know will give me trouble: Luther's translation of the Bible and Livy's account of the Second Punic War. The Book of Job acts as consolation, Livy gives me courage. His book is a description of Carthage's war against Rome, a war that Rome almost didn't survive. Livy tells the story of two of my favourite historical figures: Hannibal and Fabius Maximus. Hannibal was a leader of extraordinarily bold designs, moving across the Alps with his army and elephants trained for battle. But Maximus is an equally fascinating character, someone who refused to do battle against Hannibal's armies, and because of this was considered a hesitant coward. Why did he act in this way? To save Rome. He knew that after the two most catastrophic disasters Rome had ever endured – the defeats at Cannae and Lake Trasimene – another open-field battle against Hannibal would mean the end of the republic. Fabius Maximus waged a war of attrition instead, attacking stragglers in the rearguard, devastating Hannibal's supply lines and luring him into places where there was nothing for his army to eat. There is a striking passage in the book where Hannibal, who has been leading campaigns in Italy for years, learns that his brother Hasdrusbal's supply fleet has been destroyed off the coast of Sicily. Hannibal knows he has been cut off from his ships, and after a long moment of silence utters the phrase "I know the destiny of Carthage." That was his only response to the situation. He knew Carthage was lost and would be destroyed, inevitably disappearing into the abyss of history.
Although he was vilified and derided by Roman historiography, called a coward and dubbed _Cunctator_ , the delayer, the cowardly hesitant one, Maximus' far-sighted tactics are why he is the greatest among the leaders of his era. He defeated Hannibal and saved Rome not by demonstrating the kind of brainless bravery shown by his predecessors – men who lost decisive battles – but by following a different path. We owe him a great debt. If Hannibal had prevailed, today we would all be living in a very different culture; the world around us would be Phoenician and North African. Maximus is one of my idols, someone who followed a vision no matter what anyone thought of him, who refused to align himself to pre-existing traditions. When the boat was slipping back in the mud during the shooting of _Fitzcarraldo_ , Fabius Maximus had a hand on my shoulder.
There is often great frustration in this work. I say this not to discourage anyone; it's just a way of life. One way to get through it is sheer discipline. This isn't about physical discipline, rather a certain psychological state. Plough on no matter how many spectacular humiliations and undignified defeats you suffer. Under normal circumstances, when a human being leaps into an abyss, he shrinks back. But when a ski jumper takes off, he leans forward, head first, into the void. If he doesn't, he rotates backwards. A downhill racer might be able to brake if he needs to, but when a jumper starts down that ramp, nothing can stop him. The same could be said of filmmaking. Learn to overcome your fears and shepherd your project to completion, no matter what. It's the essential moments of struggle over the decades that I have learnt from and which have brought to me this point. When I think back to my earliest years in this business, I see I am nothing today but a product of my defeats. When I was burnt I learnt about heat, and when I was belittled I learnt about power structures. Instead of going to film school, for me it became a process of trial and error, and for the first few years it was mostly error.
Writers and filmmakers are all alone; there is usually no one to help you, so just get off your ass and start walking. When you make a film or write a book and roll it out to audiences, be prepared to deal with either kicks to the stomach and slaps to the face or complete indifference. Most of the time no one cares about what you're doing, except you. A filmmaker's existence is different from that of a train conductor or bank teller. You have made certain choices about your life, which means you need to learn to overcome the despair and loneliness. Stay focused, quiet and professional at all times. Face what comes at you. You can never be irresolute, not for a single second. Plant yourself into the ground and move for no one. Make films only if there is a natural urge within. Switch off your Internet connection and get to work.
_Has it been easy to finance your more recent films?_
A natural component of filmmaking is the struggle to find money. It has been an uphill battle my entire working life. People think it's easy for me to finance my films these days, but the basis of operations is continually shrinking when it comes to distributing the kind of work I produce. Raising money might be even tougher today than it ever has been, certainly when it comes to feature films, and audiences seem to be getting smaller and smaller. But this is all unimportant. Fifty years ago, when I walked out of the office of those pompous producers and established my own production company, I knew I would never shoot a single frame of film if I continued wasting my time with such people. If you want to make a film, go make it. I can't tell you the number of times I have started shooting a film knowing I didn't have the money to finish it. I meet people everywhere who complain about money; it's the ingrained nature of too many filmmakers. But it should be clear to everyone that money has always had certain explicit qualities: it's stupid and cowardly, slow and unimaginative. The circumstances of funding never just appear; you have to create them yourself, then manipulate them for your own ends. This is the very nature and daily toil of filmmaking. If your project has real substance, ultimately the money will follow you like a common cur in the street with its tail between its legs. There is a German proverb: " _Der Teufel scheisst immer auf den grössten Haufen_ " ["The Devil always shits on the biggest heap"]. So start heaping and have faith. Every time you make a film you should be prepared to descend into Hell and wrestle it from the claws of the Devil himself. Prepare yourself: there is never a day without a sucker punch. At the same time, be pragmatic and learn how to develop an understanding of when to abandon an idea. Follow your dreams no matter what, but reconsider if they can't be realised in certain situations. A project can become a cul-de-sac and your life might slip through your fingers in pursuit of something that can never be realised. Know when to walk away.
Many years ago I decided I wanted to publish my screenplays and prose texts, so I approached a respected German publishing house. When they turned me down, I immediately realised there was no point spending time sending out letters to other publishers asking the same question. I set up my own publishing house, Skellig, and issued _Heart of Glass_ and two volumes of screenplays. I printed a few thousand copies of each, and whenever I was invited to talk at a cinema would load a couple of hundred copies into my car so they could be sold at the box office. They cost something like $3 each to produce and I sold them for $4, so I even made a small profit. If another publishing house had produced the book and sold it in a store, it would have cost eight times as much, but I had no need of advertising and a complex system of distribution, the things that make books expensive. The technical costs of printing have always been minimal. Once it was clear how successful the books were, Carl Hanser Verlag in Munich asked if they could continue publishing the texts. I agreed, but insisted the cover had to be exactly the same as the Skellig editions – a simple design of orange lettering on a black background above a monochrome photograph – and no film stills inside.
_Have your films made money for you?_
I don't function in the way traditional film producers do. From the very beginning I have taken a long-range view of things, always looking beyond everyday financial arrangements. Short-term survival was never my plan. For years in Germany I worked in a vacuum with few financial returns. When _Aguirre_ was screened on television the same day it was released in cinemas, and in both cases did badly, I asked myself, "How can I survive this disaster? How can I continue working in this way?" Though I still carry these questions with me, I have always had faith in my films and the belief that one day they would be seen and enjoyed. Perseverance has kept me going over the years. Things rarely happen overnight. Filmmakers should be prepared for many years of hard work. The sheer toil can be healthy and exhilarating.
Although for many years I lived hand to mouth – sometimes in semi-poverty – I have lived like a rich man ever since I started making films. Throughout my life I have been able to do what I truly love, which is more valuable than any cash you could throw at me. At a time when friends were establishing themselves by getting university degrees, going into business, building careers and buying houses, I was making films, investing everything back into my work. Money lost, film gained. Today I can earn money on films I made forty years ago by releasing them on DVD and screening them on television and at retrospectives. At an early age I understood the key to this business is being your own producer. I never thought twice about taking a salary for writing and directing when I first started out. I worked out of my small apartment, with my brother and wife as close collaborators. We cobbled money together from revenues of previous films, subsidies and pre-sales, and used it for only the bare essentials, like travel costs, raw stock, lab fees and costumes. You could see every penny up there on the screen.
In the early days I made a living, but only just. I lived with very few possessions, most of which were the tools of my trade: an Arriflex camera, a car, a typewriter, a flatbed editing machine, a Nagra tape recorder. My material needs have always been limited. So long as I have a roof over my head, something to read and something to eat, all is fine. I own one pair of shoes, a single suit, and once I finish a book I pass it on to a friend. I'm just a man from the mountains who isn't very interested in owning things. I've been driving the same car for nearly twenty years, and have to hand-crank the window and lock each door individually. A few years ago I closed down the small Werner Herzog Filmproduktion office I maintained in Munich, and around the same time my brother Lucki started methodically collecting all the audio tracks, negatives, scripts and paperwork of my work, going back to the sixties, which we gave to the Deutsche Kinemathek Museum für Film und Fernsehen in Berlin. The plan is to establish a non-profit foundation, at which point I'll no longer even own my own films. Even if I went broke, I wouldn't be able to sell anything to the highest bidder. What makes me rich is that I am welcomed almost everywhere. I can show up with my films and am offered hospitality, something you could never achieve with money alone. You saw how that stranger insisted on paying the bill for our lunch yesterday. "Thank you for _Woyzeck_ ," he said. For years I have struggled harder than you can imagine for true liberty, and today am privileged in the way the boss of a huge corporation never will be. Hardly anyone in my profession is as free as I am.
_Have you always made films for audiences rather than for yourself?_
In making _Aguirre_ I purposely set out to create a commercial film for a wide audience, even if the end result was as personal as anything I had done before. The art-house circuit was a lifeline for me during my early years of filmmaking, but I never felt I belonged there, and _Aguirre_ was always intended for the general public. If I could have been guaranteed an audience for _Aguirre_ , perhaps I would have made it differently, rougher and less genre-orientated. As it is, the film is probably easier to follow than my previous work. The sequence of action is less subtle than in _Signs of Life_ and there's a clear line of demarcation between good and bad, like in classic westerns, so the audience can choose which side they want to root for. At the time the film drew a lot of criticism from my peers, which I can still hear ringing in my ears. From a perspective of forty years it's extraordinary to think that _Aguirre_ was considered a commercial sell-out, as if I had sold my soul to the Devil. People close to me turned away. "He's gone commercial," they said. It was the worst of all sins.
I never set out to make cloudy and complicated films. Every one has been born out of my deepest interests and beliefs, but at the same time every one – from the smallest television documentary to _Bad Lieutenant_ , which stars some of the biggest names in Hollywood – was made for the largest possible audience. I don't have much of an idea about what audiences want because I'm so out of touch with contemporary trends and culture, but when asked I'll always customise a film to fit the television schedule; it's always been a necessary part of the process. In some cases, like _Little Dieter Needs to Fly_ , I had to deliver a film of exactly fortyfour minutes and thirty seconds, and decided to produce a featurelength version at the same time, which is over eighty minutes. Most people saw the film in its truncated form. I didn't mind changing the title of the television version to _Escape from Laos_ because it's essentially a different film. This was all on my mind while we were making the film, which we shot simultaneously in English and German. _The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner_ was originally an hour long, but the television executives asked me to cut it down to exactly forty-four minutes and ten seconds so it would fit in their schedule. I never felt I was compromising anything by editing the film down to that length. Filmmaking is a craft, and as far as I'm concerned being a craftsman is about producing work that people will see. It has always been important for me that my films reach their audience. I don't necessarily need to hear what those reactions are, just so long as they're out there. Making a film and not releasing it would defeat the purpose. Even if my films haven't instantly found audiences, they have been on a steady upwards curve. Forty years after _Aguirre_ , people around the world want to see it and talk about it. These days I get emails from seventeen-year-olds about films I made when their parents were in diapers. I have always been mainstream. The secret mainstream.
Some might call me eccentric, but by comparison it's everyone else who deserves that label. Consider someone like Peter Alexander, a wildly popular singer, actor and television star who for thirty years was one of the biggest stars in Austria and Germany, a repulsive _chanteur_ and _charmeur_ similar to Maurice Chevalier. He was also one of those in public life always talking about the good old days, forever in denial of the catastrophes that Germany had so recently brought to the world. Although Alexander might have stood at the centre of culture fifty years ago and appealed to the masses, today it's clear that everything he did is laughably stupid. Although millions of people watched Alexander every week, he was the master of collective insanity, and as the decades tick on he will become ever more irrelevant. Most of what we see around us is the ephemeral mainstream, mass-produced populist commercial trash, designed to go straight through us. Look instead at Robert Walser, an outsider who lived at the edge of the world and spent his final decades in a madhouse, formulating ideas in his writings that a hundred years later retain startling power and validity. Walser had a talent for penetrating the hidden anguish of those around him, and his ideas will be with us for generations to come. Someone like Kafka – who worked for years in an insurance company and was appreciated by only a tiny handful of people while he was alive – was also on the edge of things. He was so embarrassed about how unpopular his work was that he visited the bookshops of Prague and bought up copies himself. Today we acknowledge that Kafka was the secret mainstream, very much at the centre of his time.
_There is a strong emphasis in Hollywood on story structure._
Things like "story structure" and "character development" all sound so stale to my ears. I know some writers stick postcards over their walls, but that's all foreign to me. I get hundreds of scripts sent to me every year, many of which are exactly 116 pages, presumably because some bloated "guru" once insisted that a script should be 116 pages, not a line longer. These screenplays are the work of writers in thrall to certain recipes; for example, that by page thirty the hero has to "know his mission" and emerge from the story a changed man. It's a misguided way of doing things. The result is a series of thoroughly unappetising dishes, the efforts of legions of industry writers who follow the pathetic postulates. I turn my back on such people. They are bedwetters, every one of them.
I am a storyteller who writes so fast he can't afford to think about the structure of the writing. There is such an urgency to tell the tale that it inevitably creates its own structure. Hollywood scripts are designed to push certain buttons at certain times, which is filmmaking by numbers. There are solid production and distribution systems in Hollywood, and very skilled technicians and craftspeople, but you hardly ever find a good story there any more. The way they do things is deranged, built around the endless rewriting of a script, bringing in one writer after another to produce a screenplay. It would be unimaginable for me to write something five times over. Too much screenwriting today is dictated by boardroom decision-making. Real storytelling will always prevail, just as it has for thousands of years. It's so much a part of our collective existence, our dreams and nightmares, that it will never be easily brushed aside. I see the role of the film director as being that of the storyteller in a busy, noisy market in Marrakech, surrounded by an excited crowd. He knows he has to hold his audience's attention at all times. Eventually, when he is finished, if the people are satisfied, he walks away with coins in his hand.
# Reveries and Imagination
_Do you still not own a cellphone?_
I'm the only thinking person I know without one. I don't want to be available at all times. Permanent connectivity isn't my thing; I have always needed moments of quiet solitude for myself. There's a Chinese poem from the Tang dynasty about someone describing a boat journey along the Yellow River and leaving his friend behind, a monk on a mountain, in the knowledge that they probably won't see each other or have any contact for years. This man's return, decades later, has an indescribable substance and depth. Compare this to standing in line at the airport, chatting on your cellphone to your loved one, who is waiting in the car park. There is too much shallow contact in our lives. I prefer to be face to face; I want the person I'm communicating with to be so close I can put my hand on their shoulder. Text messaging is the bastard child handed to us by the absence of reading.
It is my firm belief that solitude will increase in proportion to the new tools at our disposal, the explosive evolution of electronic and digital communication. Technology might remove us from our isolation, but we are entering an era of solitude. When you are caught in a snowdrift in South Dakota, fifty miles from the nearest town, your isolation can be overcome with a mere cellphone, but your solitude never will be. As for "social networks," mine has forever been my kitchen table, where I cook for no more than four or five friends.
_You use the Internet._
Of course. Who can avoid it? But I do so with hesitation. It has, after all, opened up a gigantic field of indiscretion, arrogance, narcissism and self-aggrandisement. Humility is scarce and mediocrity flows from every direction, with attention-seekers unleashing their innermost thoughts. I seem to be one of the few left who consider discretion a virtue, though we have to be cautious about such things because our sense of what is virtuous is forever shifting. A virtue can become obsolete – for example, chastity – and these days young men, their honour besmirched, would never challenge each other to a pistol duel. They would phone their attorneys instead. One time after Les Blank had been given a haircut he wasn't happy with, I suggested he do what any American would: "Give your lawyer a call and sue."
_One morning in 1984 you left Sachrang, the village where you lived as a child, and proceeded to walk around the border of West and East Germany. Was this a political act?_
Not explicitly. At the time, German reunification looked like a lost cause. The nation was in fragments, with no true centre, without a real metropolis or beating heart at its core. While the real capital city – Berlin – was a divided enclave deep in a separate country, we had to make do with Bonn, a provincial town, as our seat of government. It would be like having Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the capital of the United States. The Berlin Wall stood there, an edifice that was going nowhere without a decisive change occurring in the planet's balance of power. It was a lingering and painful wound of the Second World War, located in the spot where two political continents rubbed up against each other. Germany had become homeless within its own territory. There is, I believe, a geographical fate to nations, not only a cultural or political one. In many cases there exists an unequivocal necessity of reunification, and today we await change in Ireland and Korea; these are quests that can never be abandoned. Prominent figures like Günter Grass insisted that the two Germanys should never be brought together,* but for years the country's unification was close to my heart. I was convinced of its inevitability and felt unhappy with politicians like Willy Brandt, who, in an official statement as chancellor, declared the matter closed. Of all the German politicians I have been aware of as an adult, Brandt is the only one I ever really liked, but I found his public declarations on reunification scandalous. As far as I was concerned, there was an inevitable and irrepressible desire of the German people to reunite, so for me the question was always very much open, though I didn't think it would be solved in my lifetime, or even my children's.
The division of the country never affected me personally because I had no relatives behind the Iron Curtain, but for those who did the situation was catastrophic. I was at a train station in East Berlin about ten years after the Berlin Wall had gone up. East Germany had allowed West Berliners to cross the border on certain days, but they had to return home before midnight. There were at least five thousand people, maybe a quarter of whom were going back to West Berlin, saying goodbye to their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers. Every once in a while we are witness to a truly unforgettable drama, a catastrophic tragedy. At that moment, watching all these people who didn't know if they would ever see each other again, a great chasm opened up between Brandt and me.
I vividly remember the deep feeling of joy and jubilation when the Berlin Wall came down. My hope was that in an explosion of freedom everyone in East Germany would crawl out of their holes and display to the world their creative energies, though after only a week almost everyone had lapsed into a climate of complaint and self-pity. "The politicians aren't doing enough for us." "Why aren't they creating more jobs?" "Why aren't we as rich as the West?" In the early nineties there was an incessant debate about relocating the government to Berlin. How could Parliament, we were told, move and start its sessions in the new Reichstag without having offices ready for the parliamentarians? It was all so small-minded to me. A parliament can hold its session in an open field, if need be.
Back in 1982 I felt that Germany was a godforsaken country, and wondered who was capable of holding it together until re unification. I had the increasingly strong sense that the most robust connections between Germans were cultural and linguistic. If the politicians had abandoned the nation, it was the poets who remained. With a clear understanding of the historical necessity to move beyond politics, I set out from my home village of Sachrang one morning and walked west around the border. I was careful to travel clockwise, so Germany would always be on my right. My idea was to hold the country together as if with a belt. Unfortunately, after nearly a thousand miles, I fell ill and had to return, so I jumped on a train home, where I was hospitalised for a week because of an old football injury. To this day my journey – which never had any explicitly nationalistic element to it – remains unfinished business, though of course the need to complete the walk no longer exists. I later gave a public talk at the Munich Kammerspiele theatre, where I read from texts I wrote during my travels.†
_Has travelling on foot always been important to you?_
For too long we have been estranged from essential nomadic life. Humans aren't made to sit in front of computer screens or travel by aeroplane; nature intended something different for us. Walking great distances has never been extreme behaviour to me. It has forever helped me regain my equilibrium, and I would always rather do the existentially important things in my life on foot. If you want to propose marriage to your girlfriend and you live in England and she is in Sicily, do the decent thing and walk down there. Travelling by car or aeroplane wouldn't be right at such a moment. Making a journey like that on foot has nothing to do with being a tourist; you won't find many of them carrying binoculars, a canteen, a compass and a penknife but no camera on their travels. In fact, the dignity and identity of cultures around the world are being stripped to the bone by tourism. I have a dictum that connected me instantly with Bruce Chatwin: "Tourism is sin and travel by foot is virtue."
Travelling on foot isn't about testing your limits or exercising or hiking with a tent on your back. It's about moving through a landscape, embarking on a process of discovery, with no shelter at hand. My voyages on foot – wandering out into the world unprotected – have always been essential experiences for me. For hours during my walk around Germany, sometimes even for a day or two at a time, there was no well or creek to drink from. I would knock on the door of a farmhouse and ask if I could use their faucet to fill my canteen. "Where have you come from?" the farmer would ask. "Sachrang," I would say. "How far is that?" "About eight hundred miles." "How did you get here?" he would ask. The moment I told him I had walked, there was no more small talk, only an immediate reflex of grandiose hospitality as he invited me into his home. When people take note of how far you have come on foot, they tell you stories that have been bottled up for years. One evening in a mountain hut I spoke with a retired teacher who told me a story about the final day of the Second World War in Holland. Canadian forces were advancing on him with their tanks. He had been given orders to take a group of soldiers prisoner at a farm behind the advancing line of enemy tanks. He told me that only by turning his gun on his superior officer did he manage to prevent the execution of these prisoners. Then, together with his Dutch captives, he had to overtake the advancing enemy and was eventually intercepted by Canadian tanks and taken prisoner himself.
When you come on foot you bring a certain intensity. Although I never dream at night, when walking I experience exciting voyages into my own imagination, and fall into deep reveries. Rhymes seize hold of me and I'm unable to shake them out of my mind. While on my walk around Germany I was consumed with a phrase about a Bavarian mountain: " _Der Watzmann rennt, der Watzmann rennt, holldrioh mein Holzbein brennt_ " ["The Watzmann's racing, the Watzmann's racing, hey-de-ho, my wooden leg is blazing"]. I float through fantasies and find myself inside unbelievable stories while walking. I move through entire novels and films, as well as extraordinary football games, always with the best players, most wondrous action and perfect goals you can imagine. When I emerge from a story, or once I hear the whistle blow, I find myself ten miles from where I started. Exactly how I got there I don't know. The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.
_When Lotte Eisner fell ill, you refused to let her die._
We German filmmakers were still a fragile group in 1974, so when a friend called me from Paris to say that Lotte had suffered a massive stroke and I should get on the next aeroplane, I started looking for flights, before realising it wasn't the correct way to proceed. I was unable to accept that Lotte might die, and though it was the start of the onslaught of an early winter, I decided to walk from Munich to Paris. My pilgrimage was a million steps in rebellion against her death.
I stuffed a bundle of clothes and a map into a duffel bag, then set off in the straightest line possible, sleeping under bridges, in farms and abandoned houses. I made only one detour – to the town of Troyes, where I marvelled at the cathedral – and ended up walking across the Vosges mountains for about twenty miles, following the same route Büchner describes in _Lenz_. I'm not superstitious, but did feel that coming by foot would prevent Lotte's death. The Catholic Church has a wonderful term for this: _Heilsgewissheit_ , the certainty of salvation. I moved with the faith of a pilgrim, convinced that Lotte would be alive when I got to Paris four weeks later. When I arrived in town I stopped at a friend's place to take shelter from the rain and sat in his office, steam coming off my clothes, utterly exhausted after having walked the last fifty miles without a break. I gave him my compass, which I no longer needed, and walked to Lotte's home. She was very surprised, but happy to see me. Years later, bedridden and nearly blind, unable to read or see films, Lotte wrote to me, asking if I would visit her. I went to Paris, where she told me, "Werner, there is still some spell cast that prevents me from dying. But I can barely walk. I am saturated with life [ _lebenssatt_ ]. It would be a good time for me now." Jokingly, I said, "Lotte, I hereby lift the spell." Two weeks later she died. It was the right moment for her.
When you travel on foot it isn't a matter of covering actual territory, rather a question of moving through your own inner landscapes. I wrote a diary of my walk to Lotte – the story of a journey on foot – which is like a road movie that never lingers on physical landscapes. After some initial hesitation, then after excising the most private passages, I released it as a short book. _Of Walking in Ice_ is literature created more by my feet than my head, and remains closer to my heart than any of my films.
_You were friends with British novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin._
Bruce and I had an instantaneous connection because we both knew that travelling on foot is an essential part of being human. We shared the conviction that mankind's problems started the moment humans abandoned a nomadic existence, became sedentary, and began building permanent settlements.
I first met Bruce in 1984, when I was in Melbourne working on _Where the Green Ants Dream_. I read in the paper that he was in the country, so I immediately contacted his publishing company and tried to locate him. They told me he was somewhere in the desert in central Australia. Two days later they phoned back and said, "If you phone this number in Adelaide within the next twenty minutes, you can reach him before he goes to the airport." I called. "You're the one with the films!" Bruce said. I asked what his plans were. He was about to fly to Sydney and then London, but after a short conversation decided to head to Melbourne instead. How would I recognise him? "Look for a man with a leather rucksack," he said. Apparently Bruce knew some of my films and had read _Of Walking in Ice_ , which he liked and said was one of the few books he always carried with him. We spent two days together, talking. For every story I told him, he would tell me three. We would sleep for a couple of hours, then wake up and carry on.
Years later, when he was ill, Bruce asked me to come and show him my film about the Wodaabe. Before I arrived I had no idea he was dying. He had the strength only to watch ten minutes at a time, but insisted on seeing the film anyway. He was lucid, but eventually became delirious, and would exclaim, "I have to be on the road again." "Yes," I said. "That's where you belong." He wanted me to come with him, so I explained we would walk together when he was strong enough. "My rucksack is heavy," he said. "I will carry it, Bruce," I told him. His bones were aching, and he asked me to shift him in his bed. He called his legs "the boys." One time he asked me, "Can you move the left boy to the other side?" He looked down and saw that his legs were so weak they were almost spindles. Then he looked at me and said, with great lucidity, "I will never walk again. I'm busy dying now." For years Bruce used a leather rucksack made by an old saddler in Cirencester. He carried it for five thousand miles on his back before giving it to me. "It's you who has to carry it now," he told me. It has always been much more than just something in which to carry things. If my house were on fire, I would first grab my children. Of all my belongings, it would be the rucksack I would throw from the window first.
_Where did you get the idea for the Aboriginal drama_ Where the Green Ants Dream?
I first went to Australia in 1973, as a guest of the Perth Film Festival, where I saw a film by Michael Edols called _Lalai Dreamtime_ , featuring Sam Woolagoodja, a saint-like, charismatic old Aborigine. I'm fascinated by the dignity and intensity of individuals and groups who have to defend themselves and their communities against the destruction of ancient traditions. I immediately decided I wanted to make a film with Sam, but he died before I got the chance. Nonetheless, the idea of setting a story in Australia, one that could feature some of the Aborigines I had met, stayed with me.
I had read several newspaper articles about a trial involving Nabalco, a Swiss bauxite-mining company in the northwest of the country, where various Aboriginal clans had lived since time immemorial, and whose sacred sites had been destroyed.‡ It was the first time the Aborigines had sued a mining company; they lost the case because they were unable to prove they had title to the land before 1788. At the end of the trial the judge acknowledged that the Aborigines had inhabited the territory for many thousands of years, and expressed genuine regret that Anglo-Saxon common law forced him to make a judgement in favour of the mining company. The ruling turned out to be a political victory because it raised public consciousness of the Aborigines; the case touched upon fundamental questions of identity and history, and how white Australians deal with Aboriginal culture. Several other cases eventually came to court that were mostly won by Aborigines. I was inspired to write the story of a group of Aborigines struggling to defend their sacred site – the place where the green ants dream – against the bulldozers of a mining company. The trial scenes in the film are based on genuine courtroom transcripts.
It was a pleasure working with the local Aborigines, although they raised a couple of objections. There was a deceased member of their community with the same name as one of the characters in the screenplay. Once someone dies their name mustn't be spoken out loud for at least ten years; the locals would talk instead of "the man who died." It meant I had to make some minor changes to the script. The other issue had to do with the sacred objects in the courtroom scene. During a case heard before the Supreme Court of the Northern Territories, the Aborigines brought with them objects that had been buried for about two hundred years, asking that all spectators in the courtroom be removed so they could show them only to the judge. They were carved wooden artefacts, completely beyond the comprehension of an Anglo-Saxon judge, though for the Aborigines they were irrevocable proof of why and how they had special connections to this territory. They asked me not to show any representations of these objects during the film's courtroom scene, and refused my offer to fabricate duplicates. These moments of the film have greater depth because audiences are forced to push their imaginations beyond what can actually be seen.
The Aborigines in _Where the Green Ants Dream_ lived far from where we were filming, in a place called Yirrkala, near the Gulf of Carpentaria, in the north of the country. Most of the social structures of the Aboriginal communities throughout Australia had disintegrated, and in many parts of the country there were serious problems with alcoholism. People would get their social-security cheque on Friday morning, and by the afternoon most had already visited the liquor store. By the evening they were so drunk they had to be picked up off the streets. You see a similar phenomenon in any group of tribal people that has been abruptly thrown into a civilisation technically thousands of years ahead of its own. Many are unable to cope, like the Inuit in Alaska and the bushmen of the Kalahari. Wherever you go the problems – alcoholism, disintegration of society and criminality – are almost identical. But the group from Yirrkala was largely intact, handling the modern world with their traditional ways of doing things. I spent a lot of time talking with the lucid and dignified elders – who were able to exercise a level of control over the younger men – and explained my ideas about the story I had written.
At the time we made the film there wasn't a single Aboriginal community in the country that hadn't been in close contact with white civilisation for the past half-century. Aborigines are curious people and actively seek out the modern world; their culture might appear to be primitive, but is actually highly complex. These days very little is new to them. To say we're intruders into their society is a simplification.
_What are green ants?_
I respect the Aborigines in their struggle to keep their visions alive, but because my understanding of them was limited I wanted to develop my own mythology and create my own totem animal by inventing a legend that came close to their thinking and way of life. I made up the story of the green ants. It was never my intention to be anything like an anthropologist, strictly following the facts.
There's a character in the film who lives on a mountaintop because he believes there is nowhere else in Australia where the earth's magnetic field is so abnormally distorted. He explains that the green ant is the only living creature with a sensory organ attuned to magnetic fields, like a compass. They line up and all face north when a storm approaches, which is why it's said they dream about the origins of the world. In less than a day they can build six-foot termite hills hard as rock, with immense and intricate tunnel systems beneath. Once a year the ants grow wings and fly in gigantic swarms eastwards, across the mountains. There is actually a real species of ant with green tails, and we tried shooting a scene with four hundred thousand of them. I wanted them to face in the same direction, like soldiers aligned in a magnetic field, but they wouldn't behave. We came closest when they were placed in a storeroom that was at a temperature barely above freezing. They were immobilised by the cold, but as soon as the light was switched on they started to stir and move and bite; within fifteen seconds they were all over the place. If the storeroom had been half a degree colder, they would have died, so I called a halt to the whole thing. I won't be unhappy if readers come away from this book with nothing other than the fact that ants cannot be wrangled.
My understanding is that Aboriginal Dreamtime stories and myths – which were especially important to pre-colonial Aborigines – explain the origins of everything on the planet. _Where the Green Ants Dream_ isn't their "dreaming"; it is, respectfully, my own, though it does come fairly close to a number of their myths. At the same time, I could never claim to make their cause my own. One of the tribesmen told me, "We don't understand you either, but we see you have your own dreaming." There are some beautiful things about the Aborigines I don't think we can ever truly comprehend; for example, how Australia is somehow covered with a network of dreams, or "songlines." The Aborigines sing songs when travelling, and through the words and rhythms are able to identify the landscapes, rocks and mountains around them. In his book about Australia, Bruce Chatwin writes about being in a car with some Aborigines who are singing in fast motion – as if you were running a tape at ten times the normal speed – because they were moving so fast. The rhythm of the song had to keep up with the landscape. Aborigines see themselves as part of the earth, so when we destroy the planet we also destroy them. "We don't own the land, the land owns us," Sam Woolagoodja told me. "We act as caretakers for our brothers. When you cut the land, you also cut me." In _Where the Green Ants Dream_ the Aborigines sit in front of bulldozers that are tearing up the land, but this is no traditional sit-in; they are literally part of the rocks being removed. During the trial scene, a tribal elder asks the judge, "What would you do if bulldozers and pneumatic drills knocked down St Peter's Basilica in Rome or St Paul's Cathedral in London?"
I have to be careful when discussing these ideas because I'm no expert. I can't bear people – missionaries, anthropologists, politicians – who claim to understand Aboriginal society and culture. The Aborigines evolved during the Stone Age, something that profoundly influenced their way of life until maybe only two or three generations ago. Twenty thousand years of history separate us from them. Even if we spent fifty years living with the Aborigines and spoke their language, we would still only comprehend them marginally. Our backgrounds are different indeed; we are limited to our own thinking and culture, just as they are. People come back from a weekend trip to the outback and exclaim how magical it is, claiming an ability to feel in unison with the spirit of the native people. But no outsider – including white Australians – can ever truly understand such things.
_You seem ambivalent about the film._
_Where the Green Ants Dream_ isn't that bad, it just has a climate that these days I'm resistant to. For me the story is about protecting the spirit, traditions and mythology of the Aborigines, but the film has a slightly self-righteous tone to it, even if it does represent my thoughts and disquiet about contemporary society. It will always be important for me because the film is, in some sense, a requiem for my mother, who died just before we started shooting, and to whom I dedicated the film. I wrote the script when she was still alive, though from the start the spirit of the story had something of a requiem about it. I still appreciate the idea of the aeroplane – piloted by a mechanic who sings "My Baby Does the Hanky Panky" – that may or may not have crashed. Perhaps the Aborigines really have flown over the mountains and escaped into their dreamland, even if there are reports of an aeroplane wing having been found. I also like the shots at the beginning and end, those blurred, strange images that somehow represent the collapse of the world, even if they have nothing directly to do with the story. Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein spent weeks in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas with scientists from a meteorological laboratory who were researching storms and chasing tornadoes. It's how I envision the collapse of the planet: a tornado wipes everything away, sucking it into the clouds. Years later I witnessed the destruction caused by Cyclone Tracy, which swept across Darwin in northwestern Australia. Among the debris I saw a water tower with a vast rectangular imprint on it. A huge refrigerator had flown through the air for a few miles and smashed into the tank a hundred feet above the ground.
_You joined up with Kinski again to make_ Cobra Verde, _based on Chatwin's novel_ The Viceroy of Ouidah.
The production was one of the worst I have ever experienced, and once filming was over it was clear I would never again work with Kinski. At the time I thought to myself, "Will somebody please step in and carry on the work with this man? Enough is enough." Making _Cobra Verde_ with him was like tracking a wild animal. If we wanted to catch the beast on film, we had to hide in the bushes for days at a time. Suddenly he would come and drink at the water-hole, but by the time we turned the camera on he had disappeared into the night. He was prone to bursts of fury, interspersed with moments of grace. It was no longer a case of rehearsing a scene or checking he was on his mark, but just rolling the camera as quickly as possible.
There was also something about Kinski's presence in the film that meant a foreign stink pervaded, and _Cobra Verde_ suffers because of this. In some scenes there is a stylisation that Kinski forced on the production, one vaguely reminiscent of bad spaghetti westerns. It was a real problem holding him together during filming. He had recently married some Italian beauty queen and whenever he could find a phone line would talk for hours with her. From day one I struggled to harness his insanity, rage and demonic intensity. He was like a hybrid racehorse that would run a single mile and then collapse, but on _Cobra Verde_ I was forced to carry him for five miles. At the time he was involved in an all-consuming project and had written a confused screenplay of the only film he was to direct: the life story of Paganini, with himself in the title role. For years he implored me to make the film, but I always said no; I knew this was something he had to do himself. I urge everyone to see _Kinski/Paganini_ for no other reason than for years he claimed that I was a talentless imbecile and it was him who actually directed the films we made together. It will take you a long time to find a film as bad as his. See it and make up your own mind.
Every day I wondered if we would ever finish _Cobra Verde_. Kinski directed his abuse in the direction of cameraman Thomas Mauch, and terrorised him so badly I had to replace him within the first week. He wanted to stay, but unfortunately caught the brunt of Kinski early in the battle. I chose his replacement – the Czech Viktor Růžička – because I heard he was physically strong, built like a peasant and very patient. Anyone else would probably have quit within two hours. Nothing really changed once Mauch was gone, and it remains a very bitter moment for me. Abandoning my loyalty to him was one of the most difficult things I have ever done.
_How was production in Africa?_
Sometimes it was so hot you couldn't step outside. To find a working telephone was a major chore, there was hardly any gasoline for our vehicles and I struggled to find sufficient accommodation, transport and food for cast and crew. In northern Ghana, near Tamale, two hundred people worked around the clock for ten weeks constructing a palace out of clay and making several thousand plaster skulls. There wasn't a single kilo of plaster to be found in the entire country when we began. Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the president of neighbouring Côte d'Ivoire, had one ambition: to build the largest church on the planet, which he eventually did in his home town of Yamoussoukro. We knew there must be a lot of plaster over there, so we bribed some construction workers and drove several vans of the stuff across the border, which meant we could fabricate the skulls we needed. The entire palace collapsed about a week after filming had finished because of a particularly fierce rainstorm. All the costumes and props for the film had to be produced in a very short period of time, which caused endless headaches because everything in Africa takes much longer than it should. It isn't a question of money; even with $25 million I would have had as many problems. You have to deviate from your normal way of doing things and try to understand the tempo of the continent. A strict Prussian military type would buckle in a matter of days. In the midst of all this was Kinski, in a ferocious rage, holding up shooting because one of the buttons on his costume was loose.
We spent several weeks working with an army of a thousand young Amazon women. They were gathered together at a football stadium in Accra, where Benito Stefanelli – an Italian stunt co-ordinator who had worked on Sergio Leone's films – trained them in the use of swords and shields. They were a truly frightening bunch of ferocious, eloquent, proud, strong women. On pay day we lined them up in the inner yard of the slave fortress and opened a small gate through the main door, with the idea that they would walk through one after the other. From inside, eight hundred of them pushed against the door at the same time and squashed the ones at the front almost to death. Some of the women were already fainting, and after narrowly avoiding being torn to pieces I was able to calm the potentially fatal situation by grabbing a nearby policeman, dragging him over to the gate and having him fire three shots into the air.
_When did you first read Chatwin's novel?_
Around the time of _Fitzcarraldo_ I read his book _In Patagonia_ , the story of a long walk, and was so impressed I immediately read _On the Black Hill_ and _The Viceroy of Ouidah_ , the nineteenth-century story of the bandit Francisco Manoel da Silva, who is cheated of his wages as a gold miner, then travels from drought-ridden Brazil to the kingdom of Dahomey in Africa and becomes a viceroy and slave trader. It was full of fascinating characters and showed a great sensitivity for Africa, as well as being centred around the slave trade, so I immediately thought it would make a magnificent film. I'm a great admirer of Joseph Conrad – especially his _The Nigger of the "Narcissus", Typhoon_ and _Heart of Darkness_ – and feel that Bruce is somehow in the same league. He has the touch you rarely see in literature. I let him know about my interest in the book, but added I couldn't undertake such a monstrous project right after _Fitzcarraldo_. I had to lick my wounds for a while and work on projects like _Where the Green Ants Dream,_ some operas, some smaller films. I asked Bruce to let me know if someone else wanted to buy the rights to his book, and a few years later he got in touch to say David Bowie's agents had expressed an interest. Apparently Bowie was more interested in buying the rights so he could play the lead character than in directing the film, so I told Bruce to sell the book to Bowie on the condition that I direct. I felt attached to the project like a dog to a bone, and eventually bought the rights myself because I was convinced Bowie wasn't right for the role of Francisco Manoel. He lacks the mystery and savagery of the character, and has no real depth. The man is a neon light bulb.
I felt there wasn't a single Hollywood actor – dead or alive – capable of playing the part. Although he immediately came to mind, and though I tried to ignore him, the only person I could think of for the role was Kinski. If you read the published script, you'll notice that every character except Francisco Manoel is described in precise physical terms. This was because I wanted to avoid describing Kinski on the page; I didn't want to allow him to penetrate my imagination and insert himself into the film. But while I was writing the script, throughout that long week when I was working away at my typewriter, he appeared between the lines, worming his way onto the pages. The script was like a boat taking on water, with Kinski slipping in through every crack. By the time I had finished, no other possibility existed. Some facts have to be faced whether you want to or not, so I immediately called Kinski, and though he was really too old for the part, I told him, "If you don't take this role, I won't make the film."
_The novel doesn't have a linear narrative._
Rather than having the structure of a cinematic work, _The Viceroy of Ouidah_ captures the inner world of this character, as well as offering a rich understanding of Africa and the slave trade. The first thing I did was explain to Bruce that his book's narrative wasn't a cinematic one, which meant there would be certain technical issues in adapting it for the screen. The novel is narrated in a series of concentric circles, but I knew a film would have to proceed in a more linear way, so I told Bruce my plan was to invent things and make some changes. I let the story move through the action at its own speed and turned it into a fable, a ballad, which is made clear by the opening scene of the blind fiddler. Bruce never wanted to get mixed up with the screenplay or involve himself in the production, though he was on location with us for a few days§ and before I wrote the screenplay recommended I read an obscure book from 1874 called _Dahomey as It Is,_ which provided details for _The Viceroy of Ouidah_. It was written by a British biologist named J. A. Skertchly, who was studying beetles in a coastal region of Dahomey, which is now Benin. Skertchly was asked if he would travel to the king's residence and stay for a few days to instruct the palace guards in the use of their new rifles. The king began to enjoy his conversations with Skertchly so much that a week became eight months. In his book he describes in almost scientific detail time spent at the king's court – where he was treated as a prisoner – and his testimony constitutes a unique and exceptional document.
What I took from Bruce's book was the African atmosphere the text is so effective at creating. I travelled through Brazil, Mali, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, before deciding that Colombia and Ghana were the best places to shoot the film. Ghana was one of the first African states to become independent. Culturally speaking, it's probably the most refined nation on the continent, and the people there possess a great self-confidence. For centuries the English, Portuguese, Dutch and French colonials tried to get rid of the multitude of little kingdoms, but after independence successive governments refused to abolish them. Ghana's leaders understood the importance and usefulness of the ancient local cultural traditions.
_Were you especially interested in the slavery narrative of_ The Viceroy of Ouidah?
Neither the film nor Bruce's novel is explicitly about slavery; I don't consider _Cobra Verde_ to be an historical film, just as I never saw _Aguirre_ and _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ as faithful representations of certain events. The story is about the fantasies and follies of the human spirit, not colonialism. I was interested in Francisco Manoel's relationship with power, though I didn't particularly want to explain why this enigmatic character becomes a bandit or describe his psychological journey from South America to Africa. He'll do anything to escape poverty, even if – as he says – it costs him his life. He becomes a slave trader in Africa after overhearing rich landowners in Brazil discussing their plan to send him to his death, because for the last ten years the king of Dahomey has killed every foreigner who has set foot on the soil of his country. It's pure defiance of what awaits him that pushes Francisco Manoel to confront the situation head on and accept the job without hesitation. He has a grander design than those of his enemies and is prepared to walk directly to his apparent doom. When he reaches west Africa, Francisco Manoel boldly demands that the slave fortress – which has long since been abandoned and looted – is turned over to him and the slave trade resumed.
Although much discussed in the United States and the Caribbean, in many African countries the wounds of slavery are still so deep that people don't speak about it in public. The subject remains taboo, I suspect, because of the well-established fact that African kingdoms were implicated in the slave trade almost as deeply as white traders. There was also a great deal of trading between the Arab world and black Africa, and even between African nations themselves. Setting the story of _Cobra Verde_ during the last days of slave trafficking means moving it beyond a simple account of an historical phenomenon. As Francisco Manoel says, "Slavery was not a misunderstanding, it was a great crime. Slavery is an element of the human heart." In other words, no amount of legislation will truly eradicate it.
_Africa, not Kinski, is the star._
I was never so successful in filming the landscapes and capturing the spirit of the continent. There are some shots in the film – like the one of the crippled boy who shuffles away from the camera and stops when he reaches the steps, which he is unable to climb – that illustrate the pain slavery has inflicted upon an entire continent. It's almost as if this boy represents Francisco Manoel's guilt, and it reminds me of the sequence at the end of _Where the Green Ants Dream_ with the girl sitting in the mining encampment clutching a stone as she listens to a voice on the radio screaming about a goal scored by Argentina during a football match. Both images carry great pathos and sadness, somehow summing up the heart of these films.
The South American sequences of _Cobra Verde_ always felt heavy to me; the African part of the story is much more interesting. What audiences see of the continent are things they aren't used to, like court rituals and flag signals along the coast, and the wonderfully anarchic and chaotic crowd scenes have real life to them. In most films set in Africa the place is portrayed either as a crumbling, primitive and dangerous place full of savages, or with a kind of _Out of Africa_ nostalgia. _Cobra Verde_ deviates from all that. I set out to show things that had been ignored, like the continent's sophisticated and complex social structures, its kingdoms, tribes and hierarchies. I even managed to get His Royal Highness Nana Agyefi Kwame II, the real king of Nsein, to play the king of Dahomey. He was a wonderful and dignified man who brought three hundred members of his court with him to the set. I hadn't originally planned a scene with his entourage, but they looked so magnificent that I put them in the film. Everything and everyone you see around him is authentic; all the jesters, princes, princesses, ministers, dancers and musicians, and the traditional objects they carry. These are the kinds of characters that could never be invented. Kwame II exercised a powerful authority over everyone – even Kinski – and I could never have found anyone more convincing than him to play the king. At one point Kinski attacked a member of the crew and insulted the hundreds of Africans who had come there especially for us. He started to pack his bags, and all the king's extras were also about to leave. Kwame II explained to Kinski that filming had to continue and that he had to stay, that there were too many important things being said for the first time in the film about slavery, about Africa, about the history of the continent for anyone to allow the production to be halted. Kinski never again raised his voice against the Africans. The king literally saved the film.
_I have never seen your short_ Les Français vus par... Les Gauloises.
It was made as part of a compilation film; the other directors included David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard and Andrzej Wajda. For my contribution I purchased a $1,000 bottle of wine and brought together Claude Josse and Jean Clemente, two of the greatest living French sommeliers, then filmed them opening the wine and gushing poetic descriptions. As a contrast, I wanted to film some real Celtic people; for me they were best represented by members of the Stade Toulousain rugby team, who allowed me into their locker room before a match. I watched them spend a few hours physically menace each other and work themselves up into an absolutely berserk mood as preparation for meeting their opponents out on the field.
_Could any of your films be categorised as ethnography or anthropology?_
Only in so far as my goal is to use cinema to explore and chronicle the human condition and our states of mind. I don't make films using only images of clouds and trees; I work with human beings because the way they function within different cultural groups interests me. If that makes me an anthropologist, so be it. But I never think in terms of strict ethnography, going out to some distant island with the explicit purpose of studying the natives and their communities.
I understand what you're getting at with a question like that, but a film like _Wodaabe, Herdsmen of the Sun_ can't be seriously considered ethnographic because it's stylised to such an extent that the audience is taken into the realm of the ecstatic. I don't deny you can learn a certain number of facts about the Wodaabe from the film, but that was never my primary intention. There is no voiceover, and even the short text at the start tells you only the barest facts about these people, that they have been around since the Stone Age and are a ragged tribe despised by neighbouring peoples. I purposefully pull away from anything that could be considered anthropological. In the opening scene of the bizarre male beauty contest, the tribesmen are rolling their eyeballs, extolling the whiteness of their teeth and making ecstatic faces. The fact that they were being filmed made no difference; they were completely immersed in the spectacle. These young men are so wildly stylised, why shouldn't I be too? On the soundtrack we hear a 1901 recording of Gounod's _Ave Maria_ from an Edison cylinder, sung by the last castrato of the Vatican, which creates a strange, almost ecstatic feeling, and establishes a powerful counterpoint between music and images. A traditional ethnographic filmmaker would never dare do anything like that. Using this specific recording helps carry us out of the realm of what I call the accountant's truth; anything else wouldn't touch us so deeply. It means the film isn't a documentary about a specific African tribe, rather a story about beauty and desire. It's the same idea as when I used drumming music from Burundi in _Fitzcarraldo_ , which has nothing per se to do with the Amazon jungle, and is why, at the end of _Little Dieter Needs_ _to Fly_ , you hear a piece of music sung in Malagasy that was recorded in 1931 in Madagascar. I can't tell you how many people asked me why I didn't use Laotian or Vietnamese music.
_What drew you to the nomadic Wodaabe of the southern Sahara?_
They are scornfully referred to by neighbouring peoples as "Bororo," a term of abuse roughly meaning "ragged shepherds." Wodaabe, the name they call themselves, means "those under the taboo of purity." They number no more than about two hundred thousand, and travel through the Sahel zone of the desert from Senegal on the Atlantic almost across to the Nile, particularly Mali and Niger. We know Wodaabe have been in the Sahara since time immemorial because the brand marks on their cattle are the same as those found on six-thousand-year-old rock engravings in the Aïr mountains. They have no concept of modern-day borders and are in strong danger of disappearing because their living space has shrunk as a result of the dramatic southwards spread of the desert. The Wodaabe don't know where they come from; their myths make vague mention of crossing a great stretch of water in the east. Since their language is unrelated to that of any other African peoples and they have light skin and sharp-featured, narrow faces, some people believe they must have come from Mesopotamia, crossing the Red Sea in prehistoric times.
The Wodaabe consider themselves to be the most beautiful people on earth. The men compete against each other in contests, while the young women assign one of themselves to select the most handsome man. She picks one out and disappears with him into the bush for a few nights. Most of the women are already married, which is why they return their booty to the bosom of his family once they are finished with him. Occasionally they keep the man for themselves, resuming their nomadic journey with him. During the preparations for their beauty contests groups of young men in the encampments joke and laugh, making themselves as beautiful as possible; they dress up and put on make-up made from natural dyes that have been pounded into powder. Some take a whole day to prepare for the festival, which starts at dawn and lasts five days. It's thought to be particularly beautiful to show as much of one's teeth and the white of the eyeball as possible, and some of the men roll their eyes upwards as if in ecstasy. A succession of complex dances and rituals are performed, with the men in straight lines, striding forward, grimacing ecstatically, then retreating until the moment of decision, when the winner is chosen. One of the women I filmed joked that none of the men were anything special – actually on the ugly side – and that the one she had spent the previous night with was a wimp of a lover. She was determined to find a better one.
_Jean-Bédel Bokassa is the subject of_ Echoes from a Sombre Empire.
It was during the making of _Fata Morgana_ that I first went to the Central African Republic, after having been released from prison in Cameroon. Let me say this about my time there: if you were driving a Land Rover and suddenly the vehicle was surrounded by a crowd of screaming people, the only sane thing to do was put your foot down and get the hell out of there. Bokassa had assumed power after a _coup d'état_ in 1966, and in 1977 proclaimed himself emperor. He was truly bizarre; the evil sparkling of this incredible character was fascinating to me. Bokassa was completely unlike Léopold Sédar Senghor, who, before he became the first president of Senegal, had studied Western thought and philosophy. Bokassa was, alongside Idi Amin, the most African of African leaders. Film allows us to reveal the least understood truths of man. It delves into our fantasies and dreams, in this case our nightmares. Bokassa represented the kind of human darkness you find in Nero or Caligula, and _Echoes from a Sombre Empire_ was an attempt to explore the dark abysses that lie at the heart of man. Some reviews inevitably said the film should have focused more on French foreign policy and history, but it isn't for me to discuss such things. I leave that to the journalists.
There was a cornucopia of stories surrounding Bokassa and his regime, most of which are well documented today. He had a number of children killed because they weren't wearing school uniforms, and spent a third of the country's national budget to pay for his coronation. He personally presided over the judicial system, had people indiscriminately thrown to the crocodiles, and apparently fathered fifty-four children. The cult of personality surrounding him was astonishing. He awarded himself a huge number of medals, all of which he would wear at public events, claimed he was bulletproof and could read people's minds, issued orders to have the ears of thieves cut off and personally beat inmates to death with his ivory-topped cane. The deeper I dug, the more I discovered tragedies worthy of Shakespeare. There is the tale of the two Martines, a film in itself. When Bokassa was a soldier in Indochina he had a child called Martine with a local woman. Once in power he decided to find his daughter and bring her to Africa, but the girl who was found and brought over turned out not to be the real Martine. When he eventually did find the genuine Martine he allowed the other one to stay, and the two women were married on the same day in a huge celebration, though soon afterwards both husbands were executed. Apparently one of them was involved in the murder of the other's newborn child. Bokassa decided to send the "fake" Martine back to Vietnam. She was put on an aeroplane that returned only half an hour later; it was obvious she had been pushed out over the jungle. Bokassa's crumbling palace represented the melancholy of his story. A building like that quickly decays in such a climate. Compare it to the seventeenth-century castles in Scotland, overgrown with ivy and moss, which have aged beautifully.
After he was deposed, Bokassa fled to France and was condemned to death _in absentia_. A few years later, however, he decided he couldn't stand the French winters, so, cold and homesick, he boarded a commercial airliner, believing he would be received like Napoleon returning from exile, his nation on its knees before him. He was immediately arrested, put on trial and condemned to death again, though his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, then twelve years, then house arrest. Permission came down from President Kolingba to film with Bokassa, and he wanted to meet us, but at the last minute we were expelled from the country by the minister of the interior. He was apparently implicated in several crimes from the Bokassa era, so didn't appreciate us being so nosy.
_Did the man really eat human flesh?_
The German ambassador to the Central African Republic told me that after an execution in front of the press and diplomatic corps, the execution squad rushed forward, ripped the liver from the body and ate it. After speaking to so many people who had stories about Bokassa, I quickly realised that when there is so much hearsay about a single man or event – when you hear the same stories from so many different people – speculation condenses into something factual. We have to believe it. The deeper truth of the situation is outside our reach, but not the facts. Bokassa was a cannibal. During his trial – which was videotaped in its entirety – there were precise witness accounts, including one from Bokassa's cook. When the French paratroopers who assisted in deposing Bokassa opened up the huge refrigerators in his palace, they found half of one of the emperor's ministers frozen solid. The other half had been eaten during a banquet.
Cannibalism is a documented phenomenon of many human societies, but when we made the film even those officials who had been in opposition to the Bokassa regime flatly denied he ever ate anyone. Such behaviour clearly breaks so many taboos, and admitting it somehow casts the whole continent of Africa in a bad light. You see the same kind of thing in Mexico, where some people still maintain the Aztecs never sacrificed human beings or practised cannibalism because they consider it so shameful. They make wild suggestions that such claims are a fabrication of the Spanish to denigrate the Aztec way of life.
_Michael Goldsmith guides us through the story of Bokassa's regime._
I encountered Michael – who at the time was the head of the African branch of the Associated Press – after having read some of his published dispatches. I don't recall exactly where I first met him, but like those who have crossed the Sahara, people who have been in the Central African Republic during Bokassa's reign or the chaos of the Congo somehow find each other. I can't explain how such people connect; we just recognise one another. Michael Goldsmith was different from most journalists I had met in Africa. Many were young social climbers or ageing, cynical alcoholics, but Michael expressed a certain philosophical attitude. He had reported from around the world for decades, and I appreciated his outlook on life. From the moment I encountered him I knew he was the key to telling Bokassa's story, which is why I always saw _Echoes from a Sombre Empire_ more as a journey into a personal nightmare than a documentary. In the seventies he had been accused by Bokassa of being a spy and was sentenced to death. He almost died after being beaten with the imperial sceptre by the emperor himself, then manacled to the wall of a rat-infested cell, and was saved only after his wife intervened. Years later, once Bokassa had been deposed, Michael was anxious to return to the Central African Republic.
Although he looked like a kindly librarian, Michael was a courageous man who was used to being in dangerous situations and had real insight into Africa. Soon after we finished the film he went to Liberia and was taken prisoner by a faction of insurgent rebels, most of them child soldiers. Eight-year-old children wearing rags and brandishing Kalashnikovs and M16s were shooting at everything that moved. Michael told me they were usually drunk or stoned, and one time raided a bridal store so they could dress up as bride and groom. The "bride" was an eight-year-old boy wearing a veil and a gown with high heels that were much too big for him who fired his rifle wildly, and the "groom" was naked except for a tailcoat that dragged after him. Very strange images. Michael was held captive in a building from where they had shot a passer-by; day after day he watched the body decompose. By the end dogs were carrying away the last pieces and only a dark spot remained. He managed to get home and saw _Echoes from a Sombre Empire_ at the Venice Film Festival. Three weeks later he died.
_Is_ The Eccentric Private Theatre of the Maharaja of Udaipur _another of your "utility" films?_
Sort of. I made it after receiving an invitation from André Heller, an Austrian director and creator of events who had travelled across India and appears at the start of film. He talks about the incomparable nature of the country, its extraordinary cultural diversity and the hundreds of languages spoken, and about how the arts in India are what he calls a "life-sustaining" force. André – who once created what might have been the largest fireworks display ever in Europe – asked if I wanted to film the mammoth event he had organised at the City Palace of Udaipur, on the banks of Lake Pichola in India. At the behest of the Maharaja of Udaipur, who wanted in some way to document the rich heritage of the country before "McDonaldisation" triumphed over everything, André planned to bring together a vast range of Indian performers. He had a permit from the maharaja to stage what became the events of the film, and sent out people throughout India in search of magicians, singers, dancers, snake charmers and fire-eaters, ending up with something like two thousand performers who spoke a total of twenty-three languages. I get sent a lot of screenplays that people want me to make, but I don't get many requests to make films like this, so I agreed because André's ideas were unique. The actual event took place over just a single day, but I spent a few days shooting rehearsals. I made the film for a friend and enjoyed travelling to India, somewhere I had never been. It was good to capture things that would otherwise have been ephemeral. I flavoured the film by inventing a background story – influenced by Satyajit Ray's _The Music Room_ – about the palace of a fabulously wealthy maharaja which is crumbling underneath him.
Scream of Stone _is reminiscent of pre-war German "mountain cinema."_
Throughout the twenties German directors like Luis Trenker and Arnold Fanck produced a number of _Bergfilme_ [mountain films], but unfortunately the genre later fell in step with Nazi ideology, which is probably the reason it's somewhat unexplored today. I liked the idea of creating a new, contemporary form of _Bergfilm_ , like Peter Fleischmann did when he used the elements and rules of the _Heimatfilm_ in his film _Hunting Scenes from Bavaria_ , bringing new depth to the genre. But I would never push the idea of making a connection between _Scream of Stone_ and those melodramas of the twenties – which I've never actually seen – including those featuring Leni Riefenstahl.
_Scream of Stone_ had a problematic birth. Reinhold Messner – with whom I had worked on _The Dark Glow of the Mountains_ – had an idea based on a true story about the first apparently successful attempt on Cerro Torre, a peak in Patagonia. Cesare Maestri, the Italian climber who would scale mountains with pneumatic drills, claimed to have reached the summit, but there had been instant doubt as to whether this was true, due to the fact that his climbing partner had never returned and his body never recovered. Walter Saxer, my production manager, picked up the story and developed it with a colleague. He wanted to go beyond the usual boundaries of German cinema, and from the start was the driving force behind the film. I immediately liked the ideas they came up with. There was something wonderfully physical about the story that I found interesting, but the script had many weak points, particularly the dialogue, and needed real work, so I hesitated about accepting the project because at first I didn't know how I could improve it. Finally we came to an agreement and I stepped into the film, but immediately found myself up against a brick wall when it came to making substantive changes.
Saxer was bull-headed about everything, so I can't even say that _Scream of Stone_ is my film, though it does contain some impressive sequences, like the one where Stefan Glowacz climbs up a mountain vertically, then horizontally and then vertically again, all without a safety line, all in a single take, all with the most stunning landscape behind him and a gaping abyss below. It's the most extraordinary thing you'll ever see on screen, much more so than anything in a Hollywood blockbuster. At the time Glowacz was the "rock master," the world-champion free-climber, and actually did three takes of this climb before calmly saying, "No more, Werner. My arms are boiling." The character of Fingerless, played by Brad Dourif, who turns out to be one of the few climbers who actually makes it to the top of Cerro Torre, leaving a picture of Mae West there as proof, was the only character in the original script I was allowed to make changes to. He writes a hundred and sixty letters to Mae before finally getting a response: "Come back from your mountain, climber, and see me sometime. There's a hell of a mountain waiting for you." The original idea was to cast Messner in the film. After my experiences with him on _The Dark Glow of the Mountains_ I felt he could handle the role, but then I met the Italian actor Vittorio Mezzogiorno and immediately knew he should play the part. I think Messner was almost relieved he had been passed over, though he would have been good in the film.
_Did your previous experiences with Messner help you on_ Scream of Stone?
To a certain extent. Cerro Torre is the most dangerous, difficult and ecstatic peak on earth, a 4,000-feet-high needle of basalt sticking straight up into the sky. It's more a symbolic image of deadly fear than a mere mountain. For many years it was considered unclimbable; the first verified ascent was sometime in the mid-seventies. More people have climbed Mount Everest than have ever made it to the top of Cerro Torre. You can only truly understand why it strikes so much fear into the hearts of climbers when you see the peak before you. There may be higher mountains to scale, but what makes Cerro Torre particularly treacherous are the sheer cliff faces and weather conditions. Most of the time there's a pandemonium of storms that make the summit invisible. I call them storms, but we don't really have an equivalent in our language to describe the phenomenon. The winds easily reach a hundred miles an hour at the top; our tripod was cemented down but still needed five men to hold it steady. Ice fragments and stones the size of my fist get torn away and come shooting by like bullets. One time a sudden storm hit, and two of our climbers, hanging onto the rock face, immediately dumped their rucksacks so they could get back to our encampment fast enough. These bags didn't fall to the ground; they just sailed away horizontally, never to be seen again. On a mountain near Cerro Torre I saw the unforgettable sight of wind hitting a waterfall with such force that it literally flowed vertically upwards, dissipating into mist.
_Were you ever on the summit of Cerro Torre yourself?_
Twice, both times by helicopter, which took five minutes. The second time I landed on the summit I stepped out of the helicopter with Mezzogiorno, turned around and saw him lying as flat as he could on the ground, his nails dug as deep into the ice as he could get them. I asked what was wrong. "I want to get up but my body won't co-operate," he said meekly. "Give me a little more time." I spoke to Hans Kammerlander – the climber who appears in _The Dark Glow of the Mountains_ and has a small role in _Scream of Stone_ – about the ice cave that had been built at the top of Cerro Torre and stocked with eight days' worth of provisions, in case we needed to take refuge. When Kammerlander saw me walking towards it without holding on to the rope, he grabbed me and said, "If you start to slide, there's nothing anyone can do for you. You will accelerate, then be airborne for a mile." Kammerlander looked me right in the eye. "If that happens," he said, "promise me one thing: enjoy the vista."
At one point our helicopter took Stefan Glowacz, a cameraman and me up to a ridge not far from Cerro Torre's peak to prepare a sequence. Normally a team of climbers would make extensive preparations, like building an emergency shelter and taking up provisions and equipment, after which the actors and technical crew would follow. A storm had been raging for ten days, but suddenly we had a calm, crystal-clear night, followed by a beautiful morning without wind. The conditions looked so good we made the mistake of flying up there without sending a vanguard. Once we were dropped at the ridge, the three of us started walking towards our location. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something absolutely outrageous, something I will surely never witness again in my life. Below us, as far as the eye could see, were clouds; they looked like motionless balls of cotton. All of a sudden everything exploded like gigantic atomic bombs. I immediately radioed the helicopter, which was still in sight, and watched as it made a loop towards us. It came as close as 150 feet before the storm hit us like a bullet. The clouds were over us, there was a gust of more than a hundred miles an hour, and the temperature fell thirty degrees. After twenty seconds my moustache was a lump of ice. The helicopter was literally tossed away and we found ourselves alone with no sleeping bags, tents, food or ropes. Nothing except two ice picks. We had to dig ourselves into the snow immediately, otherwise we would have frozen to death within a few hours.
We spent just over two days and nights in the snow hole. All we had to eat was a small piece of chocolate I had in my pocket. You can get by with nothing to eat for fifty hours, but water is something else; you have to drink at least a gallon of water a day, otherwise your toes and fingers freeze away. Ninety-five per cent of all losses of digits are the result of dehydration. After twenty hours some of my toes were turning black, and the cameraman, a very tough man, was in bad shape. He was running a temperature and having cramps. We used our walkie-talkie only every two hours for a few seconds to save batteries, and radioed down that he wouldn't survive another night. This stark message alarmed our team in the valley, and two teams of four climbers were sent out to reach us. The strongest of them became delirious, threw his gloves into the storm, then clicked his fingers, insisting on calling a waiter over so he could pay for his cappuccino. They had to guide him down back to the glacier, but an avalanche swept them down two hundred feet and they had no choice but to dig a snow cave themselves because one of them had lost his sunglasses and showed signs of snow blindness. After fifty hours, the clouds burst open for ten minutes, and with this lull in the storm the helicopter was able to pick us up. The pilot was in a panic and couldn't wait until the last person – me – had scrambled inside, so I crouched in a basket outside the helicopter and held on to a metal bar. When we finally touched down, my hand had frozen to the bar. It thawed out after one of the Argentinian climbers urinated on it.
_Talk about your approach to editing._
The most important thing to say about editing is that it isn't a technical process. It comes from something much deeper, from an understanding of the vision behind the images and the story you need to tell. If you don't have that, your work will be subject to whims and continual fumbling. The danger of digital non-linear editing is the ability to create twenty parallel versions of your film, which is a meaningless act. Those who produce such things are irretrievably lost in their material.
I have always been very specific about what I film, and never shoot endless amounts of footage. Every second of celluloid costs money, so the impetus when shooting on film is to expose as little raw stock as possible. Even today, when I make a film on video I never end up with a lot of footage. If you let the tape run and run, you'll have three hundred hours of mediocrity. Some filmmakers wear the fact they have so much material as a badge of honour, but attempting to be encyclopaedic is a misguided strategy, practised only by accountants. Most filmmakers with that much footage don't know what they're doing; I know I'm talking to a spendthrift when I meet a director who tells me they worked for years editing a film.
The way I work is to look through everything I have – very quickly, over a couple of days – and make notes. For all my films over the past decade I have kept a logbook in which I briefly describe, in longhand, the details of every shot and what people are saying. I know there's a particularly wonderful moment at minute 4:13 on tape eight because I have marked the description of the action with an exclamation point. These days my editor Joe Bini and I just move from one exclamation point to the next; anything unmarked is almost always bypassed. When it comes to those invaluable clips with three exclamation marks, I tell Joe, "If these moments don't appear in the finished film, I have lived in vain." With digital technology, anything mediocre or that detracts from the story is easily junked, and the remaining material melted down to the absolutely vital moments. I can edit almost as fast as I can think because I'm able to sink details of fifty hours of footage into my mind. This might have something to do with the fact that I started working on film, when there was so much celluloid about the place that you had to know where absolutely every frame was. But my memory of all this footage never lasts long, and within two days of finishing editing it becomes a blur in my mind.
I can identify the strongest material at great speed, and rarely change my mind once I make a decision. Usually we can piece together a first assembly of what the final film will be in less than a fortnight. We never look at what we edited the previous day; every morning we start from the point where we finished the day before. Once we have worked through the entire film, we move backwards; this keeps the material fresh and ensures that only footage of the highest calibre remains. It isn't that I have a particularly slovenly attitude to the editing process; I'm just ruthless with the decisions I make. I feel safe in my skills of navigation and never try out twenty different versions of the same sequence. On the few occasions an editor has persuaded me to go back and look at something I decided against, or to cut a sequence in a new way, it almost always turns out not to have been worth the effort. Occasionally, however, it pays dividends. One recent instance stands out, when Joe Bini and I were working on _Bad Lieutenant._ There is a sequence in a moving car where Nicolas Cage pulls out his Magnum and threatens to shoot everyone. The drug dealer appeases him by giving him a bag of heroin. In one of the takes Nicolas went beyond the script. He grinned, waved his gun and said, "I'm going to kill you all to the break of dawn!" It didn't feel right to me, but Joe thought it was great material and asked me to consider it in the context of this character's evolution. After he put together the final thirty minutes of the film I was able to see exactly how the scene fit in the story as a whole, and realised that both Joe and Nicolas were right.
Let me say something here about how time and money is wasted during post-production, in particular when it comes to documentaries. I often meet people who make detailed transcripts of the conversations they have recorded, then prepare "paper edits" of their films. I've never seen the point of all this. If you focus only on the words on the page and don't watch the actual images and listen to the people talking, you bypass the nuances, rhythms of speech and physical gestures. You'll never understand the fundamental spirit of the person and, in turn, of the conversation. Editing a film from a transcript can be misleading. You might think it's possible to cut a piece of dialogue very cleanly, when in reality the person you filmed was talking very quickly and ran one sentence into the next in the same breath. More importantly, you miss the sometimes extraordinarily powerful silences. I categorically forbid transcripts to be made until a film is finished, and only then for legal and archival reasons.
_Have you ever reached the editing stage and found the footage an unworkable mess?_
Never. If you have footage of real substance, it will always connect and cut together. The first version of _Invincible_ was too long, so I put it aside for six weeks and tried to forget about it; I needed some distance between the film and me. After a day of condensing and tightening, I cut forty minutes. Sometimes an individual scene won't work exactly as planned. I shot an intense seven-minute sequence for _The Enigma of Kaspar_ Hauser with Kaspar and an impoverished peasant who, in despair, had killed his last surviving cow. The idea was to place the scene about two-thirds of the way into the film. It made sense in the context of the story but somehow disrupted the flow of the narrative, shifting the focus of the story away from Kaspar. The scene detoured the audience too much, and it would have taken several minutes to get back into the story once it was over. Although it was one of the two or three best sequences I have ever shot, I threw it out.
_Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus joined you on the set of_ Stroszek.
I don't particularly like confronting my footage alone, and prefer working closely with an editor. Having another pair of eyes that can help me discover qualities and elements I might have missed is always valuable. I like having collaborators around me, people with their own vision, though none of my editors over the years have had complete freedom; I'm present throughout the entire editing process. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus edited for Alexander Kluge before working on several of my early films, including _Aguirre_ and _Land of Silence and Darkness_ , and was truly gifted at instantly sensing the quality of the footage in front of her, always able to identify what material worked and what didn't.
Starting with _Signs of Life_ , the first film we made together, Beate always complained about how bad my films were; she thought they were so embarrassingly terrible that she never went to the opening night of any of them, with the exception of _Even Dwarfs Started Small_. We checked the first reel of _Signs of Life_ on the flatbed, a 2,000-foot roll. It had been coiled the wrong way from the end, so she put it on the machine and spun it backwards, about five times as fast as it would normally be viewed. Then she grabbed the whole reel and threw it into the garbage, saying, "This is so bad I'm not going to touch it again." I was aghast, but after a couple of weeks looked at the reel again in the context of the film as a whole and realised she was right. Beate was able to spot good footage just as quickly. While some people have perfect pitch when it comes to music, she was able to express a sensibility for film material that corresponded to my own. Her grumbling about the terrible footage I was forever dumping on her doorstep was somehow a challenge; it pushed me to do the best I possibly could. I loved seeing her with those reels that she truly felt had such little value because I knew she would work harder than anyone to salvage whatever good might be in them.
For years I explained to Beate that much of what she complained about when in the editing room was due to the physical circumstances of shooting, that there were always obstacles that I struggled with on location, that every shot involved some sort of compromise. "If you don't believe me," I told her, "why not come to the set of the next film?" She came to do continuity and watch the filming of _Stroszek_ in Germany and America, and hated every day of shooting even more than the time she later spent editing the film. She found the whole experience, and the story, completely disgusting, and would sometimes signal to the cameraman to stop the whole damned thing, including one take when Bruno and Eva Mattes were doing some of the best work I have ever seen. But that's life; you have to accept strong collaborators. I don't need yes-men and -women around me, a docile crew that tells me everything I do is great. What I want are people like Beate, who bring with them a strong independent spirit and attitude.
Having said that, because Beate had been on location the film was more difficult to edit, and after _Stroszek_ I realised there is a certain value to keeping the editor as far away from the shoot as possible. Maintaining a distance helps preserve the purity of approach; an editor must be able to look at footage as clearly and objectively as possible. Being witness to all the trouble and effort that goes into shooting a particular scene – maybe one I'm anxious not to cut – means they might decide to keep it because of all the trouble it caused us during filming. But not wanting to remove a scene that doesn't work can never be a useful position to take. During the editing of every film you have to undergo the sometimes painful, sometimes joyous process of tearing things out and throwing them in the garbage. A film is easily ruined when a director squeezes his material into preconceived notions that have been channelled into post-production. When looking at your material, forget about the screenplay you wrote and then filmed; put aside any ideas you might have brought into the editing room about how the material should be pieced together. If a filmmaker distorts the fundamental nature of his footage by butchering the images to fit preconceived editing patterns, audiences immediately sense a patch-up job. The only thing to do is look carefully at what is sitting in front of you. Let it all overshadow you. Only one question remains: what is truly present in the footage? At every stage it's vital to allow the material to take on a life of its own. You might want your children to have certain qualities, but you will never end up with one to your exact specifications. Every film needs the chance to live its own life and develop its own character, however surprising. It's a mistake to suppress this. If material contains qualities you didn't expect, continue digging and discover the gems.
_Have you thought about releasing the so-called "director's cuts" of your films?_
I have been the producer of much of my work, and every film of mine has been the director's cut. As for out-takes, I have none. It's too expensive to store such things – those endless reels – and soon after the release of a film I throw out all the unused footage, everything that didn't make the final cut, including the negative and printed out-takes. A carpenter doesn't sit on his shavings. When I was in New York after the shoot of _Fitzcarraldo_ , I looked through all the material and decided what was useful and what wasn't, then threw out everything I didn't want to transport back to Germany, which meant considerable savings in freight and customs charges.
I have always kept the completed, cut negatives of my films. For years they were in a state of decay, some with colours fading, because I never had the money to pay for a duplicate negative. Originally my feelings about this had to do with my belief that film has a shorter shelf life than literature, that the inevitable deterioration and decay of celluloid is a natural phenomenon. Most films made in the first years of cinema's history are no longer with us, and in the not too distant future perhaps people will read books to find out what films were being made at the turn of the millennium. All that will exist is a single photo, alongside a basic description of the story and a few lines about the director. In the last few years my attitude to film preservation has changed, perhaps against my better judgement. I can see why films are worth saving, especially because I'm glad that certain German films from the twenties are still in existence, and that much of the work of Griffith, Méliès and the Lumière brothers is in good shape and available for contemporary audiences. Our world has always been, in a manner of speaking, reflected through cinema, and when you think about people five hundred years from now trying to understand civilisation today, they will probably get more out of a Tarzan film than the president's State of the Union address. Attitudes and trends shift so radically over time that what is considered today a third-rate B-picture, ridiculed and rejected on its first release, might tomorrow be heralded a masterpiece. It means we have a responsibility to preserve even bad films.
There is something about the work I produced forty years ago that still draws people in, but I'm under no illusions: my existence on this planet is fleeting, and so, perhaps, should be the lives of my films. I would never dare predict that anyone will be watching them a hundred years from now. Anyway, I live wholly in the present and really couldn't care less about posterity. There is only forward.
* See Grass's _Two States – One Nation? The Case Against German Reunification_ (Secker and Warburg, 1990), where he writes: "We should be aware – as our neighbors are – of how much grief this unified state caused, of what misfortune it brought to others and to ourselves as well. The crime of genocide, summed up in the image of Auschwitz, inexcusable from whatever angle you view it, weighs on the conscience of this unified state."
† See "Thinking about Germany," p. 458.
‡ _Milirrpum_ v. _Nabalco_ (1971) 17 FLR 141 was the first litigation on land rights and native title in Australia. The Northern Territory Supreme Court ruled against the Aborigine claimants, a decision overruled by the High Court of Australia in 1992.
§ See Chatwin's essay "Werner Herzog in Ghana," in _What Am I Doing Here_ (Vintage, 1998).
# Fact and Truth
_What was the starting point of your Minnesota Declaration?_
The Minnesota Declaration, written in 1999, is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and designed to provoke, but the ideas it tackles are those my mind has been seriously engaged with for many years, from my earliest documentaries onwards. After wrestling with these issues in various films, they became more relevant than ever with _Bells from the Deep, Death for Five Voices_ and _Little Dieter Needs to Fly._ The point is that the word "documentary" should be handled with care. It seems to have a precise definition, but this comes from the lack of a more appropriate concept for a whole range of cinema, and our unfortunate need to categorise. Although they are usually classified as such, it would be misleading to call those three films documentaries. They merely come under the guise of that label.
The background to the Minnesota Declaration – subtitled "Truth and Fact in Documentary Filmmaking" – is simple. I had flown from Europe to San Francisco and back again in a short space of time, and ended up in Sicily, where I was staging an opera. Unable to sleep because of jet lag, at midnight I turned on the television and was confronted by an excruciatingly boring nature film about animals somewhere out in the Serengeti, all cute and fluffy. At two in the morning I stumbled across something equally unbearable. But then, at four o'clock, I found a hardcore porno. I sat up in bed. "My God," I said to myself. "Finally something straightforward, something real." It was the naked truth, even if it was purely physical. I had been thinking about writing some kind of manifesto, a rant against _cinéma-vérité_ and my thoughts about fact and truth in filmmaking. I wanted to explore the idea of what I call "ecstatic truth," even if it's a phrase that shouldn't be interpreted too deeply; everyone should figure it out for themselves. That same night I sat for twenty minutes and wrote down the twelve points, the fundamental idea behind which is that we can never know what truth really is. The best we can do is approximate.
There is a monastery in Rome called the Santissima Trinità dei Monti. On one of the walls of the cloister is a painting of St Francesco di Paola. From a distance, looking down a corridor, the image is clearly of a saint staring up into the sky in some sort of rapture, but the closer you move to the picture, by doing so changing your perspective on it, the more distorted and incomprehensible it becomes. When you stand directly in front of it, the image has been completely transformed; the saint has disappeared and a landscape – the Strait of Messina – has taken his place. There are other examples of paintings that use anamorphosis, but I have always considered this the most interesting one. Sometimes, when you think something is understood, when you feel that the truth of an image has been grasped, the more unknown it becomes, no matter how close you get to it and how deep you explore. Truth can never be definitively captured or described, though the quest to find answers is what gives meaning to our existence.
A few days after my late-night hotel experience in Sicily, I was at the Walker Art Center in Minnesota for a retrospective of my work. In something that turned into a serene, low-key rant, I read out to the audience what I had written in that hotel room and distributed printed copies. "I have brought you a kind of manifesto," I told everyone, "and would like to call it the Minnesota Declaration. Do I have your approval? If anyone has any objections, let me know." The crowd went wild; it was the first time I had ever received unanimous public approval. These dozen points contain, in condensed form, everything that has angered and moved me over the years. And hopefully people will find it all somewhat humorous and unpretentious.*
_Your conclusion about_ cinéma-vérité _is that it fails to penetrate the deeper truth of situations it portrays._
As I said when we talked about _ekstasis_ , some mystics lived their faith and spirituality as if in ecstasy, allowing them to penetrate things more deeply than pure rationality does. They experienced truth in an ecstatic form by leaving behind the confines of their human essence. The word for "truth" in ancient Greek is " _aletheia_ ," derived from the verb "to hide." This is a negative definition, meaning to bring something out of hiding and make it visible, and is actually a very cinematic concept because when you film something, there is a latent image on the celluloid; only when you develop that celluloid does the image emerge for all to see. My work in cinema strives for the same: to make visible those things that are latent in us.
When filmmakers explore dimensions beyond the so-called "truth" of _cinéma-vérité_ , they are ploughing fertile ground. _Cinéma-vérité_ is fact orientated and primitive. It is the accountant's truth, merely skirting the surface of what constitutes a deeper form of truth in cinema, reaching only the most banal level of understanding. If facts had any value, if they truly illuminated us, if they unquestionably stood for truth, the Manhattan phone directory would be the book of books. Millions of established and verifiable facts, but senseless and uninspiring. The important truths remain unknown. Do we know what all these people dream about? For whom do they cast their ballots? Why does Mr John Smith cry into his pillow at night? Too many documentary filmmakers have failed to divorce themselves clearly enough from the world of journalism. I hope to be one of those who bury _cinéma-vérité_ for good.
None of us lead lives of pure logic and order, and similarly, in the best cases, cinema has a strange, mysterious and illusory quality. It isn't suited to capturing realism and daily life; it has forever been able to reach beyond formal systems of understanding. It sheds light on our fantasies and – like poetry, literature and music – can illuminate in ways we will never truly be able to grasp. It leads audiences into places where they can observe truth more deeply. I have, with every one of my films, attempted to move beyond facts and illuminate the audience with ecstatic truth. Facts might have normative power, but they don't constitute truth. Facts don't illuminate. Only truth illuminates. By making a clear distinction between "fact" and "truth," I penetrate a deeper stratum that most films don't even know exists. The truth inherent in cinema can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically and mathematically correct. In other words, I play with the facts as we know them. Through imagination and fabrication, I become more truthful than the bureaucrats. I keep telling young people – sometimes hesitant to explore this kind of cinema – that manipulation, concoction and invention are what cinema is really about.
_Is there, in this respect, any difference between your fiction and non-fiction films?_
The line between fiction and documentary doesn't exist for me. My documentaries are often fictions in disguise. All my films, every one of them, take facts, characters and stories and play with them in the same way. I consider _Fitzcarraldo_ to be my best documentary and _Little Dieter Needs to Fly_ my best feature. They are both highly stylised and full of imagination.
Land of Silence and Darkness _is an important film in this respect._
Yes, though at the time my ideas on the subject weren't so developed. I wonder if they were even conscious; it was more an instinctive approach. The line quoted at the end of that film – "If a world war were to break out now, I wouldn't even notice it" – isn't something Fini ever said; I wrote those words because I felt they encapsulated how someone like her might experience the world. The lines at the start of the film, when she talks about the ecstatic faces of the ski flyers who she says she used to watch as a child, are also by me. This is all pure invention; Fini had never actually seen a ski flyer before. I asked her to recite those words because I felt that the solitude and ecstasy of these athletes as they flew through the air was a powerful visual metaphor to represent her solitude and state of mind. No scenes were ever shot contrary to her wishes; she was happy to record what I had written for her, and showed her understanding by squeezing my hand. Different rules apply when the subject of a film is dead. With Kinski in _My Best Fiend_ and Timothy Treadwell in _Grizzly Man_ – both of whom weren't around to defend themselves – I was especially careful with the material I was working with and the stories I wanted to tell.
What I did with _Invincible_ is an example of how I have used these ideas and applied them to a feature film. Most of the facts about the life of Polish blacksmith Zishe Breitbart in the twenties didn't interest me, so I reinvented the character, transplanting him into the early thirties, the period when the Nazis were gaining power. Everything fascinating about the relationship between Germans and Jews was exacerbated in that era, then turned into the most monstrous crime and tragedy. The "truth" about Zishe's life is brought much more into focus when we see his story through the lens of Nazi Germany.
_This isn't an approach you take for all your non-fiction films._
The stylisations in my documentaries are usually subtle ones; you probably wouldn't notice them unless you were paying close attention, though even in a film like _Ballad of the Little Soldier_ you can see hints. I could have made a straightforward study of the situation in Nicaragua and called it _The Children's War Against the Sandinistas_ , but I used the title I did because some of the most interesting material I shot was of villagers and young soldiers singing. The Miskito Indians are a people with a great musical tradition, and I felt their songs were a powerful way of revealing their deepest beliefs. I wanted to tell the story of children who were dying in battle, and the images of them singing become a powerful way of looking into their hearts, much more so than filming them with rifles in hand. In _Cave of Forgotten Dreams_ you see Maurice Maurin, a man with extraordinary olfactory talent, roaming the landscape, fantasising about the odours of thirty thousand years ago. I filmed him using his primal technique of searching for currents of air and sniffing around at the base of a mountain. This was all my invention, though at one time Monsieur Maurin really was president of the French Society of Perfumers.
Take a look at the argument I have with Graham Dorrington in _The White Diamond_. He didn't think it right that I go up in the prototype airship, and insisted that for safety's sake he make the maiden flight on his own. But if there was going to be only one flight, I wanted to be up there with a camera. The truth is that though these conversations really did take place, what you see in the film was staged, and we shot the scene several times. In _The White Diamond_ is a sensational image captured by one of the cameramen, a wildlife photographer. We see a droplet of water in extreme close-up, and refracted through it is the waterfall, which appears upside down. I knew if I placed it in the right context and was inventive enough, the kitsch wouldn't show. There's a scene where Marc Anthony Yhap is out foraging for medical herbs. He stops on a ledge where there is a view of the falls and points out this droplet to the camera. Everything he says was planned, including my question to him, the most insipid New Age thing I could think of: "Do you see a whole universe in this one single drop of water?" In real life I would never ask something so stupid, but Marc Anthony slowly turns with an imperceptible smirk on his face and says, "I cannot hear what you say, for the thunder that you are." I shot this scripted line – which I borrowed from _Cobra Verde_ – a few times before I got exactly what I wanted. It wasn't actually even a real droplet of water. It was glycerine, which is more translucent and has better optical properties. I placed it very carefully on the leaf myself.
At the start of _Echoes from a Sombre Empire_ I appear on camera, sitting in my Munich office, reading from a letter written by Michael Goldsmith in which he explains that his experiences of Bokassa and the Central African Republic still resonate powerfully within him, and that he recently dreamt about crabs invading the earth. These large, bright-red creatures have emerged from the ocean and are crawling everywhere, eventually covering the entire planet, layer upon layer. Michael's letter was real, but it never mentioned crabs; the idea was mine, and the images of them crossing the railroad tracks came from footage I found in an archive. There is no symbolism here and I can't explain it fully, but I know these images belong in the film. There is, incidentally, no clear-cut symbolism in any of my films. I've never thought in such terms; for me, a chair is a chair, and even if it were shoved under my nose I wouldn't recognise a symbol in a painting or film. Years later I went to Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, west of the Australian mainland, and filmed those same crabs for _Invincible_. I spent days waiting for millions of these creatures to crawl out from the jungle, head towards the sea, mate, then lay their eggs.
The final scene of _Echoes from a Sombre Empire_ is set in a decrepit zoo, where we were searching for the lions that had lived in Bokassa's court. When someone was sentenced to death they were often thrown either to the lions or crocodiles. By the time we got there, almost every animal in the zoo had starved to death; we found only a leopard, a hyena and – the saddest thing I have ever seen – a chimpanzee addicted to cigarettes, thanks to the drunken soldiers who had taught it to smoke. In the film you see Goldsmith looking at this creature. He says something like, "I can't take this any longer," then asks me to turn off the camera. "Michael, I think this is one of the shots I should hold," I answer back from behind the camera. "Only if you promise this will be the last shot in the film," he says. The nicotine-addicted animal was real, but this dialogue and my use of the animal was a scripted invention. The scene – which we shot six times – was carefully planned. There was something momentous and mysterious about the chimp, and filming it in the way I did elevates _Echoes from a Sombre Empire_ to a deeper level of truth. To call the film a documentary is like saying Warhol's _Campbell's Soup Cans_ is a document about tomato soup.
The opening quote at the start of _Lessons of Darkness_ is from Blaise Pascal: "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like Creation – in grandiose splendour." This may sound like Pascal, but it was invented by me. Even some scholars don't know the quote is a fake, but I would rather see people dig around and read Pascal than ask me where I found these lines. I tell everyone it comes from an obscure essay published in a journal of the period which has never been included in his complete works. This means they keep searching, which is good news for me. I have a joy of invention, and this Pascalian pseudo-quote helps elevate audiences to a higher, almost sublime level before they have even seen the first image of the film. We're immediately in the realm of poetry, which inevitably strikes a more profound chord than mere reportage. Audiences have been lifted to a level that prepares them for something momentous; they are instantaneously immersed in the cosmic. Pascal himself couldn't have said it better. Shakespeare thought the same way: "the truest poetry is the most feigning." My purpose is never to deceive or mislead. Does Michelangelo deceive us with his _Pietà_ , one of the most beautiful sculptures on God's wide earth? Jesus is correctly portrayed as a thirty-three-year-old man, but his mother is sculpted as a girl of seventeen. In this context my Pascal invention is legitimate. Following the quote, _Lessons of Darkness_ continues with a voiceover that speaks of "A planet in our solar system with wide mountain ranges enshrouded in mist." What I actually filmed were little heaps of dust and soil created by trucks as they drove through the desert. Those mountain ranges were no more than a foot high. Like many things in my films this isn't a lie, just an intensified form of truth.
_You made_ Lessons of Darkness _soon after the end of the Gulf War._
The world had been saturated night and day with images of the burning oil wells in Kuwait, but through the filter of television news. I remember watching those broadcasts and knowing I was witnessing a momentous event that had to be recorded, but in a unique way for the memory of mankind. The networks and cable channels had filmed it all wrong; that tabloid style of reporting, with its eight-second snippets, quickly inured audiences to the horrors, and all too soon everyone had forgotten about those spectacular fields of serene, pitch-black burning oil that covered the landscape. I was seeking images of another kind, something very different, something longer lasting. I wanted to see these shots play out in long, almost endless takes. Only then could the images reveal their true power.
The stylisation of horror in _Lessons of Darkness_ means the images penetrate deeper than regular television news footage ever could, something that bothered audiences in Germany. When the film was shown at the Berlin Film Festival, nearly two thousand people rose up with a single voice in an angry roar. They accused me of "aestheticising" the horror, and so hated the film that when I walked down the aisle after the screening, people spat at me. I was told that _Lessons of Darkness_ was dangerously authoritarian, and so – finding all this hostility rather invigorating – I decided to be authoritarian at my very best. I stood before them and said, "Mr Dante did the same in his inferno, and Mr Goya did it in his paintings. Brueghel and Bosch too. You cretins are all wrong." You should have heard the tornado of disgust. The German press found the film to be a dangerous attack on everyone's decency, though it received tremendous reviews around the world. After all, I'm hardly the first filmmaker to show this kind of stylisation on screen. Kubrick's _Dr Strangelove_ , with its beautifully blossoming atomic explosions, is one of the most painful films I have ever seen. Sitting here twenty years later I would dare an assumption: if I showed _Lessons of Darkness_ to audiences at the Berlin Film Festival today, they would like it.
_There were criticisms about you not identifying Kuwait._
There was never a need to name Saddam Hussein and the country he attacked. If people watch _Lessons of Darkness_ in three hundred years' time, it still wouldn't be necessary for them to know the historical facts behind the film. War has no fascination for me beyond its absurdity and insanity, and _Lessons of Darkness_ consciously transcends the topical and the particular; this could be any war and any country. The film is about the evil that human beings are capable of, which is why it will never age. It is precisely because Iraq and Kuwait aren't named that humanity will always respond to these sounds and images.
I located the people I filmed through various organisations that were working with torture victims, and specifically set out to find individuals who had lost the power of speech after being tortured. There's an imbalance to the film because I wanted to speak with more of these victims, but the Kuwaiti authorities were constantly scrutinising what I was doing and eventually expelled me from the country. From the start they hoped I would make a film that showed the positive, optimistic reconstruction of the country, with the cleaning up of the oil wells and an apparently heroic fresh start. What the Kuwaitis wanted to portray on film and broadcast to the rest of the world consisted only of heroic firefighters and rescuers, not the scarred victims. They objected to me going into the deepest wounds the war had inflicted on some people, and one afternoon I was handed a letter by the Ministry of Information stating very plainly that we were being wished a pleasant flight out of the country early the next morning. It was obviously an expulsion order. If I had insisted on continuing filming, they would have confiscated my footage, so I wrapped things up and left.
_You show both the landscape from afar and the firefighters on the ground._
_Lessons of Darkness_ belongs as much to British cameraman and co-producer Paul Berriff as me. There was the danger of two cooks preparing one meal, but Paul is a man of such calibre that our collaboration worked very well; ultimately I owe the film to him. I knew after watching CNN that I wanted to go to Kuwait, and found Paul by searching for someone – anyone – with a shooting permit. The massive oil fires were being extinguished unexpectedly fast, so I had to hurry. I met Paul in a hotel in Vienna. It turned out that although he had all the required paperwork, he wasn't entirely sure what he wanted to film. We talked for only twenty minutes before I said, "Do you have the nerve to step back as director of this film and be just the cameraman?" Paul stood up and bowed. "It would be an honour," he said. A courageous man, very physical, dogged in everything he does. He had already made several daring films about people such as sea rescuers, who pluck drowning people from the North Sea as they dangle down on a cable from a helicopter, and throughout the seventies shot several films for the BBC about the unrest in Northern Ireland. Paul himself has risked his life to save people in trouble and has received numerous awards for bravery.
A skilled helicopter pilot was imperative, and fortunately Paul had already contacted Jerry Grayson, an expert pilot who had worked on several Hollywood films. He understood the terrain and airflows around the burning oil wells, and was able to establish a pattern of flight that facilitated a sequence of travelling shots. I was lucky he had a true narrative intelligence and knew intuitively where to move next in terms of the story being told. I was never in the helicopter; the footage was shot two days before I arrived in the country. The cameraman, Simon Werry, is an expert aerial photographer who knew I wanted as many unbroken travelling shots of the landscape as possible. I would never have been able to direct every one of the shots even if I had been up there, where temperatures reached over a thousand degrees. If Jerry had flown across an area into which the heat might be suddenly blown, the helicopter would have exploded. When flying over the burning oil fields he had to make his own choices for safety reasons, and did an outstanding job in allowing Simon to hold the shots for as long as he possibly could.
I was initially advised to make a film about Red Adair and his efforts to put out the fires, but his working methods involved the heaviest imaginable machinery and every precaution in the book. He was extremely meticulous, cowardly and overly bureaucratic; he wanted the most expensive, state-of-the-art equipment put in place, which would have taken months, and predicted it would take four or five years to put out the fires, which it would have done if Adair had gone about things his own way. Very few people in Kuwait were actually in favour of how he was doing things. The job was eventually done within about six months, though the crews working on the ground were running high risks. The men in the film are, I think, American or Canadian. There were also Iranians, Hungarians and teams from all over the world. The Iranians were the most remarkable because they didn't have much equipment, so they fought the fires almost with their bare hands, so to speak. Everyone who worked with these men spoke of them with great respect.
One of the reasons my collaboration with Paul worked so well was because of this understanding of hearts we had, something that became obvious when we decided we didn't want to use long zoom lenses when filming on the ground. If something interested us, we physically moved in together, and wherever possible placed ourselves beside the firefighters. Paul did most of the camerawork himself, and we shot only on film, not video. Sometimes this was a problem because raw stock has to be acclimatised, which meant we couldn't just unpack the celluloid and expose it in the camera. We had to protect the magazines with aluminium foil and remove the film from the heat as quickly as possible once a roll had been shot. Whenever possible we tried to shoot with the wind from behind, so the heat was blown away from us. We had regular cameras and wore Nomex suits for protection, the kind used by Formula One drivers, which can keep you alive for about half a minute when you're engulfed in flames. We cut the tips of our flameproof gloves off to operate the camera and were hosed down by firefighters every forty-five seconds; the soles of our shoes would have melted away if we hadn't been careful. At one point Paul jumped out from behind the barrier where we were taking refuge from the heat because he wanted to film something, and the part of his face not covered by the camera immediately began to redden. I held my two hands over his face for protection, and within ten seconds my thick leather gloves were burning. One of our boom microphones melted away. The sound was actually the most impressive thing; you have to see the film in a cinema with Dolby stereo to really appreciate it. Geysers of fire shooting three hundred feet up into the sky with that kind of pressure sound like four jumbo jets taking off simultaneously. You could scream as loud as you wanted over this noise and still not be heard. There was something cosmic about the experience that went far beyond the politics of the events. It really was like filming on a different planet.
_You have described_ Lessons of Darkness, _like_ Fata Morgana, _as a science-fiction film._
Calling _Lessons of Darkness_ a science-fiction film is a way of explaining that it contains not a single frame recognisable as our planet, yet we know it must have been shot here. I used the voiceover to place the film – and the audience – in a darkened planet somewhere in our solar system.
When we talked about _Fata Morgana_ , I spoke of embarrassed landscapes. The landscape you see in _Lessons of Darkness_ isn't just embarrassed, it's completely mutilated. I set out to record crimes perpetrated against not just humanity, but Creation itself. Our entire world seems to be burning away, and because of the music I call the film "a requiem for an uninhabitable planet." Unlike _La Soufrière_ – which tries to document a natural catastrophe – _Lessons of Darkness_ shows a landscape that has been mutilated by a man-made one. The film plays out as if aliens have landed on an unnamed planet and are observing the world around them. There is a line I speak in the voiceover when one of the firefighters makes a signal: "The first creature we encountered tried to communicate something to us." This idea becomes more explicit with the shot of the firefighter lighting up a plume of gushing oil. The voiceover explains that these men have been seized by madness and are reigniting the flames because they can't imagine life without fire; having something to extinguish makes them happy again. In reality, the gush of oil had created a lake that was approaching other burning fires. If it had ignited, there would have been an even bigger problem, so there was a practical reason for the lighting of this plume. I asked the firefighters to let us know when they were going to take action so we could be there with a camera.
_How did you select the music?_
It fell into place very easily. During editing I watched the film and put on a piece of music, and knew within fifteen seconds if it fit. I didn't need more than two or three attempts for each sequence of the film. The title of _Lessons of Darkness_ comes from a piece of music by François Couperin, _Leçons de ténèbres_ , which was one of my earliest musical discoveries. In _Fata Morgana_ there is a beautiful early recording of the piece performed by Hugues Cuénod, a Swiss tenor. I immediately had the feeling it should be the title of this film.
Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia _features an array of characters from Siberia._
I engaged some Russian collaborators and asked them to scour the land for the most impressive Jesus Christ they could find; there were about a hundred of them roaming Siberia at the time, competing with each other. Eventually they came up with Vissarion, an ex-policeman who one day realised he was, in fact, Jesus. He lived an ascetic life in a tiny apartment in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia and actually had an agent in Moscow, but this didn't bother me because I had the feeling there was real depth to him. The faith healer in the film, Alan Chumack, used to be a well-known media figure on Russian television who would re-enact alien abductions. One day, after discovering he was wildly popular with audiences, Chumack decided he had psychic powers himself.
My favourite character in the film is Yuri Yurevitch Yurieff, the orphaned bell ringer who used to be a cinema projectionist. I flew out of the country the day after we filmed him tolling the bells. It was only months later, while I was editing, that the cameraman Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein said, "After you left we had dinner with Yuri and he told us his life story. He's an orphan and went in search of his lost family." I rushed back to Russia, brushed the snow away from the church tower, put Yuri in the same costume, framed the camera so we couldn't see the frozen landscape, and asked him to tell us his story. He spoke about his search for his parents, a story that mirrors the tragedy of Russia, with the Stalinist repressions and Hitler's invasion, when so many people died or disappeared. When he was found as a child and asked for his name – first, middle and family – all he would say was "Yuri." For me the man is a true musician; the way he strung up the ropes in the tower is incredible and the sound he gets from tolling the bells has real depth to it. My plan was to start the film at a monastery with a single monk playing a single bell, then show bigger and bigger bell-ringing orgies throughout. Yuri would have been somewhere in the middle. I also spent time looking for a hermit. Advertising for such people probably isn't the most useful way of going about things, but I did eventually find one. He wasn't actually a textbook hermit, just a convicted murderer who had built himself a small monastery within a prison compound near St Petersburg, next to the football pitch, where he lived a monastic life. I looked hard for a genuine hermit and had so many knowledgeable people engaged in the search that I can't imagine there are any left. Very few anyway, and well hidden at that.
_Do you speak Russian?_
I understand some words and more or less the subject of a conversation. The key to _Bells from the Deep_ was Viktor Danilov, an interpreter I met during the shooting of Peter Fleischmann's _Hard to Be a God_ , in which I played a small role. Viktor helped with the on-camera conversations and always knew in which direction I wanted the encounters with these people to move. Sometimes, when I would sense things were going off topic, he would look at me and signal with his face, as if to say, "Don't interrupt!" I wouldn't have made the film without him.
_Is anything invented?_
It depends on what you mean by "invented." A woman stands on a hilltop explaining that the locals call it "The Seventh Hill of Jerusalem," that the hill once opened up and revealed to visiting pilgrims a singing choir and cathedral consecrated to the fourteen thousand children killed in Bethlehem by Herod. Then she crawls on her hands and knees and touches the stump of a pine tree a man once chopped down, after which he immediately went blind and died. "Nobody is allowed to chop trees down on this sacred hill or harm them in any way," she explains, adding that the stump has miraculous powers and can heal the sick. Then she turns to me and asks if she should crawl around some more. I nodded from behind the camera. There is another old woman in the film – the one with a bandaged hand – who told me about her pig that had escaped from the sty. It went berserk and attacked a cow, so she grabbed a stick and yelled at it, at which point the animal turned on her and bit her hand. What does any of this have to do with "faith and superstition"? It's like in school, when I would write essays on German literature and apparently totally miss the point. "You were meant to write an essay about Hölderlin," the teachers would tell me, "but what you wrote is completely off topic." Today, having left school behind me, I can now take these apparent liberties and include the story of this rabid pig, which obviously has to do with faith and superstition. It's in the film, after all.
_Bells from the Deep_ doesn't strive to report facts about Russia as an ethnographic film or book might do; that would be like reading a Hölderlin poem in which he describes a storm in the Alps and insisting it's a weather report from 1802. The best of the film is fabricated. It begins in the Tuvinian Autonomous Republic, northwest of Mongolia. An old man is throat-singing about the beauty of a mountain. Later in the film there are two boys – one twelve, the other fourteen – singing a love song. What does this have to do with a film about faith? Yet it belongs; just by dint of declaration this becomes a religious hymn. Later we see what appear to be people deep in prayer. We were driving to a location when I stopped the bus because in the distance I saw a frozen lake with dozens of people on it; they had drilled holes in the ice and were sitting, quietly fishing. It was so cold they were crouching down with their backs against the wind, all facing the same direction, as if they were in deep meditation, so the film declares them pilgrims in prayer.
In the final moments there are two speed skaters moving through the shot. I spotted them from a distance and whistled to catch their attention, then explained I wanted them to be in the film, passing in and out of the frame, gently in between the people on the ice. They agreed, but were anxious to show how good they were and started dashing around like madmen; one of them used to be in the Soviet Olympic skating team and wanted to show off. I had a specific piece of music in mind for this sequence, so the images had to correspond with the rhythms in my head. I told the skaters to go much slower and float majestically into shot with a certain gravitas and magnificence. We shot it several times before they understood exactly what I wanted. Watch the scene again and look at the precision with which they move.
_Is the legend of the Lost City of Kitezh real?_
_Bells from the Deep_ is one of the most pronounced examples of what I mean when I say that through invention, fabrication and staging you can reach a more intense level of truth. I took a fact – that for many people this lake was the final resting place of this lost city – and explored the truth of the situation to reach a more poetic understanding. I heard about the myth while I was out there; it's a very real belief of these people. As recounted to me, the legend is that the city was systematically ransacked and demolished by hundreds of years of Tartar and Hun invasions. The inhabitants called on God to redeem them, and He sent an archangel who tossed the city into a bottomless lake, where the people live in bliss, chanting their hymns and tolling the bells. During the summer, pilgrims crawl around the lake on all fours, saying their prayers. I was also there at the beginning of winter because I wanted shots of them looking through the ice, trying to catch a glimpse of the lost city. Unfortunately there was no one around, so I hired two drunks from the nearby town and asked them to play pilgrims. One of them has his face on the ice and looks as if he's deep in meditation. The accountant's truth: he was fast asleep.
You can find a sister to this image in _Encounters at the End of the World_ , which I filmed years later. The sound designer Douglas Quin gave me a series of extraordinary recordings of underwater seal calls – what one physiologist in Antarctica describes in the film as "inorganic sounds" – and I asked the scientists to get on their hands and knees, as if they were trying to listen through the ice for these noises, which sound like early electronic music. It was all precisely staged because I wanted the shot to be perfectly balanced; of course, none of these people would do such a thing for real. I asked them to repeat it a couple of times, to the point where the ear of one woman froze to the ice. I was immediately profuse with my apologies. While we were shooting _Encounters_ I noticed that the divers who went under the Ross Ice Shelf, a bay in Antarctica the size of Texas, didn't speak much. To me, it seemed as if they were priests preparing for Mass. When under the ice, the divers find themselves in a separate reality in which space and time acquire a strange new dimension; Henry Kaiser, who filmed down there and whose footage appears in _The Wild Blue Yonder_ , speaks about his dives being consciousness-altering experiences. In the film I say that those who have experienced the world under the frozen sky often talk of "going down into the cathedral." I made up that line, though there is something almost religious about being down under the ice, as if confronted by the essence of Creation itself.
_Is what we see in_ Bells from the Deep _representative of the general attitudes and feelings in Russia today?_
Many Russians – including my wife – are philosophical when it comes to beliefs and superstitions. The depth of the Russian soul is unique, and the border between faith and superstition is often blurred for them. The question is: how do you depict the soul of an entire nation in only sixty minutes? The scene of the drunken city-seekers somehow represents Russia; the entire country is secretly searching for the Lost City of Kitezh. Russians who have seen _Bells from the Deep_ consider this sequence the best in the film. They understand the devout passion and religious fervour of people who stare so intently, face down, with unwavering concentration, into the depths below.
_Florian Fricke wrote the music for several of your films._
I first met him around 1967, at the home of an industrialist, the man whose wife took me to Africa to make _The Flying Doctors of East Africa_. I would play football with him on the lawn of this enormous house. He was classically trained, a fine pianist who had studied at Freiburg University until injury forced him to quit, so he became a composer instead. For decades he was a trusted collaborator and wrote the music for many of my films, including _The Great Ecstasy, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu_ and _Heart of Glass_. He also appears as the pianist in both _Signs of Life_ and _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_. We worked closely together, and often I would tell him the story I had in mind before there was even a written screenplay. We wouldn't talk about music; we spoke instead about the inner drama of the story, or about some sort of vision I had. He was a poet first and a musician second, and his feel for the inner narrative of a cinematic story was infallible. Florian never failed to create music that has forever given us an entrée into otherwise in accessible dimensions. It's what I was saying earlier about the music in _Fata Morgana_. Florian's compositions add dimensions to a film that we never knew existed and enable us to shift our perception; they make visible what would otherwise remain mysterious and forever hidden in my films, and also what lies buried in our souls. Although when seen alongside Florian's music an image remains the same projection of light, it is somehow transformed, like the cliff faces and peaks of _The Dark Glow of the Mountains_ , which appear to possess a sacred aura and cast a strange spell when we look at them while listening to music by Popol Vuh, Florian's one-man band.
I described to Florian what I wanted for _Aguirre_ – something full of human pathos and the surreal – and what he came up with wasn't real singing, nor was it completely artificial either; it sits uncomfortably between the two. I wanted choral music that would sound out of this world. Florian used a strange instrument called a choir-organ, which is similar to a mellotron and contains three dozen different tapes running parallel in loops. Each tape would be a voice of a single pitch. Put together it sounds like a human choir, but the music has an artificial, eerie quality to it. He was always full of ideas like this, though towards the end we moved in different directions; he drifted into New Age pseudo-culture and the style of his music changed. I used to joke with Florian, telling him, "You must never grow old. You have to die young and beautiful." I can still hear those words in my mind today. After his death in 2001 I asked his widow if she had any music of his I had never heard, and she gave me a piece I used in _Wheel of Time_. Not only does this music somehow help transport the images, it's also a bow in the direction of my dear friend.
_Has sound design always been important to your films?_
On practically my first film I came to understand that sound decides the outcome of many battles, that the texture and subtleties of a film often come from its soundtrack. I encounter many young directors who manage to make their first film – after overcoming problems of finance, organisation and everything else – but fall down because of their neglect of sound. Almost all my films have been shot with direct sound, which inevitably takes more time and energy than recording it months later in the controlled environment of a studio. Sometimes it takes more time to prepare the sound than it does to set up the shot. When it comes to post-production, for _The Wild Blue Yonder_ soundtrack I took recordings of howler monkeys I made in Guyana when I was making _The White Diamond_ and carefully added them to Henry Kaiser's underwater footage. Every bird noise you hear in _Aguirre_ was intentional. Throughout the shoot we recorded as many birds as possible, then carefully mixed the film's soundtrack, which makes the jungle seem alive and dangerous. The silences were especially carefully designed; whenever you hear nothing there must be Indians around, and that means death.
The silences in all my films are important. I asked Jean Clottes, one of the scientists in _Cave of Forgotten Dreams_ , to talk about how the silence inside the cave is so profound that you can hear the beating of your own heart. Ernst Reijseger's cello emerges out of the faint heartbeat I added to the soundtrack and the almost imperceptible drops of water you hear inside the cave. It reminds me of a moment in the Taviani brothers' film _Padre Padrone_ , when the father says to his son, "Close your eyes and listen." All we hear is the gentle rustling of leaves on a tree. I will never forget the enormity of the impressive silence I heard in the Sahara and when, as an adolescent, I went with the fishermen of Crete on their small boats that dispersed into the night. With powerful carbide lamps they would attract the fish, which would criss-cross the water like streaks of silver amidst reflections of the stars burning brightly in the sky. No one ever spoke; everything was dead quiet. It's no coincidence that there is a noticeable absence of urban life in my films. I rarely shoot in big cities. I admire Robert Bresson's films, in which we hear so many silences, each one different. Compare these subtleties with a film like _Apocalypse Now_ , where sledgehammer sound effects constantly hit you over the head. It's like watching early colour films, with their absurdly bright and garish images screaming at you.
_Can you read music?_
Although for years when I was young my mother struggled to get me interested in playing the flute and failed to teach me even the most basic melodies, and though I must be one of the few opera directors who can't read music, I know I'm a very musical person. I put my disconnect from music down to a childhood tragedy I experienced at the age of thirteen. The music teacher at school asked everybody to stand up in alphabetical order and sing a song. The whole thing had an ideology behind it; at the time ideas were floating around about everyone having innate musical talent, whether or not they were able to sing. When it came to my turn, I was asked to stand up. "I am not going to sing," I told the teacher. It quickly turned nasty. Bold as I was at that age, I insisted, "Sir, you may do a somersault forward and backward. You may run up the walls and on to the ceiling. I... am... not... going... to... sing." That annoyed him so much he brought in the headmaster. In front of the whole class, while I was standing there, they discussed whether I should be thrown out of school. It was that serious, but I was very stubborn. Then the bastards took the whole class hostage. "Nobody is going to leave until Herzog sings." Everyone started pressuring me, saying, "Don't worry, we won't listen to you. We just want to go outside during the break." The headmaster insisted there would be no break if I didn't sing. I stood my ground, but after forty minutes, for the sake of my classmates, I sang. While doing so I knew I would never sing again in my life. I told myself, "No man will ever break me again."
I disconnected myself entirely from music at that moment, a painful move that created a profound vacuum within me. Today I would give ten years of my life if I could play the cello with the same ease as breathing. The finest music has a quality of consolation you find nowhere else, with perhaps the exception of religion or being in contact with small children. During music lessons at school I became ever more autistic. I was on a different planet; I turned off my ears, and between the ages of thirteen and eighteen music didn't exist for me. When I left school I sensed a huge void, so I dug into music with a ferocious intensity but no guidance from anyone. I started with Heinrich Schütz, and from there to Bach, Orlando di Lasso, Carissimi, then Beethoven and modern composers. Later I encountered Gesualdo's _Sixth Book of Madrigals_ , a moment of absolute enlightenment for me. I was so excited I called up Florian Fricke at three in the morning. "Everyone who is into music knows about Gesualdo," he said after half an hour of my raving. "You sound as if you have discovered a new planet." But for me that's exactly what it felt like, as if I had found something tremendous within our solar system. "Are you ready to take the insult that the director of the opera can't read music?" I ask the conductors I'm working with. "But I can listen very well."
The Transformation of the World into Music _was made at the Bayreuth Wagner Festival._
I became fascinated with Wagner relatively late, and today consider his music as some of the greatest ever written. When I heard Wagner's _Parsifal_ for the first time in Bayreuth during a rehearsal, the auditorium was almost empty. There was a moment in that particular staging when for twenty minutes Kundry is lying on the ground, hidden as part of a rock formation, then suddenly rises up and screams. It was such a shock for me, with my knees propped up against the chairs in front of me, that I was jolted so violently I tore my entire row of seats from its anchoring. Along with Wolfgang Wagner, the grandson of Richard Wagner, I tumbled backwards. Wagner got to his feet and rushed over to me. I thought I was going to be fired, but he bowed, took my hand and said, "Finally, an audience that knows how to respond to the music." I appreciate that Richard Wagner isn't a particularly attractive figure and am well aware of his anti-Semitism, though he is no more to be blamed for Hitler than Marx is for Stalin.
Wolfgang sent a telegram asking me to stage _Lohengrin_ at the Bayreuth Festival. I replied immediately, answering his request with a single word: "No." He refused to take that for an answer and became like a terrier snapping at my heels, insisting I reconsider, even though I kept turning him down. Finally, after weeks of this, he became suspicious and asked whether I had even heard the opera. I told him I hadn't. "Would you please listen to my favourite recording, which I'm going to send you?" he asked. "Then, if your answer is still no, I'll never bother you again." Upon hearing the _Vorspiel_ [overture] for the first time, I was completely stunned, as if lightning had struck. I knew this was something big and beautiful, so I accepted Wagner's offer. "Let's just do the _Vorspiel_ and keep the curtain closed," I said to him. "When people eventually demand to hear the opera, we'll just play it again." Wagner, I think, started to like me. A few years before, when I was writing the script for _Fitzcarraldo_ , I decided Fitzcarraldo should listen to Wagner in the jungle, but when I was next in Peru I distinctly remember listening to _Siegfried_ and quickly realising that Wagner's music didn't connect to the landscape and story I wanted to tell. It's too Teutonic; just go down to the jungle and try it for yourself. The ending of the film – where Bellini's _I Puritani_ is performed with a jungle backdrop – couldn't have worked any other way.
I directed _Lohengrin_ at Bayreuth in 1987, where it ran for seven consecutive years until 1994, when I made _The Transformation of the World into Music_. You have to see the film in context, as a work serving a clear purpose; it's another one of my "utility" films. Over the previous few years operas staged in Bayreuth were being recorded for transmission on the French/German television station Arte. The plan was to screen all of Wagner's operas – something like forty hours of music – in the space of a month, and an introductory piece about the festival was needed. Arte suggested a rather dubious approach, something like "The Myth of Bayreuth," but I told them I would focus instead on the more practical aspects of the festival. I knew I wanted to stay away from the Wagner fundamentalists and mystification of Bayreuth, though there is a moment in the film when Plácido Domingo talks about the festival being a pilgrimage for many people, where performances are sacred rituals. What interested me was that at Bayreuth you find a climate and atmosphere like no other opera festival, a genuine appreciation of music, something made clear by the women, who don't wear jewellery – not like they do in Milan and Salzburg – because it would be out of place. I was fascinated by the craftspeople, who spend months every year preparing the productions. I made _The Transformation of the World into Music_ during my final restaging of _Lohengrin_ , when I had easy access to colleagues, musicians and singers. There were new and significant productions being staged at the time, like Heiner Müller's _Tristan und Isolde_ , so my own work on Lohengrin is only a small part of the film. What's important to remember is that Richard Wagner designed Bayreuth as a workshop where the most important thing is craft and experimentation, not adoration. For two years after I initially staged _Lohengrin_ , I kept modifying and improving the production. The whole thing was an important learning experience for me.
My own stylised contemplation of the reality of Bayreuth, and just how extraordinary and unique the place is, comes in _The_ _Transformation of the World into Music_ when I head into the bombproof vault with a small torch. I could have switched on the light, but entering this darkened, sacred, underground room guided by a custodian makes the whole trip down there more mysterious. The vault contains Wagner's original manuscripts and _partituras_ , which taken together are undoubtedly a monumental achievement of German culture.
_Why a desire to start staging opera in the eighties?_
I never had any such aspiration; I was literally dragged into it. Although I selected the music, the opera at the start of _Fitzcarraldo_ – Verdi's _Ernani_ – was actually directed by Werner Schroeter, not me. When I made the film I had never been to the opera. A few years later, after I had already turned her down a few times, the _intendante_ at the opera house in Bologna somehow persuaded me to come down and take a look at the place, and I was immediately fascinated by the logistics and mechanics. I was standing on the stage when all of a sudden I found myself surrounded by forty stagehands, electricians and other personnel who gently formed a solid circle of bodies. The circle tightened and they locked shoulder to shoulder, entrapping me. "I have been selected as spokesman," one man said. "We have taken a collective decision that we are not going to let you leave until you sign a contract and agree to stage an opera here. We want you to be with us." I looked around at all these nodding Italians with such determined looks on their faces, and said, "Where is this contract?" We went to the office as a group, and I signed. I love the Italians for their gift of physical enthusiasm. They liked the idea that when it came to music, I was untouched by certain ideas and tendencies, and that beholden as I was to no particular kind of staging, I would inevitably take a different approach to the work. Soon after this meeting I watched an opera at Bologna to get an idea of the space and its technical possibilities.
I staged my first opera, Busoni's _Doktor Faust_ , in 1986. Busoni was born in Tuscany, but his mother was from Trieste. He lived most of his life in Germany and other German-speaking countries, so the Germans have never considered him German, and for Italians he was never a fellow countryman. He wrote _Doktor Faust_ at a strange moment, when the world of music was somehow holding its breath, before it moved into twelve-tone. It's an unfinished work, full of gaps and inconsistencies, but I instantly felt comfortable and confident in what I was doing. There are some composers whose music I have no access to, like Schönberg's _Moses und Aron_ or Berg's _Wozzeck,_ though I quickly realised I can cope with the wildest and messiest of stories, even something like Verdi's _Giovanna_ _d'Arco_ , which was originally about a shepherd girl who falls in love with a king, but then – apparently with only a few days' notice – was rewritten as the story of Joan of Arc. The libretto really is _irrapresentabile_ , as the Italians say. My opera work was appreciated with an immediacy by others, something I have rarely experienced with my films. Opera has brought me joy and inner balance, though I'm the first to admit that when I started I had little idea about what opera was supposed to look like and how it functions up there on the stage.
I never do research and have never read any of Wagner's books and essays. Before I started work on _Lohengrin_ an assistant handed me a pile of literature and opera theory, none of which I looked at. The only thing I ever study – and I do it very carefully – is the libretto and the music. The truth is that apart from my own productions, I have watched maybe four or five operas in my entire life, though I have listened to lots of recordings. I know very little about the different stylistic approaches to opera or its trends and fashions; I just seize upon and work with what I see when I hear the music. I can construct the action, setting and entire architecture of an opera in my mind as I listen to it. Hardly anyone believes me when I tell them the first production I ever saw was at La Scala in Milan, two years after I made _Fitzcarraldo_. The key to my opera work is my love of music.
_What does it mean to transform a whole world into music?_
That's what opera is about. The idea of staging an opera seemed a strange thing for me to do, until I realised that since my earliest days as a filmmaker I have sought to transform every action, every word into images, so I thought, "Why shouldn't I try at least once in my life to do the same with music?"
Opera is a universe all its own. On stage an opera represents a complete world, a cosmos transformed into music. I love the stylised performances and grandeur of human emotions – whether love, hate, jealousy or guilt – being acted out. Do humans really recognise these archetypes of emotional exaltation? Of course we do. The fantastical situations we see in opera are almost like mathematical axioms: condensed and concentrated, speaking to audiences without appeal to realism or psychology. It doesn't matter that so many of the stories are implausible and most of the libretti are bad. Many plots aren't even within the calculus of probability; it would be like winning the lottery jackpot five consecutive times. Yet when the music is playing, no explanations are required; primordial feelings suddenly reverberate within us. The stories make sense and audiences are shaken. Strong inner truths shine through, and the veracity of facts no longer matters. Everything is possible. Working within these artificial worlds, with no representation of reality as such, and with music always dictating what's happening on stage, it's more a case of "staging" than "directing." An opera staging mustn't be so elaborate or extreme that it detracts from the music. For too long German opera was dominated by the so-called _Regietheater_ , the "director's theatre," where _Lohengrin_ is set in Auschwitz, Rigoletto enters on a Harley-Davidson, and Fidelio frequents S&M parties with a martini in hand.
Just as I don't like to over-rehearse scenes before I shoot them, I dislike rehearsing opera too much, otherwise it gets stale. Four weeks is enough for everything; anything longer and people start getting bored. I try to be quick at the job, though the practicalities of the opera world mean this isn't always possible, and it can be a fragmented and disjointed process. The great singers are booked years in advance, and sometimes I have to rehearse a scene involving half a dozen characters with only one singer because the other five aren't around; then, two weeks later, I might get a chance to rehearse the same scene without that one singer but with the other five. Much of the time we'll have only a pianist, not an entire orchestra, and a chorus that can work only on specific days. It means we have to rehearse with a chorus as if the lead singers are on stage, even if at the time they are performing on another continent. Frequently there aren't even stand-ins. The whole thing is like making a series of prints where you first produce everything in red, then green, then blue, and only then is it pieced together and a single image created. Things are different at Bayreuth because everyone arrives more than a month before performances start. In less than a week I work with the singers and move through the entire opera, locating the big questions and problems, establishing the flow of things.
People surrender themselves to music and film in similar ways, which means cinema is closer to music than it ever will be to literature or theatre. The fact that so many filmmakers have gravitated towards opera over the years is some kind of proof of this. When I rehearse an opera I forget everything, including that I'm a filmmaker. Film and opera are like cats and dogs; they will never be truly married together. For one thing their concepts of narrative are completely different. In opera, characters take five minutes to answer a simple question, then sing the same thing three times over. That could never work on film. With opera there are two thousand different perspectives, but with a camera there is only one position at a time. The opera director has to be aware of what the stage looks like from every possible angle, from the corner of every last balcony in the auditorium. If a singer takes a step too far to the right, one whole side of the house is unable to see them. When I first started out I would move around the auditorium, trying out every seat, but these days can tell, while still standing on the stage with the singers, with my back to the auditorium, exactly what an audience will and won't be able to see.
_How do you find working with opera singers?_
Opera singing is a merciless profession. A film actor can make a dozen mistakes and continuously shoot a scene, while a theatre actor who gets lost can somehow improvise until he finds his way back into the text. But opera singers can do neither of those things. They remind me of gladiators thrown into an arena packed with thousands of people all screaming for blood. I'm amazed by the boldness needed to step out in front of so many people, all of whom will notice within a millisecond if the voices they are listening to are off-key. When you see singers taking their bows at the end of a performance and the curtain comes down for good, it truly is something to behold. The men are several pounds lighter; they literally lose that much weight during the performance. When I stand on the sidelines, hidden from the audience, watching the singers in profile as they sing, with the lights on them, I can see the power in their voices because of the spitting they do. They literally give themselves away to the audience during a performance. There is something awesome about them, and I have total and absolute respect for these artists. I also salute the prompters, who are always one step ahead of the music. Never before have I seen such precision and concentration.
I rarely feel truly comfortable in opera houses. If I'm sitting in the front row of the auditorium, I admire everything in front of me – from the orchestra pit through to the darkest corners backstage – but everything behind me isn't the kind of world I belong to. Many opera houses need the threat of catastrophe and intrigue to get sufficiently energised. I was directing Plácido Domingo in a production of _Il Guarany_ in Washington D.C. and the atmosphere was a little flat, so to create a little spark I casually mentioned to my assistant that Domingo wouldn't be singing on the opening night. Within twenty minutes there was a conflagration at every corner of the opera house; even the chefs were arguing about it. Suddenly everyone was alert and wide awake. It can sometimes be healthy to set the roof on fire at these places. What I really like is literally being in the middle of the music. There is a wedding march in _Lohengrin_. Walking with the choir – one of the best in the world – being right there amidst a hundred and twenty people singing, most of whom could be soloists in other opera houses, was absolutely stunning, and a great privilege.
_Many scenes in_ Death for Five Voices, _your film about Carlo Gesualdo, are subtly stylised._
Subtly stylised? No, in this case some of them are complete fabrications. The film runs amok, and most of the stories it tells are invented and staged, yet they contain the most profound truths possible about Gesualdo. No book or other film gives as much insight into the man.
Gesualdo was a sixteenth-century musical visionary, the composer who has astonished me more than anyone else, though I wanted to make a film about him because his life is as intriguing as his music. He was never financially dependent on anyone, so could pay for his voyages into the musical unknown. While his previous work is more within the context of his epoch, with the _Sixth Book of Madrigals_ Gesualdo all of a sudden seemed to step four hundred years ahead of his time, composing music we hear only from Stravinsky onwards. It's no coincidence that Stravinsky made two pilgrimages to Gesualdo's castle near Naples and wrote an orchestra piece with the title _Monumentum pro Gesualdo_. There are moments in _Death for Five Voices_ where we hear the five separate voices of a madrigal. Each voice sounds normal, but in combination the music is fantastically ahead of its time, even of our own time. I always liked those kinds of visionaries. Gesualdo, Turner – predecessor of the Impressionists – the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, Hercules Segers: those four have long been my favourites. Akhenaten, who ruled in the fourteenth century BC, was the first monotheist and a thousand years ahead of his time. He abandoned polytheism, making Aten the sole god of Egypt and forbidding the worship of any other deity. After his death the capital city he built was abandoned and his name systematically erased from all monuments; the new style of art he created disappeared with him. Akhenaten was also monogamous, loyal to his wife Nefertiti, in an era when pharaohs were expected to have harems packed with hundreds of women.
As for stylisations in _Death for Five Voices_ , there is a sequence of a boy being prepared for horseback riding where we meet the director of a mental institution in Venosa. He talks about how we aren't allowed to film certain things because he has to protect the privacy of his patients, including two who both believe themselves to be Gesualdo. The problem, he explains, is how to keep them away from each other. This is all invented; the man playing the director is actually my opera agent. In the scene filmed inside the museum in the castle of Venosa, we see a glass showcase that contains a clay disc with an array of enigmatic script-like symbols and ideograms on it. When I first saw this thing I was fascinated by it and immediately wanted to include it in the film. I wrote a monologue about this disc for the director of the museum, which he speaks while standing next to the showcase. He presents a letter from Gesualdo to his alchemist, enlisting his aid in deciphering the mysterious signs on the disc. "The prince spent sleepless nights trying to unravel the secret of these strange symbols," the professor says. "In the course of this activity he became lost in a labyrinth of conjectures and hypotheses. He almost lost his reason in the process." The letter he reads from is a real handwritten letter from Gesualdo, but is actually nothing more than an invitation to a party at his castle. The spoken text is entirely invented, and the professor is played by the dean of the law school in Milan. The scene reflects the fact that Gesualdo became demented in the final years of his life. He single-handedly chopped down the entire forest around his castle because he was convinced it was closing in on him, and hired young men to flog him daily, something that gave him festering wounds and apparently led to his death. There is a scene in _Death for Five Voices_ where we meet a woman running around the prince's ruined castle, singing his music and insisting she is the spirit of Gesualdo's dead wife. Her character emphasises the profound impact Gesualdo's music has had on people over the centuries. We hired Milva, a famous Italian actress and singer, to play the part.
_What about the story of Gesualdo killing his child?_
I invented the scenario of Gesualdo placing his two-and-a-half-year-old son – who he had reasons to doubt was his child – on a swing and having his servants push him for two days and nights until the child was dead. In some of the existing documents there is an allusion to him killing his infant son, but no absolute proof. Having a choir on either side of the boy on the swing singing about the beauty of death is also invented, though in one of Gesualdo's compositions there is a text about such things. Historical documents make absolutely clear that he murdered his wife and her lover in flagrante.
The last scene of the film was shot at a mediaeval tournament in Arezzo. I wanted to have the musical director talk about boldness and adventure in music, and as I was speaking with him I noticed a young man who was playing a footman to one of the knights. The whole scene with him on his cellphone to his mother was staged. He was actually talking to my brother, who was standing ten feet away and knew exactly when to make the call. I told the young man to act as if it were his mother calling him and that she wanted him to come home for lunch. I already knew it would be the last scene in the film. "Don't worry," he says, "I'll be there soon. The film about Gesualdo is almost over." I asked him to look straight into the camera after speaking the line and be deadly serious, no matter what. I was right next to the camera, joking around. There is a strange expression on his face because he didn't know whether to laugh or look into the lens with great intent. He stares directly to camera, and the film ends.
Little Dieter Needs to Fly _is a moving story told powerfully by Dieter Dengler._
I was invited by a German television station to contribute to their series _Voyages to Hell_ and immediately sensed it was my kind of thing. The television executive wanted me to make a film about myself, about being imprisoned in Africa and the problems on _Fitzcarraldo_. "That was difficult work," I told him, "but it wasn't a voyage into hell." I had read about Dieter in the sixties – though by now he was very much a forgotten figure – and tracked him down. Although his accent hinted at his Swabian background, Dieter's English was fluent, and he was the greatest rapper I ever met. He died some years ago of Lou Gehrig's disease, and the first thing the illness took was his power of speech. How scandalous that in his final days he was bereft of words. Being with Dieter was a constant joy; the man had such an intense enjoyment of life, something you sense throughout _Little Dieter Needs to Fly_. Even when he was no longer able to talk, we still managed to have long conversations together. He could tell dirty jokes and stories without a word, just using his face and hands. I remember looking at his feet and having no trouble believing he had run barefoot in the jungle for weeks, and that by the end maggots were crawling out of them.
Dieter's story is an extraordinary one. Born in Germany just before the Second World War, his earliest memory is of Allied aeroplanes diving down from the sky and bombing his village of Wildberg, in the Black Forest. One bomber came so close to the house where Dieter lived – firing as it flew – that when it whipped past the window where he was standing, Dieter's eyes locked with the pilot's for a split second. Rather than being afraid, he was mesmerised by these almighty beings swooping down from the clouds, and from that moment Little Dieter Needed to Fly. After his apprenticeship as a blacksmith and clockmaker, at the age of eighteen he emigrated to America. In New York he survived on pizza crusts until he enlisted in the army. After more than two years of peeling potatoes and another two years of changing tyres, and three years of college, Dieter eventually became a pilot. He was excited to head to Vietnam because he wanted to hang out with the go-go girls in Saigon. In 1966, during the early stages of the war, he was shot down over Laos forty minutes into his first mission. He started preparing to eject once he was hit by enemy fire; fragments of the engine were flying about his head. But then, because of an updraught, his aeroplane picked up altitude as he flew over a dense jungle ridge and he decided not to jump out. Dieter told me he didn't eject because he didn't want to abandon his first-ever aeroplane, so he ended up going down with it. He immediately buried his emergency radio because he knew the North Vietnamese might use it to lure rescue helicopters into an ambush. He was wearing civilian clothes under his flight suit and had his German passport with him, as well as his old certificate of apprenticeship as a clockmaker; the idea was that he could pretend to be a journalist from Germany. Pathet Lao guerrillas found him quick enough. Two days later he escaped, but was recaptured after almost dying of thirst, then subjected to a forced three-week march through the jungle, and eventually transferred to a prison camp run by the North Vietnamese, where two other Americans and three Thais were being held.
When he saw the state of these men – who had been held captive for more than two and a half years – Dieter immediately began making plans to escape. The camp was heavily guarded, but he saw that an opportunity arose every time the guards put their weapons down and went to eat in the kitchen. Eventually Dieter put his plan into action, which led to a gun battle that left five guards dead. The prisoners, split into two groups, ran barefoot into the jungle. Dieter ended up the only survivor. After his friend Duane was killed, he threw caution to the wind and set fire to an abandoned village, hoping to attract the attention of nearby aircraft. After a series of incredible coincidences he was finally spotted by an aeroplane and hoisted into a helicopter. The crew didn't recognise him as one of their own and, afraid they might have picked up a North Vietnamese soldier on a suicide mission, a huge marine threw himself on Dieter, nearly crushing him. The marine almost fell out of the chopper in horror when he pulled out a half-eaten snake Dieter had stuffed down his shirt. It had been five months since his aeroplane had been shot down; he was down to eighty-five pounds and probably had no more than a day to live. Dieter was the only American POW to escape from North Vietnamese and Laotian captivity, and remains one of the most highly decorated soldiers in American history.
While Dieter was still recovering in hospital, his mother was flown over from Germany; it was the first time she had been in an aeroplane. She brought a box of apples with her and handed out fruit to her fellow passengers, but when dinner was served by the airline staff she refused to eat because she had no money and thought she had to pay for it. When the admiral who met her at the airport realised what had happened, he immediately ordered some food be brought from the nearest canteen. Dieter's mother was allowed to stay in the admiral's house, but at five o'clock the next morning an alarm went off because she had lowered herself down on a rope to clean the windows. It was her way of showing thanks. The following morning another alarm went off because she was seen behind the house showering with a garden hose. She just wanted to save water.
_How did Dieter handle home life after his experiences as a prisoner?_
He developed certain safeguards, but never had to struggle for his sanity and wasn't consumed by the problems you see among some Vietnam veterans, men who returned home completely destroyed inside. Dieter was a unique man with extraordinary survival instincts, alongside great integrity and pride, and wasn't affected by his experiences as much as most other people would have been. He was tortured by having sharp pieces of bamboo put under his fingernails, and one of his arms was bound so tightly that it was unusable for six months, but he still refused to sign the propaganda declaration that denounced American military action, something almost every other POW did. "I love America," Dieter kept saying. "America gave me wings." During the war his grandfather had been the only person in his village who hadn't voted for Hitler, and because of this was dragged through the streets by an angry mob and accused of being a traitor. If his grandfather could endure such treatment, said Dieter, he could too. Although he was imprisoned and tortured, he never looked at his captors with disgust. He respected them, something I have always admired.
Being held prisoner was clearly the event that shaped him, but Dieter had such a difficult childhood amidst the devastation of post-war Germany that he was well prepared for his jungle ordeal. He possessed all the qualities that make America so wonderful: self-reliance and courage, a readiness to take risks, a kind of frontier spirit. He grew up in a remote area of the country, and as a child saw things that made no earthly sense. Germany had been transformed into a dreamscape of the surreal, which is what we see in the film, those endless images of bombed-out cityscapes. Like me, Dieter had to take charge of his life from an early age, and we connected because as children we had both experienced things that children shouldn't, like real hunger, though things weren't as bad for us as they were for him. Dieter – whose father was killed at Stalingrad – would peel wallpaper from the walls of bombed-out houses, and his mother would cook it because there were nutrients in the glue. Until the day he died, Dieter refused to see himself as a hero. "Only dead people are heroes," he would say. One time after he spoke in detail about the tortures he experienced during captivity, my wife asked him, "How do you sleep at night? Do you have nightmares?" "You see, darling," he said nonchalantly, "that was the fun part of my life." When we screened _Little Dieter Needs to Fly_ at the Telluride Film Festival, Dieter flew over in his singleengine Cessna, and the first night slept in the cockpit. One evening I was with him from eight o'clock until two the following morning, and he proposed – I swear to God – to eight consecutive women in total exuberance. The women all loved him for his intense charm and joy, even if they turned him down flat. He took the eight refusals with grace, then proceeded to get completely drunk and slept outside the door to our apartment because he had forgotten his key and didn't want to wake us up.
I like the United States for embracing someone like Dieter, a quintessential immigrant who came to America not just to find a job, but as a man with a big dream. Not only did he fulfil that dream, he was punished for it, then finally redeemed. The day we filmed the sequence on the aircraft carrier, I asked him to wait on the pier because I wanted to put the camera up on the bridge and get a shot of him walking into the ship for the first time. I went to the bridge, told the captain who I was, and explained what film we were making. "Dieter Dengler?" he asked. "You can place your camera here, but please give me five minutes." Almost immediately every officer on board scrambled onto the gangway, formed a line and saluted Dieter as he walked up. This was more than thirty years after his escape from the jungle. He died of Lou Gehrig's disease a few years after _Little Dieter Needs to Fly_ was released, having battled the disease like a warrior. I filmed his funeral in Arlington National Cemetery and included the footage as a postscript on the DVD of the film. What I continue to find wondrous is that Dieter emerged from his experiences without so much as a hint of bitterness; he was forever able to bear the misery with great optimism. Dieter had such an impressive and jubilant attitude to life, able to brush his experiences aside and deal with them, never making a fuss. He has been a role model for me, and even today when I am in a complicated situation I ask myself, "What would Dieter do?"
_How is_ Little Dieter Needs to Fly _stylised?_
The substantial elements are real. The two thousand pounds of rice, two thousand pounds of flour, six hundred pounds of honey and one thousand gallons of drinking water in vacuum-sealed plastic barrels really were there under the floorboards of his house. Dieter slept easier knowing it was all stashed away. Even years after returning home he thought about opening a restaurant where he could eat all the food he wanted. Also true is that when he was half dead in the jungle, a bear who had followed him for days came so close he could smell its foul breath. I was careful about representing Dieter's reality on screen, but did ask him to become an actor playing himself. Everything in the film is authentic Dieter, but to intensify him some of the stories were scripted, rehearsed and carefully orchestrated. It was my job as director to translate and edit his thoughts into something profound and cinematic, which meant trimming away everything that didn't fit, however interesting. Sometimes during filming Dieter would focus on some little detail and miss the bigger picture; I had to push him to condense a story that rambled on for almost an hour into only a couple of minutes. "Please, Dieter," I would say, "you have to be more disciplined. Stick to the essentials. Cut away everything that isn't important." There are a couple of scenes in the film that were shot at least five times until we got it right.
The film starts with Dieter visiting a tattoo parlour in San Francisco and looking at an image of Death whipping a team of horses up from Hell through fire and brimstone. He tells the tattoo artist he could never put that design on his body because for him it was different. "It didn't look like that to me," he says. "It was the angels who steered the horses. Death didn't want me." Although he had hallucinations when he was near death in the jungle, Dieter never had any intention of getting a tattoo; the whole thing was my idea. Then we cut to him driving to the home that he built with his own hands on Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco. When he gets out of his car, Dieter repeatedly opens and closes the car door before walking to the front door, which he again opens and closes. Eventually he goes inside. This is a scene I created after he casually mentioned that his experiences in the jungle made him appreciate being able to open a door whenever he wanted. I was intrigued by the many images of open doors on the walls of his home, all of which were really his. "They were a bargain," he said, "only ten bucks each." I told him we had to shoot a scene and make this truth visible. "Open and close your front door a couple of times," I said, "then talk about the door as a symbol of freedom." He hesitated and said, "I'll look weird to my buddies." What finally convinced him was when I told him how charming the ladies would think it was. From this moment early in the film the audience is irrevocably with Dieter, very much on his side. In our conversations, whenever he would describe his dreams to me, the image of a jellyfish – dancing in a kind of slow-motion transparent movement – floated into my mind, so we went to the local aquarium and filmed the sequence where he explains what death looked like to him. These ethereal, almost unreal creatures express his dreams perfectly, though it was all my idea.
One of the best examples of stylisation in any of my films comes at the end of _Little Dieter_ , the scene shot at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona, an aeroplane graveyard with tens of thousands of mothballed aircraft sitting in rows, as far as the eye can see; nothing but aircraft from horizon to horizon. Dieter talks about the nightmares he had immediately after his rescue, and how his friends would take him from his bed at night and pack him into a cockpit, where he would sleep. He says that inside an aeroplane is where he felt safe. All this is true, though I chose the base because of the stunning visuals. Dieter had never been to Davis-Monthan, and his line "This is heaven for pilots" was scripted by me.
_Wasn't it a bit much to march Dieter back through the jungle with his hands bound behind his back?_
Dieter loved Asia and its people, and had been back to the jungle many times since the war. Soon after we shot the film he even returned to the village near where he had crashed, and where the engine from his aeroplane was displayed on a pedestal, as some kind of trophy, a souvenir of his failed sortie.
The Laotian authorities weren't too happy about us filming in their country because apparently they're still grumpy about the fact that Dieter shot and killed five Laotians during his escape, so we filmed in jungle areas of Thailand at the border and on the Mekong River instead. By the time we made the film many of the metal panels of his aeroplane had long since been turned into cooking pots by local villagers, but some of the fuselage was still at the crash site; we knew exactly where to find it, and Dieter insisted on swimming across the Mekong to clandestinely film some scenes at the site. I planned to go with him, carrying a small digital camera, but in the end prudent members of the crew advised us against it. I did also wonder whether including images of whatever remained of the aeroplane in the film would provide us with any significant insights. The German television network wanted me to shoot reenactments of the events Dieter was talking about with actors, but I knew it would more effective if Dieter did everything himself. He always exuded such sanity that it was never a problem for him to run through the jungle with his hands tied behind his back, led by a group of locals hired from the nearest village. The line "This is a little too close to home" was scripted. The scene was a safe and effective way of getting something special from him. He insisted on playing the part, and rushed off into the forest, surrounded by these gun-toting men, with the cameraman and me running behind. Perhaps it was his way of chasing the demons away.
I chose not to include anything overly violent in the film, and a few years later there were scenes we shot for _Rescue_ _Dawn_ – where Dieter was portrayed by Christian Bale – that even during production I felt shouldn't be included. There is certain imagery I don't appreciate: that of graphic violence, stark naked as it sometimes appears in real life, especially when perpetrated against the defenceless; such things are easier to stomach in stylised, comic-book form. I say this not because I find onscreen violence a particular danger to our children's well-being and civilisation in general; it's just that having to look at such things on screen is my Achilles heel. I have a tendency to faint when giving blood, and once passed out while watching the scene in _The Passion of Joan of Arc_ when prison guards draw blood from Joan's arm. As for censorship, I'm against it, though I would cut something from a film if it deeply offended the religious feelings of the majority of people in a country. I would never show the butchering of a cow in the release print of one of my films in India, but would never cut something if all it did was hurt the feelings of cat lovers in England.
Wings of Hope, _another tale of horror in the jungle, is a sister to_ Little Dieter.
The film – which was dormant in me for many years – is the story of Juliane Koepcke, a seventeen-year-old German girl, the sole survivor of an aeroplane crash in the Peruvian jungle on Christmas Eve in 1971. Juliane's mother was killed, along with ninety-four others. The aircraft was travelling from Lima to Pucallpa when it disintegrated over the jungle – probably after having been struck by lightning – less than an hour after taking off, and she sailed to earth still strapped to a row of seats. It was almost as if she didn't leave the aeroplane; the aeroplane left her. There are several explanations of how Juliane's fall was cushioned and she managed to survive a fall of nearly three miles. During particularly serious storms there are powerful updraughts, one of which might have caught the row of seats and driven it upwards. The seats might also have spun wildly as they fell, like a maple seed, because Juliane was sitting at one end of the row, and this may have slowed her. The dense lianas, intertwined with the tall trees, also probably broke her fall as she hit the ground. What's astonishing is that after ten days the intensive search was called off, and on the twelfth day Juliane – who had survived on a pocketful of candies – emerged from the jungle. Her eyes were so bloodshot that local villagers thought she was a forest demon and fled when they saw her.
The fact that Juliane landed without being killed is a miracle, but her escape from the jungle was not; it was sheer professionalism. She was familiar with the environment because of time spent at the ecological station her parents had founded deep in the jungle. She must also have inherited some of her father's dogged willpower. He was a biologist who wanted to do research in the jungle. After the war, without a penny or passport to his name, he dug himself into a cargo of salt on a freighter bound for South America as a stowaway, and walked across the entire continent until he reached Peru, which is where Juliane grew up. After the crash, she followed the water rather than waiting for help, which is what most people would probably have done. Juliane knew that a small creek always leads to a larger one and eventually a river, and eventually human beings, and that if she followed the shrieks of the Hoatzin bird she would end up at a large body of water. She never panicked when crocodiles splashed violently from the sandbanks and disappeared into the river in which she was wading. Her parents had taught her how to survive under such conditions; she knew that these animals, when on land, always flee from human beings and hide in the water, never in the jungle. She did everything right; everyone else, including me, would have fled into the jungle and inevitably perished. _Wings of Hope_ isn't just about Juliane's ordeal; it deals with something deeper, touching powerfully on our relationship with nature and how to survive it.
The other reason for my fascination with the story is that in 1971 I was in Peru working on _Aguirre_ , and was booked on the very flight that crashed. The girl who played Aguirre's daughter was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl I found in Lima. We had a chaperone for her, but a few days before the start of shooting her parents suddenly decided to withdraw their permission for her to be in the film. I flew from Cusco to Lima and eventually persuaded them otherwise, then found myself – alongside my wife, some actors and crew – in Lima. We had tickets to fly back into the mountains shortly before Christmas, but the flight was delayed by a day and a half due to repairs. More and more passengers were accumulating at the airport. I had to bribe an airline employee so I could get a boarding pass, but at the last minute my scheduled flight was cancelled. After a series of crashes the airline had only a single aeroplane left, which flew the inland routes in Peru, all in a single day. In the end, because it was already so late in the day, it was decided this aircraft would fly only to Pucallpa. I remember being in the departure hall surrounded by people who had made it onto the flight; there was jubilation because they knew Christmas would be spent at home. I had flown in that same aeroplane many times, back and forth into the jungle, and knew the crew who died on the flight. I would talk to the stewardesses and always sit by a window because I wanted to see the Andes and the beginning of the jungle. The airline was notorious for its crashes, and only months before two of the company's pilots – who didn't even have proper licences – missed the runway in Cusco and smashed into a mountain. One hundred and six bodies were retrieved from the wreckage, although the maximum capacity of the aeroplane was only ninety-six. An airline employee had sold an additional ten standing places in the aisle and pocketed the cash. It also turned out that the airline's mechanics had repaired only motorcycles. Only much later did I discover that we were filming _Aguirre_ a few rivers away from Juliane as she was fighting for her life.
I always knew I would make _Wings of Hope_ one day, but it took a while to locate Juliane, who today is an expert on Amazonian bats. There had been an unprecedented media frenzy following her rescue and return to Germany, with journalists even showing up at her hospital room dressed as priests or cleaning personnel and taking photographs. After this intense harassment she successfully covered her tracks, got married and changed her name. I managed to find her father, who immediately ranted at me, saying he would never give the name and address of his daughter to anyone. I had a suspicion Juliane would be in Peru because that was where she had grown up; I knew she loved the jungle and thought she might be working as a biologist in one of the ecological stations down there. I eventually found her through some old newspaper clippings about her mother's burial in a small Bavarian town. The local priest told me that one of Juliane's aunts lived in a nearby village. I went straight over there, but she wouldn't tell me anything, so I asked her to give Juliane my phone number. Not too long after that Juliane called me, and it turned out she lived in Munich, not Peru. I said it would be enough to talk for thirty minutes, not a minute longer, and that five minutes into our conversation I would offer to withdraw. When we met, I put my wristwatch on the table. Exactly 300 seconds into the meeting I stood up, picked up my watch and bowed. "That's the deal," I said, "unless you would like to continue for the next twenty-five minutes." Juliane took my arm. "Sit down and stay," she said. "We haven't finished yet."
Juliane had seen a couple of my films and liked them, which was helpful, but all those years later she was still somewhat traumatised by the media's treatment of her – something I touch on in _Wings of Hope_ when mentioning the trashy feature film made about her experiences† – and it took a year for her to decide that she would co-operate. There were some personal things Juliane didn't want to talk about, and she knew I would respect her wishes, but once she finally agreed to make the film she really went for it. When we flew into the jungle from Lima, I asked her to sit in window seat F, row 19, the seat she had been in when the aeroplane fell apart over the Amazon.
_Is anything stylised in_ Wings of Hope?
The beginning and end of the film, with the broken and disfigured faces of the mannequins, and my voiceover of Juliane wanting to reassemble and somehow resurrect the plane, then seeing herself, strapped to her seat, sailing through the dark abyss. This is all poetry. My decision not to introduce too many stylised elements probably has something to do with the fact that Juliane is rather straight-talking and clear-headed. The only reason she survived her ordeal was because of her ability to act methodically in the face of such dire circumstances, and I wanted these qualities to shine through in the film. Look at how much the mosquitoes bother her husband, while Juliane isn't in the least troubled by them. There is real grief in the film, but it's handled with tenderness and discretion. Not dwelling on the pain that Juliane went through back then means her story is more haunting for audiences. As usual, the television executives wanted re-enactments of her experiences and never expected me to take Juliane herself back to the jungle, but by doing this – just as by tying up Dieter Dengler and walking him through the trails where he almost perished thirty years before – we dug into a deeper reality. Once the executives saw the footage of Juliane in the jungle they immediately complained. "Why doesn't she break down when confronted with fragments of the aeroplane?" Some people don't understand that discretion is a virtue.
_In recent years you have spoken about our shifting perception of reality._
There has, in the recent past, been a momentous and ferocious onslaught of new media, tools and instruments that have radically challenged our sense of reality. Think back to the mediaeval knights who for centuries, from ancient times on, fought on horseback with sword and shield, then all of a sudden found themselves confronted with gunpowder, firearms and cannons. Overnight the most fundamental notions of warfare were irrevocably altered. The entire world of chivalry was made obsolete; centuries-old rules fell away and, amidst such radical change, certain values and virtues cataclysmically collapsed. Apparently a group of seventeenth-century Samurai in Japan decided to forgo firearms and use only swords, but they didn't last long. Then the plague decimated a third of Europe's population within only a few years. History became porous and the first signs of a new world came into view. Fresh horizons were being explored and new inventions predominated. Europe was in crisis; it was a period of absolute insecurity involving the exploration of the unknown and a wholesale re-evaluation of moral codes. What I find fascinating is the emergence of writers like Philippe de Commynes, whose memoirs of the late mediaeval period in France are invaluable. Historiography in his time perpetuated the glory of chivalresque behaviour, though it had long since been uprooted. He was the single clairvoyant who watched everything with an uncompromising, relentless gaze.
There are signs that our own times are full of equally great insecurities and upheavals, of tremendous cruelty and violence, of enormous changes, of astonishing achievements. One of the most powerful forces in society today is the unprecedented explosion of tools that have given us the ability to alter reality and create some kind of pseudo-reality, including digital special effects – such as credibly rendered cinematic dinosaurs, as compared to the model animation of the fifties and sixties – virtual reality, video games and the Internet. You can't trust a photo these days because of Photoshop, which can all too easily be used to modify and falsify an image. These things have arrived almost at once, in a single torrent. Our sense of the real world today is massively challenged; I include here reality television, breast enhancement and the carefully choreographed, fake drama of WrestleMania, populated by larger-than-life characters with muscles that nature doesn't normally provide us with and who take pleasure in telling everyone how unbelievably evil they are. Wrestling matches are continually interrupted by commercials, but never those moments when the owner of the franchise comes out into the ring with two buxom, bikini-clad blondes on his arms, or when his long-suffering wife – allegedly paraplegic and blind – is wheeled out into the ring. His son then steps out into the ring and confronts his father, but not because of how his mother is being treated; he vents because his percentage of the franchise revenue isn't big enough. I love people like Jesse Ventura, who in his wrestling days played the real badass, the California surfer with long blond hair, sunglasses and a bronze tan. He would climb into the ring and shout to the audience, "You assholes, working day in, day out for a few bucks!" A young boy sheepishly walks up to him to ask for an autograph. Jesse rips the notebook into shreds and tramples on it, at which point ten thousand people howl gloriously in unison against him. This is all a new form of spectacle, of mythology and storytelling, like the crude beginnings of ancient Greek drama, work that preceded Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, eventually flowering into something extraordinary. It's fascinating to see how these archetypes function in modern-day culture.
These tectonic shifts require similarly radical changes in the way we handle reality on screen. The more technical tricks filmmakers bring to the screen, the louder the question of truthfulness will become. A new kind of cinema is needed that can help us readjust and once again trust our eyes. This is a heavy burden for filmmakers, but there is one thing we can be sure of: _cinéma-vérité_ , which was a coherent response in the sixties, is no longer valid today, when everything can be so easily manipulated. Cinema has to find a new position from which to tackle these issues. I want to take audiences back to the earliest days of cinema, when the Lumière brothers screened their film of a train pulling into a station. Apparently some people fled in panic because they were convinced they were about to be run over. I can't confirm this; it might be a legend, but I like the story. At screenings of _Fitzcarraldo_ I heard gasps from audiences at the moment the steamship is dragged upwards. They pointed at the screen after realising this was no trick, that it was a real boat and a real mountain. If I had ploughed on with the plastic solution and filmed it in a studio with a model ship, six-year-olds everywhere today would have immediately known it was a special effect. I've seen people in a small open-air cinema in Mexico talking back to the bad guy; one of them even pulled out a gun and opened fire at the screen.
When _Grizzly Man_ came out, children – drowning in the manipulated digital images that surround them and invade their every moment – insisted there was no way that Timothy Treadwell's footage was real. Science-fiction films make it perfectly clear that what you are looking at has been artificially created in a studio with digital effects, but young people, attuned to the changes taking place around them, couldn't believe this man really walked up to a thousand-pound grizzly and stretched out his hand to touch the beast. By insisting that this kind of imagery must be the result of digital trickery, they reveal themselves to be disconnected from the real world. A few years ago my wife Lena took a series of photos of me standing next to a bear in rural Utah, one of which was used to publicise _Grizzly Man_. People immediately assume this image was pieced together with Photoshop. No one believes me when I tell them that's a real grizzly.
At a film festival one year I was witness to a "pitching session," a grotesque gladiatorial contest run by thoroughly debased people in which documentary filmmakers line up in public and attempt to raise money for their projects. The entire thing is detestable, a revolting circus. One of the organisers – an obese man who snorted about the place – waddled onto the stage wearing a cape and carrying a stick. There were beads of sweat dripping down his forehead from underneath the top hat he was wearing as he pranced. I wanted to vomit. I was on a panel discussion with other filmmakers who were talking about "reality" and how to capture it on film, how _cinéma-vérité_ was the only way forward, that manipulation and staging in non-fiction cinema was a no-no. A young woman next to me kept raving about her own particular style, how she wanted to be as unobtrusive as possible, like a fly on the wall. It was just the kind of thin, trivial ideology I look upon with deep suspicion. Even if some of the most disturbing footage I have ever seen – the abduction of a toddler by two young boys from a shopping mall in England in 1993 – was unstaged, captured by a surveillance camera, I have no interest in blindly recording hours of nothing, waiting for a bank robber to show up once every ten years.
I say here to adherents of _cinéma-vérité_ : I am no bookkeeper; my mandate is poetry. I want to be involved. I want to shape and sculpt, to stage things, to intrude and invent. I want to be a film director. I was the only person at the festival arguing against these morons. The subject was being so hashed to death that I couldn't take it any longer. I grabbed a microphone and said, "I'm no fly on the wall. I am the hornet that stings." There was an immediate uproar, so not having anything more to say, I shouted out, "Happy New Year, losers." And that was that.
* See p. 476 for the Minnesota Declaration.
† _The Story of Juliane Koepcke_ (aka _Miracles Still Happen_ ) (1974), directed by Giuseppe Maria Scotese.
# Fervour and Woe
_You have acted in several films over the years._
I enjoy working with Zak Penn, who contributed to the script of _Rescue Dawn_. His film _Incident at Loch Ness_ is very intelligent; it's a hoax built upon a hoax upon a hoax, and its marketing campaign was yet another hoax. Press reports were circulated saying that I was going to make a film about the Loch Ness monster and that at the same time cameraman John Bailey was making a documentary about me called _Herzog in Wonderland_. Both were diversions. The film we actually made is a complex ruse that seamlessly blends digital effects with a group of people – most of whom are playing themselves – improvising. The result is clever and funny, subtly incorporating the strangest and silliest stories and rumours about me. I enjoyed the element of self-mockery my part involved, like having the audience watch me buying razor blades in the local supermarket and packing my bags before I leave for Scotland. I had a feeling that a dose of self-irony would do me good. Even the DVD commentary Zak and I recorded is one big joke, with me storming off halfway, completely miffed.
References to my films and me are hiding under every rock; look carefully and you'll see them throughout. Some are subtler than others; for example, I have never cooked yucca – which needs to be carefully processed to rid it of all toxins – for dinner guests, and "my" house in the film was actually Zak's home at the time. But you can hardly miss the moment when Zak has me at the point of an unloaded flare gun because I refuse to film the styrofoam Loch Ness monster bobbing in the water; it's some kind of homage to the tales of Kinski and me during the production of _Aguirre_. There are some amusing moments that didn't make it into the film, like Zak's assistant thinking I'm a vegetarian. I assure you that's the last thing I would ever be. Maybe people took no notice of the ideas behind _Loch Ness_ because it's a comedy, which is unfortunate because it raises what I consider to be important and serious questions. What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? Like sleep without dreams. How is it that three million Americans claim to have had encounters with aliens, and three hundred thousand American women maintain they have been gang-raped by extraterrestrials? Why do almost all these women weigh over 350 pounds? Why have we never heard about such things happening in Ethiopia?
A couple of years later Zak directed _The Grand_ , in which I play "The German," who always needs extra hand lotion in his hotel room, believes coffee to be the beverage of cowards and has to kill something every day in order to feel alive. It doesn't need to be big; squashing an ant is sufficient. He shows up at the hotel with a luggage cart full of caged animals, only to be told they aren't allowed in his room. "Don't worry," he tells the receptionist. "They won't be here for long."
_Harmony Korine._
A few years ago he wanted me to play the father in _julien donkey-boy_. Originally he was going to act as my son in the film, but felt uncomfortable being behind and in front of the camera at the same time. Actually he just chickened out. Harmony didn't want me for the role just because I was the right age and looked the part; it was more significant for him than that. The deeper meaning to my being cast was that I have been something of an influence on his filmmaking over the years, and he wanted his "cinematic father" to be in the film. There was no real screenplay; much of _julien_ was improvised, like my lines from _Dirty Harry_. I was sitting at the dinner table, surrounded by a crazed grandmother, a son who is a failed wrestler, a daughter who has been impregnated by her own insane brother Julien, and Julien himself, who has just committed murder. All I knew was that Julien was going to read a poem, and my job was to insult him. The red light on the camera started blinking, so I turned to Harmony and said, "Are we rolling?" He nodded, saying nothing. I asked him what the dialogue was. "Speak!" he said. It was all born out of the pressure of having to say something; everything I did was improvised on the spot. The character I play is completely dysfunctional and hostile. Let's face it, my scope as an actor is limited, though I love playing these vile and debased characters. Whenever it comes to these kinds of people I'm the first person they call. After _julien donkey-boy_ opened in France my wife received a call from a friend. "Is that monster really your husband? We can offer you immediate shelter."
I played a missionary in Harmony's _Mister Lonely_. Originally I had a bigger part but was editing _Rescue Dawn_ at the time, so couldn't spare the time. We were filming on an island off the coast of Panama, at the airport. I strolled over to a man who was muttering to himself and had a bunch of half-wilted flowers in his hand. I starting talking to him, and though he was quite incoherent I figured out that he was waiting for an aeroplane to arrive. His wife and three kids had bolted three years ago, and ever since then he had been hoping she would come home to him, so there he was, waiting patiently. I was wearing a priest's costume and told Harmony we should improvise a scene where this man could confess. "I can look into your heart!" I said out of the blue. "I know your wife left you because you fornicated with other women! Repent now!" He insisted it wasn't true. I looked him square in the eye and said, "I know what happened! It wasn't just one woman, it was at least five! You sinned! Down on your knees and repent!"
As for my role in the Tom Cruise blockbuster _Jack Reacher_ , I was paid to be scary. As chief ideologue of the baddies, my particular method of intimidation is forcing my adversaries to chew their own thumbs off. I wasn't hired just because I have a funny accent; apparently they were having difficulties in casting a real bad-ass bad guy. Some actors look dangerous only when they come at you with a gun or when they scream and shout, but apparently the only person they could think of who is threatening even before he opens his mouth is Herzog. It isn't the first time this has happened. I'm always being stopped by customs officials at airports, and many years ago I played a deranged murderer in Edgar Reitz's film _Geschichten vom Kübelkind_.
_You lent your voice to an episode of_ The Simpsons.
When they invited me to voice a character, I said, "What do you mean, my voice? Isn't it a newspaper cartoon strip?" They thought I was pulling their leg, but I had no idea the animated series existed. I played a German pharmaceutical industrialist called Walter Hottenhoffer who creates an LSD-style pill that makes everyone happy, in particular grumpy grandpa. It's my apotheosis within American popular culture.
_Do you still play football?_
Not too often since moving to California, though for years I was with a club in Munich called Black and Yellow [Schwarz/Gelb München]. It was a hopeless team but a great joy to play with those people. I pay tribute here to the late Sepp Mosemeier, the founder and president, a chubby pastry baker by profession. In a different life he would have been an opera singer or poet. He had a wonderful outlook on everything and managed to keep the team together – men from all strata of society – for years.
During the early years I was a goalkeeper, about which I have a strange story. I'm interested in how sometimes we do things completely contrary to our intentions, yet they turn to be the right thing after all. We were playing against a far superior team – a group of apprentice butchers from Munich – and were having a good day, keeping the game tied at 1–1. One striker on the other team was a bully, strong as an ox and with a ferocious shot. Seconds before the game was over there was a penalty against us, and though I prayed, "Please, not the bully," I saw him trotting to the penalty spot with absolute confidence. When your opponent is someone with such a relentlessly strong kick, a monster who can turn a football into a projectile, a goalkeeper has no choice but to pick a corner and hope it's the one the ball is going to fly into. But even if I picked the correct corner there was still little chance of stopping the ball. I saw him placing the ball on the spot and had the feeling he glanced for a split second into the right-hand corner of the goal. I said to myself, "Go for the right, go for the right." He took the run-up, and the second before he kicked I inwardly screamed to myself, "THE RIGHT! THE RIGHT!" For some reason I flew to the left, which turned out to be where he was aiming for. The ball hit my fist, pounded into the ground, soared high into the air and bounced away from the goal. It was a strange experience, not unlike what Peter Handke describes in his novel _The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty_ , though in his story the goalkeeper is so terrified that he ends up frozen dead centre between the posts.
My time in goal ended a few years later during a football game at the Cannes Film Festival, where there was a tradition that directors played against actors. Although some of the directors were near obese and totally inept, it was a hard-fought match one year. The actors would draw our team into their half, then kick the ball at the goal and sprint – three or four at once – towards me. Up until half-time I had managed to save all their attempts at goal, but at the beginning of the second half the ball flew wide into empty space near me. As I ran out of the penalty area to connect with it, I saw Maximilian Schell galloping towards me like a furious bison. I was certain I could get there first to kick the ball away, which I did, but a split second later Schell crashed into me and dislocated my elbow; it still bothered me a year later. After that I stopped playing in goal and moved to centre forward, where I got the reputation of being a kamikaze player. I was never the fastest person on the pitch, but I was the most dangerous, though you have to see all this in perspective. It was football at a very low level.
During pre-production on _Aguirre_ in Peru, I met the legendary Rudi Gutendorf, who over the decades coached six first-division teams in Germany and countless others in nearly forty countries. At the time he was the coach of Lima's top club, and one day he invited me to participate in the team's fitness training. After that there would be a test game, team A versus team B. One of the B-team players had hurt his ankle, so Rudi told me to step in as a substitute. Before we started he asked me, "Who do you want as your opponent?" I said, "I want to play against the best in the world. I want Gallardo." Alberto Gallardo – famous after his performance in the 1970 World Cup – was extremely unpredictable, so fast that no one in the world could follow him. I was confident I could at least shake him up on the pitch. This was ridiculous, wishful thinking on my part; the whole thing was hopeless from the start. I had no idea how tough it was going to be, how fiercely the players fought for the ball. Even with my thirty-foot start, Gallardo would outrun me by twenty feet, and after only ten minutes I was so bamboozled that I couldn't tell in which direction my team was playing. I couldn't even have told you the colour of my team's shirt. After fifteen minutes I had terrible stomach cramps and crawled pathetically off the field on all fours. I ended up behind some bushes, vomiting. Rudi was good enough to pretend he hadn't seen anything.
_Did you go to football matches as a child?_
Until the age of about fifteen my brother and I would go see Die Löwen [The Lions] play. It was more of a working-class club than Bayern Munich and quickly disappeared from the first division. My father always objected to us playing football; it was much too primitive and proletarian a game for him. He didn't like us coming home with dirty knees and shorts, and preferred we do something classier instead, like fencing.
_Albert Camus apparently said that much of what he knew about morality he learnt from the football pitch. Can the same be said of you?_
No. Football is just football.
My Best Fiend _is about your relationship with Klaus Kinski._
Kinski was one of the great screen actors, perhaps the last expressionistic performer in cinema. As an adolescent I watched him in the anti-war film _Kinder, Mütter und ein General_ , in which he plays a lieutenant who leads schoolboys to the front. The mothers of the boys and the soldiers go to sleep for a few hours. Kinski is awakened at daybreak, and the way he stirs, raising his head from the table, will forever stay in my memory; I replay it several times in _My Best Fiend._ I'm sure it looks like nothing special to most people, but this one moment impressed me so profoundly that later it was a decisive factor in my professional life. Strange how memory can magnify things. Today I find the scene where he orders Maximilian Schell to be shot much more impressive.
Kinski was undoubtedly the ultimate pestilence to work with, but he also gave truly amazing – and in subtle ways very different – performances in each of the films we made together. He and I were like two critical masses that would explode when they came into contact with each other, though thankfully I was able to transform this highly flammable mixture into a productive screen collaboration. He constantly threw tantrums, created scandals, broke contracts and terrorised actors, crews and directors. Every day it was my task to domesticate the beast and make these crazed energies productive for the screen. One of my achievements was to do this without clipping his wings, which would have made him harmless and uninteresting on screen. I was able to see through him like looking through water in the sink; I could always gauge his hysterical energy, and knew how to mobilise and articulate it in front of the camera. People think we had a love–hate relationship, but I neither loved nor hated him. At one point I did seriously plan to firebomb him in his home, though I confess with some embarrassment that my infallible plan, with its airtight alibi, was sabotaged by the vigilance of his Alsatian. It was all a farce, like those Italian comedies of the fifties where bank robbers drill through the wrong wall and accidentally find themselves in the local police station. Kinski later told me he had planned to murder me around the same time. We had a few drinks and a good laugh about it.
Kinski and I complemented each other in a strange way, and though it's true I owe him a lot, it's also fair to say he owed me something, even if he could never admit it. It was a fortunate situation for both of us: fortunate for me that he decided to be in _Aguirre_ ; fortunate for him I took him seriously as an actor. He was so reckless with his own possibilities. Look at all the films he made and you see what I'm talking about; in many of them he appears for only two minutes, which meant he was needed for only one or two days of shooting. No one could endure him for longer than that. When he and his Vietnamese wife – who I had never met before – arrived on the set of _Aguirre_ , Klaus and I embraced one another, after which I went to shake his wife's hand. He immediately pushed me aside and with a menacing look stood two inches from my face for at least a minute, staring directly into my eyes, snorting and fuming and shivering, without saying a word. This book isn't the place for me to talk about the monstrous way Kinski treated the women in his life and abused his daughter Pola, who sought me out before she published her memoir.* Let me say that there were debates in Germany about whether her allegations could be proved, but there isn't a shred of doubt in my heart that she is telling the truth. If I am on anyone's side, it's hers. All this may change the way people see Kinski in my films, but this shift of perspective won't last for ever. Long into the future audiences will see Kinski again as Aguirre. All these centuries later, the fact that Caravaggio was a murderer doesn't change the way we look at his paintings.
_Did you learn anything from Kinski?_
What was impressive about him was his knowledge of cinema, of lighting, stagecraft and the choreography of the human body in front of the camera. I shot a sequence for _Aguirre_ , but two days later had the feeling I hadn't filmed it correctly and decided a wider angle was needed. On set and in costume, Kinski made precise inch-by-inch movements and turns with the exact same rhythms as he had two days before. There was no video footage to study. He had instant recall of the physical nature of that particular moment and his contribution to the scene. Then there's the "Kinski Spiral," something I demonstrate in _My Best Fiend_ with photographer Beat Presser. When an actor enters the frame from the side, there is often no dramatic tension, so whenever there was a reason for it Kinski would make his appearance from directly behind the camera. If he wanted to spin into frame from the left, he would position himself next to the camera, with his left foot next to the tripod. Then he would step over the tripod with his right leg, twisting his foot inward. The whole body would unwind before the camera, allowing him to spin smoothly into frame, which created a mysterious nervousness. There is also a move called "Kinski's Double Spiral," where the initial movement is followed by a counter-spin, but that's complex stuff and I could never explain it to you in words. I adapted the single spiral for a shot in _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,_ when Kaspar is at the party with Lord Stanhope. Look closely and you see me doing it myself in _Incident at Loch Ness._
_Was there a particular reason you made_ My Best Fiend _when you did?_
When I first heard Kinski had died I understood it only acoustically. I registered the fact but it didn't really enter my heart until months later, when I stood alongside his ex-wife and son, his ashes in my hands, which I emptied out into the Pacific Ocean. I always felt that the five films we made together needed something to bind them together, and planned to make a film about the two of us – our struggles, our work together – but for years after his death it was all too heavy to deal with. Time lightened the burden, made everything milder, and when I felt able to talk about Kinski with warmth and humour I realised I was ready. If I had made the film immediately after his death, I'm sure it would have been much darker. Today I can laugh about what happened between us; I see the bizarre side of everything and look back with some serenity. As it is, _My Best Fiend_ has a feeling of utter weightlessness for me.
The film was easy to make, almost effortless. It appeared before my eyes, complete, in the same room as me. I had no script; I knew only that I wanted to go back to this or that place, where we had shot our films, and talk to the camera. I always felt the film is more than just a personal look at my working relationship with an actor; it's about the process of creation itself, and could just as easily have been about two other people. The themes it deals with go far deeper than Kinski and me. I was very selective when it came to the conversations I included in _My Best Fiend_ ; I'm speaking here primarily of Eva Mattes and Claudia Cardinale. I could have found untold numbers of people who had only terrible things to say about Kinski, that he was the ultimate scum, but I wanted to show another side, one that doesn't necessarily shine through in his autobiography. He truly could be full of humour and generosity. On one occasion I complimented him on his beautiful couture jacket, at which point he took it off and insisted I keep it. If something didn't go as I hoped when we were working together on _Woyzeck_ , he would take my arm and say, "Werner, what we're doing here is important. Just striving for it will give it its appropriate size. Don't worry, it will fall into place." He worked hard on Büchner's text, and unlike so many other times generally knew his lines. It was truly a joy to work with him during those days, and I think back on that time with genuine fondness. I'm glad the sequence of the two of us embracing at the Telluride Film Festival is in _My Best Fiend_. In fact, I'm glad that footage exists at all, otherwise no one would believe we could be so good with each other.
Kinski always complained about the money he was offered to be in certain films. He refused roles in films by Kurosawa, Visconti, Fellini and Pasolini, and spoke of those directors as psychopathic assholes who never paid enough. But I always had relatively small budgets and paid him less than what he would have earned working with these other filmmakers, so it's something of a paradox. We had a rapport that meant money wasn't important. In public Kinski claimed to hate my films and me, but when I spoke to him privately it was obvious the opposite was true, that he was proud of the work we did together.
_In his autobiography Kinski describes his ambivalent feelings towards you._
The book is a series of highly fictitious and entertaining rants, in which he uses the wildest possible expletives to describe me; at one point he writes about pushing me into piranha-infested water, then watching them shred me to death. On page after page he keeps on coming back to me, like an obsessive compulsion.† I had a hand in helping to invent particularly vile expletives and insults. "Nobody will read this book if I don't write terrible things about you," he told me. "If I say we get along well together, nobody will buy it. The scum only want to read about the dirt. Don't let the vermin know we collaborated on this." I came with a dictionary from which we pulled out the foulest invectives we could find. He needed money at the time and knew that by writing a semi-pornographic rant against everyone and everything it would get some attention. Kinski actually grew up in a relatively well-to-do middle-class pharmacist's household, but in the book he describes his childhood as one of such poverty that he fought with rats over the last breadcrumbs and worked in a morgue washing corpses. He even wrote about an incestuous relationship with his mother, something that apparently infuriated his brothers. What's fascinating about his book is that to a certain extent it tells the story of the life Kinski wished he had. Although I helped him find new and interesting insults, I can't deny that he wrote about me with some degree of disturbing sincerity.
_You lived with Kinski for a time when you were young._
It was a chain of coincidences. My mother – struggling to raise three sons on her own – found a room in a boarding house for the four of us in the Schwabing neighbourhood of Munich. It was cramped, with a dozen people clambering for the same bathroom every morning. The owner was Klara Rieth, an elderly lady of sixty-five with wildly dyed orange hair who had a soft spot for starving artists, as she had come from a similar background herself. Kinski had been living in a nearby attic. Instead of furniture he had filled it knee high with dry leaves and would sometimes come to the door stark naked to sign for a letter. Klara invited Kinski to stay at her boarding house, and as a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy I distinctly remember the first time I saw him. It was in the long corridor of the apartment as he fled from a young housemaid who was chasing him, furiously beating him with a large wooden tray. Apparently Kinski had tried to grab under her skirt. When we ate at the same table, he would throw his knife, fork and spoon on the floor and eat with his fingers, insisting that " _Fressen ist ein viehischer Akt. Wir müssen mit den Händen essen_ " ["Eating is a beastly act. We should eat with our hands"].
From the first moment he arrived at the boarding house, Kinski terrorised everyone. He once locked himself into the bathroom and, in his maniacal fury, smashed everything to smithereens for forty-eight hours. The bathtub, the toilet bowl, everything; you could sift it through a tennis racket. I never thought it possible that anyone could rave for so long. One day he took a running jump down the long corridor in the apartment and smashed through into Klara's room; the door flew off its hinges. He stood there flailing hysterically and foaming at the mouth. Something came floating down like leaves – it was his shirts – and three octaves too high he screamed, "KLARA! YOU PIG!" His voice was incredibly shrill; he could break wine glasses with it. What happened was this poor woman who let him live there for free, feeding and cleaning for him, had failed to iron his shirt collars neatly enough. He pretended to be a genius who had descended from heaven with God-given gifts, though in reality he worked very hard to train himself. I would hear him doing voice exercises for ten hours non-stop in his tiny room.
One day a theatre reviewer was invited for dinner. He hinted that having watched a play in which Kinski had a small role, he would mention this performance as being outstanding and extraordinary. Kinski immediately threw two steaming potatoes in the man's face, before jumping up and screaming, "I was not outstanding! I was not extraordinary! I WAS MONUMENTAL! I WAS EPOCHAL!" I appeared to be the only person at the table who wasn't afraid, merely astonished. He entered my life, when I was thirteen, like a tornado, and three months later left like a tornado. Years later, when I decided Kinski was the only person who could play Aguirre, I knew what was in store for me.
_Was he some kind of alter ego for you?_
We were similar in many ways, and I suppose you might say he was my screen alter ego, but only because all the characters in my films are close to my heart. The reality is Kinski always wished he could direct, and envied me. He wanted to articulate certain things that were brooding inside of him, but was never fully able to.
Although we often kept our distance, we would seek one another out at the right time, and could often make ourselves understood without words, non-verbally, almost like animals or a set of identical twins. Whenever he got going, I would turn on the camera as quickly as possible, and often managed to capture something unique. Sometimes I would even provoke him so that he would scream and shout for an hour, after which he would be exhausted and in the right mood: silent, quiet and dangerous. I did this for the speech in _Aguirre_ in which he calls himself "the Wrath of God." He insisted on playing the scene screaming with anger, but I wanted him almost whispering, so I purposely irritated him, and after a particularly vicious tantrum he was utterly exhausted and literally foaming at the mouth. I turned the camera on, and he did the speech in a single take. I knew how to trick him into giving the best possible performance, though he always believed he was doing everything himself. During production on _Fitzcarraldo_ we did takes where everything was perfect; the camera and sound were flawless, the acting was excellent. "Klaus," I would say, "I think there is more to this," and somehow he knew what I was talking about. I would roll the camera again, and he would move things in a fresh direction. At other times, as the scene was coming to a close, I wouldn't cut because I could see he was up to something exceptional, that an idea had popped into his head. I knew when there was more to be wrung from Kinski. This was usually all done without a word spoken; he would look at me out of the corner of his eye, instantly sensing I wasn't going to stop the camera, and launch into something new and original.
_How did the Indians react to Kinski's behaviour during production on_ Aguirre ___and_ Fitzcarraldo?
His ravings strained our relations with the locals. He was quite frightening to them, and because the Indians would solve their conflicts in a totally different way, he became a real problem. During Kinski's frequent tantrums they would huddle together and whisper to themselves. In their culture everything is softly spoken; there is never a loud word. One of the chiefs came to me towards the end of production on _Fitzcarraldo_. "You probably realised we were afraid," he said, "but not for one moment were we scared of that screaming madman, shouting his head off." It turned out they were actually afraid of me because I was so quiet.
Kinski's behaviour can be explained partly by his egocentric character. Egocentric perhaps isn't the right word; he was an outright egomaniac. Whenever there was a serious accident, it became a big problem because all of a sudden he was no longer the centre of attention. The locals usually clear a swathe of trees in the jungle without wearing boots, because more likely than not they will be sucked into the mud. But even with dozens of woodcutters in the jungle working barefoot, it's rare for one of these men to be bitten by a snake because the animals naturally flee from the noise of the chainsaw and smell of gasoline; it happens maybe once every three years. Unfortunately a lumberman working on _Fitzcarraldo_ was bitten twice by a shushupe, one of the most poisonous snakes on the planet. It would have taken a few minutes for cardiac arrest to take place, so this man thought for five seconds, grabbed his chainsaw and cut off his foot. His colleagues immediately applied a crude tourniquet using lianas. It saved his life because the camp – where the serum was stored – was twenty minutes away. I knew that when news of all this reached Kinski, he would throw a tantrum and rave about something trivial because he was now a marginal figure. After the plane crash I described earlier, there were garbled reports on the radio; we were desperately trying to work out whether we could send out a rescue party into the jungle. Kinski saw he was no longer in demand and threw a fit, claiming his coffee was only lukewarm that morning and his mineral water wasn't cold enough. For hours he screamed at me, three inches from my face, as I explained the severity of the situation to him. As usual in such situations, I stood like a silent rock wall and let him crash against it. I finally walked to my hut, where for months I had successfully hidden one last piece of Swiss chocolate from the ants. We would all have killed one another for a taste of something like that. I went right up to his face, unwrapped this tiny piece of chocolate and ate it in front of him. All of a sudden he was quiet; it was beyond him. Towards the end of shooting the Indians offered to kill Kinski for me. "No, for God's sake!" I told them. "I still need him for shooting. Leave him to me." They were dead serious, and there's no doubt they would have done the deed. Occasionally I regretted not having given them the nod.
Kinski was a peculiar mixture of physical cowardice and courage. A wasp would cause him to scream for his mosquito net and a doctor, though on _Fitzcarraldo_ , when it was proposed we get onto the boat as it went through the rapids, Kinski was encouraging. "If you sink," he said, "I shall sink too." Although he styled himself as a man of nature, he never actually liked the jungle, and everything he said about nature was a careful pose. He declared everything there erotic, but never set foot outside of our encampment and brought with him antidotes for every kind of poisonous snake imaginable. If Kinski wandered a few feet into the jungle to where a fallen tree lay, a photographer had to follow and take hundreds of photos of him tenderly embracing and copulating with this thing. The shots of him with the butterfly in _My Best Fiend_ are out-takes from _Burden of Dreams_ ; the only reason it was sticking so close to him was because it was licking his sweat. There was no mystical, animal-like connection between the two of them. There is a moment in _Burden of Dreams_ when Kinski, Thomas Mauch and I pull up to shore in a small boat, and Kinski is the one who leaps out and pulls us onto dry land. He was playing to the camera, plain and simple; he took pride in being physical when he knew such things were being documented. It was the same thing with that photo of him at my throat with a machete, which became the poster image for _My Best Fiend_. He saw Beat Presser standing with a camera and lunged at me. You don't need to look carefully to see that I'm grinning. I distinctly remember Kinski embracing a young homeless child on the set of _Cobra Verde_ and giving him a $100 bill, but only because two journalists were watching; he would never have done something like that otherwise. Poses and paraphernalia were what mattered to Kinski. His alpine gear was more important than the mountains, and his camouflage combat fatigues – tailored by Yves Saint Laurent – were much more important than any jungle. Kinski, in this regard, was endowed with his fair share of natural stupidity.
_Do you miss him?_
Perhaps sometimes, though my relationship with him had ended some years before he died. There were moments in _Cobra Verde_ I'll never forget. The final scene where he tries to pull the fishing boat out into the ocean – something that would normally take a dozen men – was the last day of shooting we ever did together. It was unrehearsed and was supposed to last less than a minute. I sensed something else was coming, so I let the camera run. Kinski knew I wasn't going to cut the scene, and it soon became a sequence of extraordinary despair as he collapsed with exhaustion into the water. I thought he was really drowning and my first reflex was to run over and help him; the crew had to hold me back so I wouldn't jump into the surf and get him out. I knew at the time we could go no further together, and told him so. There was nothing I wanted to explore with him beyond the five films we made together; anything else would have been repetition. He sensed it too. He died in 1991 at his home north of San Francisco. He had burnt himself out, like a comet. I regret not a single moment, and today judge Klaus only for his work done in front of the camera. The butterfly shot is the image I like to keep in my head, even if it goes against many of my memories. Maybe sometimes I do miss him, the swine.
The Lord and the Laden _and_ Pilgrimage _are both about faith and religious worship_.
Both films were made for television. The network asked me to contribute to a series about two thousand years of Christianity; I told them I wanted to do something about the church in Latin America, but they shouldn't expect anything encyclopaedic because I wanted to go to a couple of specific places. The opening shots of _The Lord and the Laden_ were taken in Antigua, Guatemala, and the main sequence was shot at a shrine in San Andrés Itzapa, also in Guatemala. There is nothing organised about this religious ceremony; it's in a private yard and is run by regular people who pay nothing to attend. The mixture of paganism and Catholicism is evident. The figure being worshipped – Maximón, an ancient Mayan god dressed up like a rich Spanish ranchero to demonstrate his power – is a mannequin in a glass case. Part of the veneration of this pagan god involves fumigating him with cigar smoke and putting cigarettes in his mouth, so lots of people are smoking. Worshippers also spit and spray alcohol over him and each other, part of a ritual of cleansing and purification in the presence of God. The Catholic Church, not knowing what to do with this phenomenon, has more or less adopted Maximón. They wanted a foot in the door to places like this, so squeezed in a Catholic saint – St Simon – though everyone ignores him. You would never see a Catholic priest there. The whole place is completely chaotic, with no hierarchy or dogma.
I went to the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, where I filmed the _Codex Telleriano-Remensis_ , one of the few pieces of Aztec history that survives in its original form, and was also allowed to film the _Codex Florentino_ in the Laurentian Library in Florence. For me the _Codex_ is one of the greatest and most honourable deeds of humankind, unquestionably a monumental achievement. Even as Aztec culture was being destroyed by the Spanish invaders, there was one man, Bernardino de Sahagún, who, with other monks, spent decades methodically collecting accounts from Aztecs who had knowledge of their history, language, culture and economic system. The result was a book that describes Aztec life, from religious rituals to botanical knowledge and educational systems. Amidst the carnage of the Spanish invasion, this far-sighted monk attempted to preserve as much of the Aztec world as possible, and even purposely mistranslated certain Classical Nahuatl accounts about religion and human sacrifices because otherwise the texts would have been burnt by the Inquisition. A translation was done into English, which in its magnitude is comparable to the King James Bible. Two scholars at the University of Utah spent a quarter of a century on the project. It has such power of language that I made a pilgrimage to see the surviving translator, Charles Dibble, in Salt Lake City. He was an unobtrusive man in his eighties, a professor emeritus, moved and surprised that a filmmaker was so interested in his work.
_You worked with John Tavener on_ Pilgrimage.
At the time we made the film I considered Tavener one of the greatest living composers, and was initially uncertain whether a collaboration would work because he always refused to write music for films. But in this case it was neither about him writing music for a film, nor me making a film to accompany his music. The idea was to ensure that both elements found common ground; this was a project where music and images had equal value. I contacted Tavener and was surprised when he told me he liked my films and would be happy to meet. We had a good working relationship. People who have a certain greatness to them are easy to get along with. The mediocre are the troublesome ones.
The context Tavener and I worked within was a religious one. His conversion to the Greek Orthodox Church as a young man strongly influenced his music, while I feel I understand religious impulses because of the short and dramatic religious phase I experienced in my adolescence. It meant we approached the film from the same point of view, one that seemed obvious for both of us. I proposed our collaboration be about the prayers and hopes of pilgrims. "We shouldn't talk about making a film together," I said. "We should make a pilgrimage together." When we first met we had such an instant concordance of hearts that we didn't even discuss the music or the film. He immediately knew what I wanted, and after he played maybe twenty seconds on the piano I interrupted him and said, "John, stop. Just compose it."
The finished film is only eighteen minutes long, with no dialogue or voiceover. We see only landscapes, bodies and faces – all material originally shot for other projects – but for me it's an important work about basic human emotions and practices. Some of the footage features pilgrims I filmed in Russia for _Bells from the Deep_ , and the images of the crashing waves are from Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, where I shot the crabs for _Invincible_. The quote at the beginning is from Thomas à Kempis, the mediaeval mystic: "It is only the pilgrims who in the travails of their earthly voyage do not lose their way, whether our planet be frozen or scorched: they are guided by the same prayers, and suffering, and fervour, and woe." If readers have had their eyes on the previous chapters of this book, they will smell something the moment this text appears. Yes, the quote is my invention. I had something else in mind, but Tavener wrote a fine letter to me, full of passion. I immediately knew he was the _melior pars_ and had the right to overrule me. It's a question of fairness. I always try to respect the wishes of collaborators in these kinds of situations, when they come at me with such intensity and conviction. Unless what Tavener had proposed contradicted my deepest knowledge of cinema, I was willing to accede.
Most of _Pilgrimage_ was shot at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Tepeyac, on the outskirts of Mexico City. There was very little available light, so we made the film entirely on video. People were arriving from all over the country, some literally on their knees, exhausted, weeping, tormented, at the end of their physical strength. Whether en route to Santiago de Compostela or at the shrine of the Virgen de Guadalupe, pilgrims on the move are a metaphor for human life. We had very little room to manoeuvre because thousands of people were arriving every hour, drifting through the basilica on a mechanical conveyor belt that moves slowly, never stopping. This is the only way to maintain any level of safety because otherwise there would be serious pile-ups. In the film it appears as if everyone is floating past the camera, looking up in wonder. My original idea was to include a variety of sounds I had recorded in the basilica, but the moment I heard John's music it was obvious this would bring the film down to some pseudorealistic level. It isn't important to show exactly who these pilgrims are, or who and what they are venerating. A man talks to the image of the Virgin while holding a photo of a woman. We know nothing about him, yet through this simple, stirring image we seem to have complete knowledge of his story.
_Would you have shot films like_ Aguirre _and_ Fitzcarraldo _digitally if the technology had been available?_
Under no circumstances, though I'm not one of those caught in the nostalgia of celluloid. Nothing can compare with the depth and force of film, and though digital imagery has improved over the years and will continue to do so, I plan to stick with film for as long as possible. One problem is that some high-tech cameras are designed and produced by computer engineers who don't fully understand cinema's century-old history of high-precision mechanics. We shot _My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done_ using what at the time was an innovative camera that looked like a gigantic computer. It took me more than four minutes just to turn it on. That's an eternity for me when I'm on a film set. The more technologically advanced your equipment is, the more potential problems there are.
Although the relatively low cost of video means filmmakers can be more self-reliant, it provides an unhealthy and misleading pseudo-security, because you can instantly replay the images you have just captured. What I like about film is that you never immediately know what has been shot. When I feel in my guts we have the best we can possibly get, I stop. I don't want to be able to push a button and check there and then what we've been working on. This is why you won't find video-assist monitors on my set. I feel the same way about dailies, which I always found dangerously misleading and discouraging. Material fresh from the laboratory can be useful to look at if you want to check certain technical things, but when you take a shot out of context – not only from the scene but also the story as a whole – there is no way of knowing just how good it really is. Filming on celluloid naturally forces you into a much more intense relationship to whatever you're shooting. Careful deliberation is required; you have only a few minutes on a single reel to get what you need. On video, by comparison, you can pick up hours of material very easily, though most of it will likely be of mediocre quality, and you can never make a single extraordinary minute of cinema with mediocre material.
_How much of_ Invincible _is based on historical fact?_
It was inspired by the true story of Siegmund "Zishe" Breitbart, a young Jewish blacksmith who became a famous strongman in the variety world of Vienna, Berlin and even Broadway in the early twenties. The Nazis, who were rising to power at the time, were dismayed that a Jew, not an Aryan Siegfried, was being hailed as the strongest man in the world. Zishe was fiercely proud of his Jewish heritage, called himself the "New Samson" and died after an absurd accident when a rusty nail scratched his knee.
One of Zishe's descendants, Gary Bart, had in his possession thousands of related photos, letters, newspaper reports and other documents. I also saw thirty seconds of a newsreel about him. There was a screenplay in existence that Gary had commissioned, but it was about Zishe's fairground exploits, and after reading it I called Gary and said I thought there was something big in the story, something everyone had overlooked. There was a fire on my roof almost instantly and I had to scramble up with a bucket. I asked Gary if he had the nerve to throw away his investment, telling him I would write a screenplay myself. As I already mentioned, I shifted the entire story ten years into the future, closer to the Nazi era. _Invincible_ is a story that shows the Jewish people as strong and confident, and ends on 28 January 1933, two days before Hitler takes power. I also added things like the character of Zishe's nine-year-old brother Benjamin. Their relationship is an important one because it serves to show the power of family life in condensed form. I see Zishe and Benjamin as Moses and Aaron: the prophetic strongman heavy of tongue and his little brother having to speak for him. What really touched a nerve with me was the idea of someone so strong also being so vulnerable.
Zishe reminds me of Mike Tyson, who I have met a few times. Tyson appears to be a person of absolute violence and madness, an almost prehistoric type from the underbelly of society, but there is another side to him. He read a lot of books in prison; the man has the soul of Mozart and carries with him great intelligence and tenderness. You couldn't imagine talking to Mike Tyson about Machiavelli, the Roman Republic and early Frankish kings like Clovis, Pepin the Short and Charles Martel, but that's what happened to me. He's a genuinely fascinating character.
_Did you consider not casting a real strongman in the part?_
Never. When I look around at actors with rippling muscles, they seem totally inauthentic and pumped up with steroids. The genuine strongest of the strong look very different, and I knew there would be a serious credibility gap with the film unless I found a real strongman. If audiences see Zishe in that early circus scene and don't absolutely believe his strength, _Invincible_ instantly fails. When we shot the film, Jouko Ahola – who played the part and is a carpenter by trade – was in fact officially the strongest man in the world, an absolute colossus, able to drag a fire truck behind him. When he lifts nine hundred pounds in the film, that really is him lifting nine hundred pounds. Actually, it's slightly under nine hundred because Jouko knew that an injury would put him out of commission for months. He always stood out when compared to other strongmen, not least because he has such a boyish innocence about him, something made clear the second you see him on screen. What I liked was that he was so soft-spoken but had such charisma. He's the kind of person you want as your big brother, someone to look out for you. His good-heartedness was also something I saw women respond to immediately, which is another reason I cast him. Jouko was resistant to accepting the role, but I told him, "I know my job, and I know how to make you into a good actor."
This question of authenticity and attention to detail was important to me not just in the casting, but also when filming on location. At the time I was finishing up another film and staging an opera, so I asked my production designer Ulrich Bergfelder to go to eastern Poland and take photos of various landscapes and towns. He came back with a useful set of images, though I immediately sensed it wasn't the right place to film because so much had been destroyed during the Second World War and many of the beautiful wooden buildings had been replaced with concrete eyesores. I decided we had to film elsewhere, so on the advice of Volker Schlöndorff, who suggested I go to Latvia and Lithuania, a decision was taken rather quickly. For the market sequence, which was shot in Vilnius, we made a real effort to create as historically authentic an environment as possible. All of a sudden, in the middle of the shot, after having blocked off several streets and stopped traffic, an elderly lady walked by carrying a big yellow shopping bag. She refused to believe we were making a film and just wanted to do her shopping. At that moment I had the feeling we were doing a good job. It took us weeks to negotiate with the Jewish community in Vilnius because we wanted to film in the local synagogue, the only one out of more than a hundred that had survived the Nazi onslaught. The locals were initially resistant to the idea. Could a German filmmaker really depict Jewish life and rituals in a dignified way? Eventually we were permitted to shoot there, and many of the extras in _Invincible_ are genuine congregants of the synagogue.
The father of Jacob Wein, who played Benjamin, gave me a book of Jewish legends in which I found the story of the "unknown just." In every generation, so the legend goes, there are born among the Jews thirty-six men who God has chosen to bear the burden of the world's suffering, and to whom he has granted the privilege of martyrdom. These men are indistinguishable from mere mortals, and they themselves often don't know they are one of the thirty-six. I realised the story embodied the soul of the film, that of an ordinary man with an extraordinary gift who finds the courage to accept and fulfil his destiny. I knew it had to be included in _Invincible_ , as spoken by the character of Rabbi Edelmann, and once the script was written I asked Herb Golder, my assistant director, to read it to Gary Bart. I instantly knew Herb had to play the part. We had searched everywhere for a real rabbi – including Tel Aviv and London – but with deadlines approaching I realised no one was as convincing as Herb. I told him he would be playing the rabbi and insisted he not shave for a few weeks.
_The character of Hanussen figures prominently in the story._
While Zishe influences people by the strength of his body, Hanussen manipulates audiences through the power of imagination, and the collision of these two makes for a strong dramatic clash. Hanussen's character in the film is actually based more on historical reality than Zishe's is; a fair amount is known about him because he published his own newspaper and wrote a book entitled _Mind Reading and Telepathy_ , as well as an autobiography. Hanussen was an expert hypnotist and illusionist who claimed to be a genuine psychic, and stepped into the role of a clairvoyant because the climate of the early thirties demanded a seer, someone able to offer some perspective amidst the political chaos and turmoil of the times, with its bank collapses, unemployment and attempted coups. He reinvented himself as a Danish aristocrat with the stage name Erik Jan Hanussen, though he was actually a Czech Jew called Hermann Steinschneider. Hanussen said he predicted the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 and Hitler's electoral victory the year before; in the film he talks about "the figure of light that has come among us." In reality he did something all cheats and con men do: he bet on every horse, predicting the victories of Von Schleicher, Brüning and Von Papen as well. After the election he pointed only to the paragraph he had written about Hitler, who he knew personally. In the film the courtroom scenes between Zishe and Hanussen become more than just a legal battle, because Hanussen's true identity is revealed. He had compromised too many high-ranking Nazi party members, which seems to be why he was abducted and later found riddled with bullets in a forest outside Berlin, half eaten by wild boar.
_Hans Zimmer wrote the music._
I like Zimmer because he is talented, self-made, has a true understanding of cinema and is unable to read music. It turns out he was inspired to become a film composer after seeing _Fitzcarraldo_ , and immediately quit his band, moved into a sleazy hotel in Los Angeles and started a new career. I asked if he would write something for _Invincible_ but made clear the budget wouldn't stretch to his normal fee, so he offered to write something for free and also pay for the choir and orchestra out of his own pocket. His attorneys advised him that this would have resulted in certain tax implications, so we agreed on a fee of $1. The transfer of music rights was originally to be in perpetuity, which is an unnerving concept for me, so I changed it to "perpetuity minus one day." When Hans saw that he insisted on having one day subtracted as well, so the contract we both signed read "in perpetuity minus two days."
_You contributed to the compilation project_ Ten Minutes Older.
I was invited to make a film of exactly ten minutes on the subject of time. It was a challenge, an exercise in narrative discipline, like writing a Japanese haiku; everything not absolutely essential was put aside. I tell the story of a native Stone Age Indian tribe that lived deep in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, the Uru Eu. They were the last significant group to come into contact with the rest of humanity and technological civilisation, though there are probably several tribes – perhaps some on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean and tiny groups in the Amazon and New Guinea – that remain untouched. The tribe had shot arrows at anyone who approached, so in 1981 the Brazilian government decided to make controlled contact with this group because it was inevitably going to happen eventually, especially with the increasing encroachment of gold, lumber and petroleum companies. The encounter between these two cultures took only ten minutes, but in that time the Uru Eu society was dragged into modernity, thrust forward ten thousand years, from a Neolithic Stone Age existence into the twentieth century. Within days some of them were being flown to cities, driven in cars and exposed to television and prostitutes. The story of the Uru Eu is a profound tragedy because, with no immunity to chickenpox and the common cold, diseases the rest of humanity had developed resistance to, 75 per cent of the tribe died within a year. I found the only competent speaker of their language who also spoke Portuguese and, alongside the Brazilian cameraman who in 1981 had recorded the first contact, filmed with some of the few surviving members of the tribe. The film is called _Ten Thousand Years Older._
_Not many filmmakers have been invited by the Dalai Lama to film a Buddhist rite._
Which is one reason why I made _Wheel of Time,_ though I could never claim to be very connected to Buddhist culture. At the time my understanding of the religion was rudimentary. A group of Buddhists in Graz, Austria, were planning to hold the Kalachakra initiation ceremony there. Every few years the Dalai Lama settles on one place where he invites the Buddhist world to celebrate this event with him. I was initially hesitant because I can't stand crowds of Western Buddhists crammed together in one place; there's something about seeing them in multitudes that looks wrong to me. Besides, I had no desire to be a cultural tourist, slipping into a religion I knew little about. Then I watched an amateur video from an earlier Kalachakra ceremony in Ladakh, in the Himalayas, and was impressed. The plan was also to hold the ceremony in Bodhgaya, a small village in India, where – after years of wandering as an itinerant – the historical Buddha had experienced his enlightenment under a tree.
I was still undecided about the project, but the Dalai Lama sent an envoy who asked me to reconsider and make the film, starting in Bodhgaya. Apparently he's a big fan of cinema, especially vampire films, and enjoyed _Nosferatu_. It isn't easy to say no when the Dalai Lama summons you; the man is charismatic, warm-hearted and deeply philosophical, with an astoundingly clear worldview, able to articulate complex ideas, and one of the best laughers I have ever met. I decided to move forward with the project and read as much as I could about Buddhism, though made the film very much as an outsider, keeping to my own culture, an approach to the subject that I feel comes through in the film. The Dalai Lama has spoken of the importance of studying religions other than our own, but at the same time staying within our own faith. Explore Buddhism, but don't leave your own religion behind.
In Bodhgaya we were confronted by the vast makeshift tent-city constructed on the outskirts of town to cater for the half a million pilgrims expected for the Kalachakra event, an eagerly awaited ceremony for the faithful. Some people arrived hanging on to battered, overflowing trucks, some by train from Delhi, others travelled thousands of miles on foot. One had even come nearly two thousand miles, prostrating himself at each step by lowering his body, arms outstretched, touching the ground with his forehead, then standing up and moving to where his head was. The journey had taken him three and a half years. Although he had protected them with wooden clogs, the bones in his hands had grown nodules, and there was a permanent wound on his forehead that came from touching the ground a couple of million times. Yet this man radiated the placidity of a statue. It's the kind of devotion that one can't help but be respectful of, regardless of what religion – or otherwise – is being honoured.
_You seem comfortable representing spirituality on film._
I felt the best way to represent the beliefs, intensity and dignity of Buddhists was simply to show what we found in India, Tibet and Austria, the wonderful physical side to the spirituality there. In Bodhgaya we participated in the frenzy by jumping into the crowd and immersing ourselves in the mayhem. The pilgrims piled themselves up as they scrambled for little symbolic gifts, and more than once I was nearly trampled underfoot.
Strictly speaking, the sequence of the circumambulation of Mount Kailash in Tibet by the faithful doesn't belong in the film because Kailash isn't part of the Kalachakra ceremony. What connects the mountain to the rest of _Wheel of Time_ is that Kailash is considered the spiritual and physical centre of the universe, which is exactly what the sand mandala of the ceremony symbolically depicts. Kailash is a mountain of the highest significance not only for Buddhists, but also Hindus, Jains and the shamanistic Tibetan Bon-Po religion, which dates back to pre-Buddhist times. It's a sacred landscape for them, as well as being a barren and solitary place with no trees and vegetation. When a nomad walks away in the morning, you can see him at midday; the next day, through binoculars, he's still a dot in the distance. I did most of the shooting there myself. The Chinese authorities wouldn't issue us with a shooting permit, but at the last minute I managed to get a tourist visa. I was in Bangkok, which is at sea level, then flew from Thailand to Kathmandu in Nepal, and from there by truck into Tibet. Within a short time I was at an altitude of 16,000 feet. Not having had time to acclimatise myself made the whole thing difficult; I was panting and puffing. Truckloads of people were showing up daily at the encampment at the base of the mountain. In an average year you would find only a handful of pilgrims, but this was a particularly auspicious moment and more than a hundred thousand people arrived. The trek around the base of the mountain takes three days to complete. The path rises so high that while I was there a handful of people from the lowlands of India died because of altitude sickness.
I used a small, hand-held digital camera and looked like a tourist. _Wheel of Time_ is the first occasion I've ever given myself a cameraman credit. I always find it embarrassing to take credit for too many things, so with several films in the past I asked a cameraman friend of mine to put his name in the credits, even though I had done all the filming myself. "Is it good work?" he would ask. "Of course," I said. "You won't be ashamed." It meant the television stations producing these films paid this man's salary, which was money I could use for other things directly related to the production. There are phantoms populating the credits of some of my films going back decades.
_Did you feel a divine presence at Mount Kailash?_
No, but I could tell everyone else did.
_What is the wheel of time?_
The centrepiece of the Kalachakra ceremony is an initiation rite comprised of teachings and prayers, with the aim of activating the seed of enlightenment dormant in all of us. The central ritual revolves around the creation of a highly symbolic sand mandala, the wheel of time, a complex vision of a sacred cosmography. As far as I know, five books of instruction are required to complete it and there are more than two hundred volumes of commentary and exegesis. The symbolic image of the mandala is deeply embedded in the eidetic memory of the Buddhist world. The artist monks come from the Dalai Lama's monastery in Dharamsala; they sit on the four sides of the platform and work with the utmost concentration, trickling extremely fine sand of different colours with pinpoint precision to create the mandala, all while wearing face masks, because to breathe or sneeze on their work would spell disaster. It's all extremely physical work, yet stunningly placid at the same time. Once the monks have finished, thousands of devout people move around the platform in prayer. Eventually the Dalai Lama disperses the image with a few strokes of a broom, then throws the sand into a nearby river, which symbolises the impermanence of things.
_In_ The White Diamond _Graham Dorrington tests a prototype airship in the jungles of Guyana._
The project was brought to me by my son Rudolph, who had the feeling I should do it because – with its themes of flight and hovering in the air – the story has such an intense connection to my feelings about flying. The film is the tale of aeronautical engineer Graham Dorrington, who once pedalled an airship from Southampton to the Isle of Wight, a distance of about a hundred miles. He was about to embark on a trip to the giant Kaieteur Falls – more than four times the height of Niagara Falls – in the heart of Guyana, hoping to float his helium-filled airship above the treetops. The purpose of the journey was to study the biosphere and wildlife high up in the canopy of the jungle, terrain which remains mostly unexplored; even the bottom of the ocean is better understood than the biodiversity you find up there. A helicopter would create an enormous amount of noise and wind, while a balloon would just float away wherever the wind takes it. A dirigible airship, the kind of subdued and contemplative form of flight that has always fascinated me, was the solution for this kind of exploration.
It was always a risky venture, something made clear by the fact that in 1993 a similar expedition in Sumatra had ended in disaster when German cameraman Dieter Plage perished on the maiden flight of a one-man airship that Dorrington had designed and built. He fell two hundred feet to his death, landing at Dorrington's feet. Plage appears in archival footage in _The White Diamond_ only briefly, but his presence somehow casts a shadow over the entire film. Dorrington's story reminds me of a Greek tragedy about a man who dreams of flying. Until today, he hasn't fully redeemed himself; he will have to cope with his friend's death until the end of his days. Dorrington shied away from telling Plage's story on camera for weeks, but I kept pushing him. One day I cornered him. "This is the moment," I said, "otherwise it will never happen." He reluctantly agreed, acknowledging it would be a key sequence in the film. I told him the only witnesses would be a cameraman, me recording the sound, and my fourteen-year-old son. I sensed that the key to Dorrington opening up was having him speak not to a camera or a crew, but a young boy.
_Behind the waterfall is a gigantic cave._
It's home to one and a half million nesting swifts. After diving down vertically at more than a hundred miles an hour, faster than a small aeroplane, they fly past – and some even through – this curtain of water. I stood on the edge of the cliff as they swept right past me like bullets but wasn't hit once; even at that speed they somehow avoid everything in their way. I spoke to one of the tribal leaders and asked him what was inside this dark cave. He said that according to ancient beliefs, great monsters and gigantic snakes are back there, guarding treasure. We lowered one of the crew – an expert mountain climber who was carrying a camera – on a rope to shoot behind the waterfall, but the tribal leader implored me not to show the footage to anyone, which is why I didn't include it in the film.
What I like about _The White Diamond_ is that the heart of the film imperceptibly shifts, midway, from Dorrington to Marc Anthony Yhap, one of the local Rastafarians, then again to Yhap's magnificent and beloved rooster Red Man. Moving from protagonist to protagonist wasn't my original plan, but as I looked at the cast of characters around me during filming, the storyline and centre of attention naturally drifted. By the end of _The White Diamond_ we are following Red Man, who has become the film's new leading character. Kleist does something similar in _Michael Kohlhaas_ , with the narrative moving from Kohlhaas to Martin Luther, then finally to a gypsy woman.
_Do you ever think back on all the people you have filmed with over the years?_
Of course. You would never say being the head of a family is a man's profession. For me it's the same thing. Making films isn't my profession, it's my life. The films and people in them aren't just characters; they are a vitally important part of me as a human being. Many are part of the family inside me, even if they probably mean something different to me today than when I made those particular films.
Fini died a few years after we made _Land of Silence and Darkness_ , and I haven't had any contact with Steiner for several decades. I was last in touch with him when he was the trainer of the American ski-flying team in Colorado. Bruno S. died in 2010. Years before he had made his full name known to the public, so for the record and in his honour let me state it here: Bruno Schleinstein. He was a genuinely inventive man, and was proud of being a self-taught pianist. He would squeeze my fingertips when we watched _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ together and he heard music. "This is feeling strong in _Der Bruno's_ heart," he would say. I ended up writing some scenes for him in _Stroszek_ where he could play the piano. He painted what I suppose would be called "naive" art, and one day showed me a great discovery he insisted was worth submitting to the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften [German Academy of Sciences]. His apartment was full of found objects because he was always rummaging around city garbage cans. He collected dilapidated ventilators, a couple of which still worked, and painted one blade yellow, one blue, one red, and so on. Bruno was convinced he was the first person to discover that when they spun around, all of a sudden the colours would vanish and appear white. In his later years he published a book of aphorisms, had an exhibition of his art and released a CD of his music. For many people my hiring a man like Bruno was too far out of the ordinary. There was a very weak film about him a few years ago that suggests I used, abused, then dropped this innocent and defenceless man. It was directed by such a puny dimwit that I have nothing to say in response, other than: I know I did the right thing. I prefer my opponents to be more formidable. Although years passed between our meetings, I always kept one eye on Bruno from afar, and would have immediately done something had I discovered he was in trouble.
The short-range commitment of filmmaking means there's a deficit of deep personal connections in this job. If I made a film every five years, it would be easier to maintain contact with people, but that's never been the case. I lead a rather nomadic existence, and in any given year might travel to a dozen countries. I'm like a late-mediaeval mercenary; once a battle is fought, I move on. I can't feel guilty about not staying in touch with all the people I have worked with over the decades. However intense it might be, time spent with someone on a film is inevitably a fleeting alliance. These relationships always come to a natural end, and sustained contact rarely develops once our work together is completed. Everyone moves on to the next project, often thousands of miles away. I count myself lucky, however, because my oldest and dearest friends are those I met while making my early films; for a time it was the only way I made contact with people. Fortunately, over the decades I have been able to call upon many of the same trusted collaborators whenever I make a film. This includes my wife, who is a photographer and travels as widely and as intensively as I do. She sometimes works as the set photographer on my films, which means we move about the world together.
Many of my collaborators over the years haven't strictly been people of cinema, though they have all brought much to the filmmaking process with their wildly divergent approaches. Tenacious men and women, singular, imaginative, dedicated and trustworthy, with great faith, all as agitated as I am. Ulrich Bergfelder, the set designer on several of my films, is a specialist in old Provençal languages and troubadour literature. Claude Chiarini, who died a few years ago, was a doctor and neurologist in a Parisian lunatic asylum, once of the French Foreign Legion and formerly a dentist. He joined us on the set of _Heart of Glass_ in case one of the hypnotised actors didn't wake up, and also to take production photos. Cornelius Siegel, a mathematician and master carpenter, is an ingenious man who can build anything. If a battery fails in the middle of the jungle, he could take some bark and resin from a tree and make it work again. Herb Golder, the assistant director on several productions, is a professor of Classics at Boston University and a martial artist. It's important for the people working on a film to know they aren't just employees, rather an invaluable component part of a team, with a vested interest in doing the best work possible. On _Fitzcarraldo_ one of the technicians at the processing lab had read the screenplay and looked at the footage we were sending him just as a filmmaker would, to the point where one time I got a message from him asking, "Where are the close-ups?"
_You had a moustache for many years. Is the tattoo still there?_
The moustache was a good one, some kind of defensive barrier to hide behind. Amidst the travails of life I got rid of it. It was actually the victim of a lost bet. Anyway, life has been good to me and perhaps I no longer need it. As for the tattoo, I don't think about it any more. It's there, on my arm, the image of Death, wearing a tuxedo and a bow tie, singing into an old-fashioned ZDF [Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen] microphone. I haven't noticed the thing for years. I was thirty-six, in San Francisco, accompanying my friend Paul Getty, who was getting a tattoo. The tattoo artist fascinated me, and while I was waiting I got one myself.
_You once gave a talk at the New York Public Library entitled "Was the Twentieth Century a Mistake?"_
The Polish author Ryszard Kapuściński and I worked on a sciencefiction project together. Kapuściński was one of the few people who had survived the chaos of the eastern Congo in the early sixties; within a year and a half he had been arrested forty times and condemned to death four times. I asked him what his worst experience had been, and in his soft-spoken voice he told me it was when they threw dozens of poisonous snakes into his tiny cell with him. "My hair turned white in five days." He was a tremendously forceful personality, full of serenity and insight. The idea behind our proposed collaboration was simple: technology is something we all rely on, yet will be the first casualty. For Kapuściński and me, science fiction doesn't mean the projection of our technological possibilities into the future, rather the loss of such things. There will come a time when we lose our grasp on technology and will never be able to recover it.
Both of us would regularly encounter computers in airports with jungle weeds growing out of the keyboards; one look at those and you knew you weren't flying anywhere. We often found ourselves standing in front of terminally inoperative elevators, which meant taking the stairs. We encountered soldiers who would cut the water supplies of cities, then return a week later with huge water trucks and sell their cargo to the thirsty population. We stayed in hotels where the bellboy would show you to your room and produce a lightbulb from his pocket. The moment you left – even for an hour – the bulb would be unscrewed from the socket and taken away. A bicycle is easily repaired with basic tools, but a car without gasoline is useless. Imagine a worldwide electricity outage for a full fortnight; the chaos and distress it would cause is unfathomable. Having fundamental skills – starting a fire without a match, constructing a primitive shelter, knowing which berries are poisonous and which aren't – would become life or death. That was our science fiction.
The hubris that human beings display fascinates me. Look at certain forms of architecture, those grandiose follies that represent the point at which our attempts to construct vast objects alongside nature became too delirious; they touch dangerously upon taboos. The dam at Vajont in northern Italy, in the Dolomite Alps, is a fantastical structure, something like five hundred feet high, the largest in Europe when it was built. The lake that the dam created had steep slopes on either side, and a small number of dissident geologists spoke of the potential for catastrophe. In 1963 came the largest landslide since Neolithic times. In one cataclysmic event, nearly a billion cubic feet of rock crashed into the lake at incredible speed, creating a tsunami almost eight hundred feet high. It swept down over several villages, killing nearly two thousand people. The dam withstood this monumental onslaught completely intact; at its base the wall is nearly ninety feet thick, made of the finest steel and concrete, which is why it will probably still be around in five hundred thousand years. Vajont is one of the follies that will outlive the human race.
While the fundamental analysis of environmentalists is correct, the whole thing took a turn for the worse when tree-huggers entered into the equation. They are so blindly concerned with the wellbeing of tree frogs, panda bears and salad leaves, yet while we have been sitting here it's entirely possible a human language has died out. We can't overlook those kinds of irreversible losses to human culture, which are taking place at a staggering speed. The extinction of a language is beyond tragic. Imagine if the last Italian vanished and took with him Dante and Virgil, or if the Russian language disappeared and we no longer had Tolstoy or Pasternak. Ninety per cent of the languages spoken today will likely be dead within a hundred years. There is a new moral and cultural imperative out there, one we unfortunately haven't absorbed into our common thinking yet. Two centuries ago in Australia there were something like six hundred languages. Today there are less than one-tenth that number. When I made _Where the Green Ants Dream_ I met an old Aborigine, the last surviving speaker of his language, living in a retirement home in Port Augusta, southern Australia. They called him "The Mute," but the only reason he didn't talk was that there was no one left on earth with whom he could communicate. I watched him walk up and down the corridors, lonely to the world, dropping change into an empty soda machine and putting his ear up to it so he could listen to the rattle of the coins as they settled at the bottom. He would do this all afternoon. At night, while he slept, the employees of the retirement home would take the money out of the machine and put it back in his pocket. With this man's death we lost part of our collective human knowledge.
We can actually identify the moment when things started to go awry. It was Petrarch who committed a "sin" by being the first to climb a mountain just for the sake of climbing. In a letter written in Latin, he speaks of a shudder he experienced; it was probably a premonition of the mass tourism that would soon strip the mountain of its dignity. An earlier arch sin, from prehistoric times, one which we can't date quite so exactly, was the breeding of the first pig. In the Palaeolithic era there were only hunter-gatherers. Breeding the first dog helped maintain that way of life because dogs would travel as companions with nomadic hunters. The same applies to horses, which were a means of transport. But the breeding of the first pig in Neolithic times was a true act of original sin. With agriculture came settlements and eventually cities, making humanity sedentary. This is where our real problems began. It's too late to turn the clock back.
Be under no illusions. Try to subdue this planet at your peril. Humanity is unsustainable. Trilobites and ammonites disappeared from this planet after hundreds of millions of years of existence, and later the dinosaurs became extinct. It never bothered me that the universe doesn't care about us, that we will all eventually disappear from the face of the earth. Crabs, urchins and sponges have a better chance of survival; they have been around for millions of years, and probably have millions more to go. We on land are more vulnerable than the cockroaches. Nature has always regulated mankind's existence. The microbes will get us in the end. Martin Luther was asked what he would do if the world were coming to an end that same day. There is a wondrous serenity to his response. "I would plant an apple tree," he said. Me, I would make a film.
* See Bibliography, p. 500.
† "I hate that killer's guts. I shriek to his face that I want to see him croak like the llama that he executed. He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! The sting of a poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No panther claws should rip open his throat – that would be much too good for him! No! The huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Malaria! Yellow fever! Leprosy!" See Bibliography, p. 499.
# Blowing the Fuses
_During an interview a few years ago someone shot you. You told the world: "It was not a significant bullet."_
Winston Churchill said that being shot at unsuccessfully is an exhilarating moment in a man's life. I was at the top of the Hollywood Hills near my home, recording an interview, when I heard a loud bang. I assumed the camera had exploded because it felt as if I had been hit in the stomach by a chunk of glowing metal, but it was intact. Then, some distance away, I saw a man with a gun, ducking out of sight on a veranda. We had already heard him shouting obscenities about the fact that yet another film star was being interviewed in public. In that respect, it was something on a par with road rage. Although the bullet – small calibre, probably 22mm, or a high-powered airgun – went through my leather jacket and a folded-up catalogue, it didn't perforate my abdomen, which would have been unpleasant. For this reason, the entire incident is nothing to speak of. I would have continued with the interview, but the cameraman had already hit the dirt. The miserable, cowardly BBC crew were terrified and wanted to call the cops, but I had no interest in spending the next five hours filling out police reports. When you dial 911 because of a burglary, the police take hours to check in on you, but when you report someone shooting, the helicopters start circling within five minutes, and soon after that a SWAT team moves in. The entire incident was more a piece of American folklore than anything else, though I'm glad it was caught on tape. No one would have believed me otherwise.
_You live in Los Angeles, home of sun, surf and vitamins._
I leave such things – including gyms, exercising in public and tanning salons, all the idiocies of modern urban life – to Californians. I have been down to Venice Beach, where the musclemen congregate, only a couple of times, and that was to show it to some curious friends. What I like about Los Angeles is that it allows everyone to live his or her own lifestyle. Drive around the hills and you find a Moorish castle next to a Swiss chalet sitting beside a house shaped like a UFO. There is a lot of creative energy in Los Angeles not channelled into the film business. Florence and Venice have great surface beauty, but as cities they feel like museums, whereas for me Los Angeles is the city in America with the most substance, even if it's raw, uncouth and sometimes quite bizarre. Wherever you look is an immense depth, a tumult that resonates with me. New York is more concerned with finance than anything else. It doesn't create culture, only consumes it; most of what you find in New York comes from elsewhere. Things actually get done in Los Angeles. Look beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and a wild excitement of intense dreams opens up; it has more horizons than any other place. There is a great deal of industry in the city and a real working class; I also appreciate the vibrant presence of the Mexicans. In the last half century every significant cultural and technical trend has emerged from California, including the Free Speech Movement and the acceptance of gays and lesbians as an integral part of a dignified society, computers and the Internet, and – thanks to Hollywood – the collective dreams of the entire world. A fascinating density of things exists there like nowhere else in the world. Muslim fundamentalism is probably the only contemporary mass movement that wasn't born there. One reason I'm so comfortable in Los Angeles is that Hollywood doesn't need me and I don't need Hollywood. I rarely involve myself with industry rituals and am rarely on the red carpet.
Of course, California is also where some of humanity's most astonishing stupidities started, like the hippie movement, New Age babble, stretch limos, pyramid energy, plastic surgery, yoga classes for children, vitamins and marijuana smoking. Whenever someone wants to pass on "good vibes" to me, I look for the nearest empty elevator shaft. There are a lot of well-educated people doing very silly things in Los Angeles, like a man in my neighbourhood who one day casually mentioned his cat was in some sort of a frenzy, so he called the cat psychic. He put the receiver to his pet's ear and for $200 the animal's problems were solved. I would rather jump off the Golden Gate Bridge than visit a psychiatrist. Self-scrutiny is a strong taboo for me, and if I had to stop and analyse myself, there's no doubt I would end up wrapped around the next tree. Psychoanalysis is no more scientific than the cranial surgery practised under the middle-period pharaohs, and by jerking the deepest secrets out into the open, it denies and destroys the great mysteries of our souls. Human beings illuminated to the last corner of their darkest soul are unbearable, the same way an apartment is uninhabitable if every corner is flooded with light. The Spanish Inquisition was a similar mistake in human history, forcing people to disclose the innermost nature of their religious faith. It did no good to anyone.
But ranting about cultural decay isn't very useful. The poet must not avert his eyes. When you look at the cultural shifts that have taken place over the centuries in the representation of female beauty, for example, someone as uncouth as Anna Nicole Smith becomes fascinating. The earliest representations of females are small statues from forty thousand years ago, like the _Venus of Willendorf_ , with no face but a massive belly and breasts; this is apparently an idealised version of fertility and fecundity. Greek antiquity has its own well-known Venuses, and in late-mediaeval paintings we see fragile Madonnas, with porcelain-like skin and small breasts. Rubens's _Three Graces_ , by comparison, are real porkers. With Anna Nicole Smith, the ideal of femininity was transformed into comic-book proportions. When combined in one person, breast enhancement, Botox and lip augmentation make for a walking art installation. However vulgar she was, there was something of great enormity and momentousness about Anna Nicole. I wish I had made a film with her.
Grizzly Man _is about bear-lover Timothy Treadwell, who was eaten by his furry friends._
Treadwell was a celebrity because he spent thirteen summers living with bears in the Alaskan wilderness. He was killed and eaten in 2003, but not before he had filmed his final years among bears with a video camera. _Grizzly Man_ is cut together from material he shot of himself with the animals amidst the extraordinary landscapes of Alaska, alongside the footage I filmed a few months after his death.
Treadwell's story is a dark and complex one, and his cause – though noble – was ill conceived. He saw a mission he wanted to fulfil and, by doing so, somehow wrestle meaning from a life he had already lost. As he says himself, "I had no life. Now I have a life." Although he tried to protect bears from poachers and other imagined dangers, it's fair to say he needed the animals more than they needed him; they were some kind of salvation for him. Treadwell was a haunted man, perhaps even with a death wish, who was forever trying to overcome his demons, which included a serious drug and alcohol problem. Out in the wilderness he was able to experience moments of both dazzling elation and utter dejection. In his footage one minute he's full of joy, exuberance and pride; the next he's weeping, feeling dejected and utterly downhearted, overwhelmed by paranoia. But whether you sympathise with Treadwell or not is irrelevant. _Grizzly Man_ is a unique document about humanity's relationship with the wild and a glimpse into the deep abyss of the human soul. For me this is a story about the human condition, the misery and exhilarations that haunt us, the contradictions within. This was definitely a personal project for me, even if so much of the film is comprised of Treadwell's own footage. We owe him our admiration because of his courage and single-mindedness; it doesn't matter how wrong his basic assumptions were and how much he romanticised nature. No one holds out for thirteen summers living amongst grizzly bears without having a deep conviction within. Whether that conviction is right or wrong doesn't matter. There is something much bigger in his story.
It would be easy to denounce Treadwell because of the games he played with danger and his sporadic moments of paranoia, as well as the posture he had of an eco-warrior, but we have to separate his occasionally delusional acts as an individual from what he filmed, which is powerful indeed. I think everybody who has an instinct about cinema would acknowledge there is something out of the ordinary and of great depth in Treadwell's footage. Probably unbeknownst to him, he created unique images of extraordinary beauty and significance that Hollywood would never be able to reproduce, even with all the money in the world.
_How did you discover that materal existed?_
I went to pay a visit to a producer friend of mine, who took me on a tour of his office. We sat down at his desk – which was covered with paper, drawings, DVDs and empty FedEx boxes – and when I got up to leave realised I had misplaced my car keys. I glanced at the table and knew they were there somewhere, but my friend thought I had noticed something that interested me. He handed over an article, one of the first published about Treadwell. "Read this," he said. "We're making a film about it." I went out to my car, but ten minutes later, after having stood reading these few pages without taking my eyes off them, I walked back into his office and said, "How far along is this project? Who is directing it?" He answered, "Well, I'm kind of directing." When I heard his casual "kind of," I looked him in the eye and said, "No. I will direct this film!" I knew this was big, even before I had any notion of Treadwell's footage. I never look for these characters. I just stumble into them, or they into me.
Treadwell left behind almost a hundred hours of footage, though much of it was of kitsch landscapes and fluffy bear cubs. In his unedited footage we see how he staged and directed things, how he did one take after another and erased the ones he disliked. We know he did at least fifteen takes of certain shots because what survives in his footage are takes two, seven and fifteen. He was extremely selective and methodical, keeping only those images that made him look like Prince Valiant in the wilderness, protecting the bears against evil poachers. I give him great credit as a filmmaker; he was no amateur, and seemed to be preparing some big production with himself as the star. Treadwell was a failed actor who claimed he almost got the role of the bartender in _Cheers_. With _Grizzly_ _Man_ I wanted to give him the chance to be a real hero, and even gave him the most glorious soundtrack possible, written and performed by Richard Thompson.
Production took twenty-nine days from the first day of shooting – in Alaska, Florida and Los Angeles – to the delivery of the final film. Although I was aware of Treadwell's hundred hours of material, I went to Alaska before I had looked at a single frame. After shooting, I was able to create the essential structure of the film and record the voiceover in only nine days. Everything fell into place with such clarity and blind certainty that all I had to do was follow a single direction, as if a star were guiding me. As I watched the footage it became instantly clear what was needed for the film and what should be left out. Just viewing all of Treadwell's material would have taken me at least ten days, but I had four assistants who went through everything, melting it down to about twelve hours of footage. I gave them precise instructions about what I was looking for, but sometimes scrutinised what they had put aside and found extraordinary moments they had dismissed. The shots of the fox paws on the tent had been discarded because they were too shaky, but I thought it was very beautiful imagery. I think even Treadwell himself would have overlooked it. At certain moments, when he was in his _Starsky and Hutch_ mode, sporting his bandanna, Treadwell would jump down in front of the camera and start talking. Then he would disappear for twelve seconds and jump down again; he would do take after take. But that "dead" footage of reed grass flowing and bending in the wind, in between takes, demanded to be seen. Even without Treadwell in shot, this empty and apparently useless material was extraordinarily powerful. To this day I have watched perhaps only 15 per cent of what Treadwell shot.
_A key moment in_ Grizzly Man _is when we watch you listening to the audio recording of Treadwell's death._
When the bear attacked Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, his girlfriend, their video camera was switched on. The lens cap was still attached, but the microphone continued to record for six and a half minutes. As I understand it, no one has heard the tape except for the coroner and a few park rangers, who discovered the camera. I stupidly told Jewel Palovak – a close friend and collaborator of Treadwell, and heir to his archives – that she should destroy the tape, but she was wise to lock it away in a safety-deposit box instead. To this day she has never listened to it.
Everyone knew of the tape's existence, so there was some pressure on me to address the issue. There is always a boundary that mustn't be crossed, and playing that tape in public would have been a gross intrusion into two people's right to a dignified death. Once again I found myself facing the question of limits, something I have carefully navigated from the start of my professional life. There is a difference between voyeurism and filmmaking. Voyeurs have a psychological sickness and would have jumped to include the tape in the film, but not me. This was no snuff movie. I explained that if anyone on the production insisted the recording be included in the film, I would quit. _Grizzly Man_ 's producer and distributor asked me to film myself listening to it, but I thought it would be more effective to film Jewel as she watches me, trying to read the echoes from my face. She was worried that the screams would leak out of the earphones I was wearing and be picked up by the microphone, but I promised her that if I detected even the slightest sound, I would erase it. The camera is behind me, and what the audience is focused on at that moment is her anguish as she imagines what I'm hearing, which was horrible beyond description. The advancement of a medium is often driven by certain transgressions. Values change from one generation to the next, and perhaps my grandchildren will find it ridiculous I chose not to include the tape in _Grizzly Man_. But I doubt it.
_The film contains few details about Amie Huguenard._
All I can say is she was very brave. She chose to stay and attack a thousand-pound bear with a frying pan, which was found next to her remains. These are animals that can run as fast as a racehorse, drag a huge moose up a steep mountain, decapitate with one blow of a paw and kill a human with a single crunching bite. Loud metallic bangs can be heard on the tape. Hardly anything was left of her. What's interesting is that though Huguenard had spent the last three summers with Treadwell, in her diary she described him as being "hellbent on destruction" and made it clear she was about to leave him for good and return to California. Treadwell seemed to hide Huguenard's presence out there; there is less than a minute of her in the hundred hours of his footage. He stylised himself as a lone warrior, and having his girlfriend with him in Alaska clearly didn't fit this image. I would have liked to talk to people who knew Huguenard; her sister was prepared to speak on camera, but the family decided against it. There is something deeply heroic and tragic about her, and she remains the great unknown of the film.
_You said earlier that throughout the film your voiceover takes issue with Treadwell's views of nature._
He considered nature to be wondrously harmonious, but for me, the world is overwhelmingly chaotic, hostile and murderous, not some sentimental Disneyesque place. Treadwell overstepped a boundary; perhaps because he grew up so far from the wilderness he had no understanding of the place. We all know bear cubs are cute, but where there is a cub there must be a mother, and there is a ferocious instinct in these creatures to protect their little ones. When I look at Treadwell's footage I see someone who felt strangely privileged, constantly crossing this line. In his quest to be close to the bears he would actually act out being one, going down on all fours and adopting the nature of a wild beast. For Treadwell, stepping outside of his humanness into this ecstasy was an almost religious act. But there were many facets to the man, and I could never reject him out of hand. Despite his stupidities he had a vigorous joy of life, and there was a genuine warmth about him. I also admire him for the impact he had on education – he addressed tens of thousands of schoolchildren over the years – which means the argument I have with Treadwell is similar to one I might have with my brother, someone I love and respect.
I found it ridiculous that everyone thought Treadwell was so courageous. "Any idiot can walk up to a bear," I thought. After hibernation, the animals graze like cattle for a few months, and at the end of the summer, when the salmon run starts, converge in large numbers along the riverbanks. While filming at one of the creeks in Alaska where Treadwell had lived, I walked up to a sleeping bear, one of the biggest I could find, one we know Treadwell filmed. I slowly moved in until I was about thirty feet away, then started speaking Bavarian. The bear heard me coming, woke up and stared into my face, but didn't bother to get up. Grizzly bears are basically uninterested in human beings as objects of prey; many more people in the United States die from wasp stings than bear attacks. The truly dangerous bear is the polar, which will usually head straight towards you because it's accustomed to hunting mammals the size of human beings. Two days after my encounter I spoke to an Aleutic – a local native – who was the curator of the museum on Kodiak Island. He made it clear how inconsiderate Treadwell had been, and I realised how foolish I had been and how misplaced was my bravado. "Bears need to be respected," he explained, "and the only way to do this is from a distance. You have to know their boundaries." The National Park Service has certain rules, one of which is that you have to remain three hundred feet from any bear at all times, and a minimum of four hundred and fifty feet from a female bear with cubs. What I did by getting so close to these creatures was a gross transgression and outright stupidity, not because it was dangerous but because it was disrespectful. Don't love the bear. Respect the bear.
_Had you been back to Alaska since shooting_ Heart of Glass?
About twenty years ago I spent a summer there with my son, at the end of his childhood. We were dropped on a lake beyond the Alaska Range with some tools and a large tarpaulin, but no tent, and immediately set about building a shelter. We had some basic food, like rice, noodles and salt. I'm not a hunter but I forage, so we searched for berries and mushrooms, and fished for salmon and trout. We lived off the land for six weeks, and from our encampment would venture out for day trips. It was so wonderful that we repeated our visit out there the following summer. I love Alaska for its solitude and space. It's one of the very few areas with a truly primordial nature. Much of the place is unchanged since humans started roaming the planet.
It can be quite sobering to return, years later, to certain places. The deserts and jungles where I filmed were fantasy locations, but seeing them again can make everything seem so banal in my mind. When I went back to the jungle, to the locations we used for _Fitzcarraldo_ , two decades later while working on _My Best Fiend_ , I remember wondering why it seemed such a grandiose place for me all those years before. Everything was completely overgrown; there was no trace of us ever having been there, and even if you had known where we shot the film, you wouldn't have recognised it. The mountainside where we cut the hundred-foot-wide path from one river to the other looked just as it did before we arrived to make the film, which is a humbling reality. There was absolutely nothing there, not a single nail or scrap of wire left, which is bizarre seeing as there are traces of prehistoric man still to be found on our planet. We were actually asked by the locals to leave certain things behind once production on the film was complete because they wanted every fragment they could find. It all had a use for them. Only Machu Picchu retained its power, though no one likes having to line up for a ticket among those throngs of tourists. The most sobering are the lava fields in Lanzarote, where I made _Even Dwarfs Started Small_. Back then the landscape was completely black and white, with barely any vegetation, but today the fields are swarming with hotels. The ten thousand windmills in _Signs of Life_ were replaced by electric pumps years ago.
The Wild Blue Yonder _contains an array of footage, some archival, some shot by yourself._
The film emerged from my fascination with the troubled _Galileo_ space probe. After fourteen years drifting in space, the danger was that the probe would crash into one of Jupiter's moons, which apparently contains ice and shows signs of microbiotic life. To avoid contamination, scientists decided to use the last few ounces of the craft's energy to catapult it out of the moon's gravity and send it on a suicide mission: a premeditated immersion into Jupiter's atmosphere, where it would become a superheated plasma and vanish. The probe was sending messages back until its last moments; for the final fifty-two minutes – which is the time it takes for radio signals to reach Earth – it was actually already dead but still communicating with NASA scientists. Some of them were ecstatic and popping champagne corks; others were sad that the mission had been sent to its death. When I discovered the expedition was being orchestrated from Mission Control in Pasadena, only half an hour away from my home, I told myself I needed to be there to film it. I was ready to jump the fence and forge an ID to get inside, but had a stroke of luck because I spoke to someone from NASA in Washington who had seen some of my films, and he got me access.
Then, some time later, in a dusty old warehouse also in Pasadena, I discovered a NASA archive comprised of documents, photos, videos and film footage shot by astronauts. This staggering collection of material represents the history of our space explorations, like El Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the archive of the discovery and conquest of the New World, where you can find Columbus's personal diaries and Cortés's letters to the king of Spain. This NASA archive had been underfinanced and understaffed for years, and the archivists there were surprised to have a visitor. One of them took me around and pulled out a box full of 16mm footage shot in 1989 by the astronauts on the space shuttle _Atlantis_ , which transported the _Galileo_ spacecraft. The material had come directly from the lab and was still sealed; no one had ever looked at it. What they filmed on that mission – probably the last time celluloid was shot in space – has an extraordinary beauty. The television stations wouldn't have touched it because there are shots that go on, uncut and uninterrupted, for nearly three minutes, which for them is an eternity. But there was real beauty in these images precisely because they roll on and on, as we move from the cargo bay in the command module and drift past any number of weird and wonderful objects.
The other starting point for the film was when I saw some otherworldly footage that Henry Kaiser – who produced the music for _Grizzly Man_ – had shot under the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Throughout the austral summer the sun penetrates the ice and illuminates everything, making it look as though there are frozen clouds up above. During the _Grizzly Man_ recording sessions with Richard Thompson I looked, out of the corner of my eye, through the soundproof glass into the control booth and saw Henry and my editor Joe Bini, thirty feet away, staring at a laptop. I caught a two-second glance of something extraordinary on the screen. "Stop everything!" I said, and immediately rushed over to Henry, who insisted it was uninteresting amateur footage, shot with a singlechip digital camera. But to my eyes it contained some of the most profoundly beautiful images I had ever seen. With underwater shots of air bubbles pushing against the ceiling of ice and endless ice crystals floating towards the camera, it was as if a poet had descended deep below the surface of the planet. The divers are exploring and retrieving monocellular creatures under the ice, but taken out of context these images are unique. To me, they looked like astronauts floating in space, and I immediately knew they should be part of a bigger film. It was pure science fiction without a technical trick, as if shot on a foreign planet, something not from this earth, the kind of fantasy landscape we usually see only in our dreams. Suddenly here it was for real. "Believe it or not," I say when asked where the scenes were shot, "those really are images from the Andromeda Nebula." They remind me of the late-mediaeval painter Albrecht Dürer, who dreamt of columns of fire raining down from the sky. I asked Henry to let me use the material and to go back to Antarctica and do more filming, because I needed a series of long, flowing shots.
_The film is a poetic mix of science fiction and documentary reality._
Which means it has a strong connection to _Fata Morgana_ and _Lessons of Darkness_. More than ever with _The Wild Blue Yonder_ I ignored the "rules" of cinema. This is where I blew all the fuses.
I wanted to explore certain ideas that had long fascinated me, like the fact that there are no friendly, inhabitable planets out there that we could ever colonise, and even if there were, we would never reach them. Jupiter is out of the question because it's gaseous, and other planets are either too hot or their gravitational pull is too strong. The Earth's moon and Mars are too barren, and even if some of Jupiter's moons contain frozen water, how would human beings survive any significant length of time out there? What would happen if we left our solar system and set out for some of the stars within the Milky Way? Insurmountable problems would immediately arise; for example, the maximum speed at which we could travel. Even if we could accelerate to velocities close to half the speed of light, we would need thousands of years to reach our destination, and centuries just to slow down upon arrival. The stark reality is that if twenty thousand years ago astronauts had set out travelling at the highest speed ever reached by a rocket, hoping to reach Earth's nearest neighbour outside our solar system, as of today they would have covered barely 15 per cent of the distance. To achieve only 10 per cent of the speed of light would mean lift-off with an amount of fuel on board equivalent not only to the mass of all the gasoline on Earth, but equivalent to the mass of everything in the entire visible universe, including the Sun and every star in every galaxy. Other exotic theoretical ideas – like entering a black hole and accessing a separate reality – have to be discarded; it would take us millions of years just to reach the nearest black hole. And how would you even survive one? They exert such unbelievable force that an entire galaxy would be squeezed into the size of an orange. Life on board the cramped spacecraft wouldn't be easy. After extended periods in space our bones develop osteoporosis, and exposure to radiation would eventually cause leukaemia or other forms of cancer. The number of coups, rebellions and insurrections, and the inbreeding and general discontent, that would have to be averted – over hundreds of generations – if a fleet of craft full of human beings set off from Earth means the whole idea is completely fanciful. Just getting to bed every night in a wallmounted sleeping bag would be difficult enough.
In _The Wild Blue Yonder_ I used anything I could find from whatever source that looked strange or seemed to come from outer space, including footage of two astronauts emerging from a water tank, which I filmed at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and immediately wove into the story of aliens arriving on Earth. I jumped at some spectacular footage from the National Archives of early aviators and material I found in the NASA archive of scientists and engineers piecing together the _Galileo_ probe. I ignored shots of the actual assembly of the craft, using only instances of standstill, when they study the machinery and seem perplexed, even frightened. All these bizarre images were tied into a story of deadly microbes having polluted Earth and a group of astronauts being sent out to find a hospitable place for human habitation. I filmed several lengthy conversations with NASA scientists but didn't use most of this material because it pulled things too much in the direction of a traditional documentary, though I did include Ted Sweetser and his colleague Roger Diehl in the film. Roger works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is an expert in ballistic-trajectory designs for the delivery of spacecraft to the outer solar system. The plan was originally to send the _Galileo_ probe directly towards Jupiter, but shortly before the launch the _Challenger_ space shuttle disaster occurred, so the project was delayed for a few years. The probe was supposed to be transported into orbit on the shuttle, but the problem was finding a way to supply it with enough kinetic energy to propel it all the way to Jupiter. Roger came up with the idea of launching the probe in the opposite direction to Earth's motion around the Sun so it would fall in towards the Sun and fly by Venus. This provided a gravity assist that pumped energy into the probe's path so it could come back to Earth and fly by it, which in turn gave another gravity assist, putting it into an even bigger orbit around the Sun and setting up a second Earth gravity assist two years later that finally pumped the heliocentric orbit up big enough so the probe could reach Jupiter. I love those mathematicians and their imaginations.
_The soundtrack is as important as the images._
The music was created by Ernst Reijseger, an astonishingly talented Dutch cellist who also worked on _The White Diamond_. I always asked him to be barefoot when recording; he plays even better without shoes. I can show him a film sequence he has never seen, or recite him a text he has never heard, and he can play along beautifully, never failing to create amazing music and truly capture the right mood, though neither of us knows exactly in which direction we are moving. Over two evenings in 2012 he and I put on a show at the Volksbühne in Berlin entitled _Eroberung des Nutzlosen_ [ _Conquest of the Useless_ ], with me reading from my _Fitzcarraldo_ journals and him playing on his cello, alongside other musicians. There was a hammock on stage to which I would retire, in full view of the audience, when the music took over.
As with _The White Diamond_ , where cameraman Henning Brümmer listened to the music before we left for Guyana, I anchored _The Wild Blue Yonder_ in music that was recorded months earlier, then played the recordings to everyone involved before we started filming. It meant the music really did dictate the rhythm and flow of the narrative. Ernst brought to the _The Wild Blue Yonder_ recording session the unlikely combination of a group from the mountains of Sardinia who sing prehistoric-sounding shepherd chants, and Mola Sylla, a Senegalese singer who sings in Wolof, his native language. When we put it all together, over a two-day period, the result was extraordinarily strange and beautiful. The musicians had never played in this combination before; every piece was unrehearsed and recorded in a single take. We ended up with two and a half hours of music. I was with them in the studio as they were performing, and would sometimes stretch out my arms and perform gentle floating movements, to mimic the images of astronauts in my mind, so the musicians would get a sense of the rhythms I wanted. It was similar to how I worked with Richard Thompson. At one point, when he was recording the piece that opens _Grizzly Man_ , I asked him to stop. "This doesn't sound like the statement it needs to be," I said. "It has to start very strongly. Set your foot down! Your music establishes the law of the land."
_The alien in_ The Wild Blue Yonder _is incompetent._
His people have to escape their dying planet, deep in the outer reaches of Andromeda, in a galaxy far beyond our own, so they send out a huge armada of spacecraft, a few of which make it to Earth. It's a long and tedious journey for them, and though their ancestors were great thinkers and scientists, the group that finally arrives many generations later are a bunch of homesick and neurotic deadbeats. They have big plans and want to make an impression, but the capital city they construct to rival Washington D.C. is a grand failure. Nobody shows up either to live there or visit the Great Andromeda Memorial or shop in the enormous mall, which is full of unsold merchandise. The aliens might have wanted to destroy New York City in two minutes – as technically advanced superbeings from other planets usually do – but in this film they suck. I couldn't have picked a more credible alien than Brad Dourif to play the part. He's especially wonderful when explaining why everyone from his planet is such an abject failure and when he complains that the CIA won't listen to what he knows about the UFO that crashed near Roswell, which was actually a probe sent by his planet ahead of the armada.
There was no budget for _The Wild Blue Yonder_ ; I used money earned from _Grizzly Man_ to produce the film. One project fed another, just as they always have done. Brad learnt his part in not much more than a day, and we spent a few hours filming him. I wrote an ad hoc text, a long monologue which he wanted to perfect down to the last comma. "I'm more interested in your train of thought," I told him. "It doesn't matter if you forget a few words. What's important is that you get the context right." The mall sequence was shot at Niland, California, close to Slab City, a rather bizarre place, what they call an "unincorporated community." Although federal law applies, there is no mayor, no tax board or anything like that, no sewerage system, water supply or electricity. This is a small corner of anarchy, a semi-lawless zone, a focal point for renegades and drop-outs, the kind of people who forever talk about arming themselves, marching to Washington and taking over the government. While we were filming, an intimidating fellow with a big fuzzy beard, dark glasses and a rather large belly gave us a threatening "time-out" sign, suggesting we should immediately stop what we were doing, pack up and get the hell out of there.
Rescue Dawn _is a fictional version of Dieter Dengler's escape from a prison camp._
It was always clear to me that Dieter's story should become a feature film, but for various logistical reasons – not least because it took so long to find the money and actors – I made _Little Dieter Needs to Fly_ before _Rescue Dawn._ There were also things Dieter didn't want to talk about when we made _Little Dieter_ , like the fact that there was real animosity between him and some of the other prisoners, to the point where they would have strangled each other if they hadn't been cross-handcuffed and chained together. With everyone bound together for two years in mediaeval foot blocks, in the humidity and suffering from diarrhoea, it's completely understandable. "We'll make so much noise the guards will notice you," everyone said to Dieter when he told them about his escape plans. "We have to stay here. The war will be over in a few weeks anyway." Dieter was also embarrassed about the vicious beatings he had received at the hands of the blacksmith he apprenticed for as a child. "The old man is still around," he would say. _Little Dieter_ is the version of the story I was bound to at the time for practical reasons. When I watched the film for the first time with Dieter, the lights went up and he turned to me. "Werner," he said without missing a beat, "this is unfinished business." The story of Dieter and Duane was always one I wanted to tell in a feature film, a tale of friendship and survival. Although _Rescue Dawn_ came second, in spirit it really was the first film. _Little Dieter_ was strongly influenced by a feature film that hadn't been made yet.
_Is_ Rescue Dawn _based on Dieter's autobiography?_
Not really, though the hard core of his story is intact and the principal figures are the cast of characters Dieter encountered in the jungle. The published version of his story – _Escape from Laos_ – was rewritten and issued by a military press, which streamlined the text and removed many interesting details, leaving only the bare-bones tale of the prisoners. Everything inspiring about Dieter's original, rambling manuscript was simplified in the book, which is devoid of all imagination. He never learnt to read and write English properly, so articulated himself in what is essentially phonetic English. The misspelling and creation of new words are wild; he spells "machete" as "muchetty." I have always compared Dieter's prose to Joyce's _Finnegans Wake_ , a book I don't much care for and which I feel drove English literature into a cul-de-sac from which – to this day – it has struggled to emerge. The learned poet Joyce attempted to push language to a certain limit in a rather calculated way, but the resulting book is an artificial and cerebral calculation, an experiment with language, a detour from true storytelling. Dieter plays with language in the same kind of way, but with genuine innocence, believing this actually is English. I can already feel the whacks from Joyce scholars for saying such sacrilegious things, but I'm convinced that Dieter's original manuscript – which truly brims with life – is an authentic _Finnegans Wake._
_The production of_ Rescue Dawn _was difficult._
For four and a half years nobody wanted to invest in the project, until all of a sudden two producers came along willing to finance the film. The first was a hugely overweight man who had fulfilled his dream of becoming a foosball world champion, and who years before had made his money in the trucking business. He moved into the nightclub business, and from there to film production. Unfortunately I didn't look into his background; it turned out he had an extensive rap sheet. The second producer was a basketball star with no experience in filmmaking, which in a way was a blessing because he more or less left us alone. However, there were perpetual financial troubles and no money in place when it was most badly needed. The transportation department had no money for gas, one day more than thirty Thai crew quit because they hadn't been paid, and I was paid with cheques that bounced. I fought hard to make something out of this disaster, and even managed to finish the film two days ahead of schedule. The crew – most of whom I had never worked with before – were a group of technicians from Hollywood, Europe and Thailand. They needed time to get used to the situation and each other, which eventually they did, but at the start it wasn't easy co-ordinating so many cultures of filmmaking into a single unit. The Americans were always nervous, telling me I wasn't shooting sufficient coverage. I took my assistant aside and asked, "What do they mean by coverage? I have insurance coverage for my car, but coverage when making a film?" They wanted me to get a range of intermediate shots, close-ups and reverse angles, all for safety's sake. But I have always filmed only what I need for the screen, and nothing else. When you do open heart surgery you don't go for the appendix or toenails, you go straight for the beating heart.
Once shooting was completed we had to wait six months to edit because there was no money for post-production. Some of the film's other producers ended up in prison, and a couple of years after _Rescue Dawn_ was released I was arrested at the airport in Bangkok and handcuffed to a chair because the authorities thought I was one of the producers who had fled the country leaving a bundle of unpaid bills. It took some persuading to convince them I was only the director. But, as usual, this is all inconsequential. I have experienced these kinds of roadblocks on almost every one of my films; it's the nature of the business, and when I speak of these two producers I do so without complaint. I merely state the facts. They were, after all, the only people who took on the challenge of making _Rescue Dawn_. It didn't bother me that one was a nightclub owner; don't forget that Sam Goldwyn started out as a glove salesman, and Jon Peters was a hairdresser. The real question is whether I was forced to compromise, and the answer is no. One achievement of _Rescue Dawn_ is that it is exactly the film I set out to make, especially the look and feel of the jungle.
Encounters at the End of the World _was filmed in Antarctica._
I was drawn to the area when I saw the footage Henry Kaiser shot under the Ross Ice Shelf, which appears in _The Wild Blue Yonder_. After seeing the images I told him I wanted to go diving in Antarctica myself, and he proceeded to explain how dangerous it is. The water temperature is below freezing, compasses are useless because, being so close to the magnetic pole, needles always point straight up or down, and the divers – who explore under a twenty-foot ceiling of ice – are at constant risk of being swept away by tidal currents. Regardless, they swim untethered without safety lines, as such things might impede their work, which means they have nothing to assist them in finding the exit holes at the surface. It's fatal if they aren't able to orientate themselves quickly enough. You can't expect valuable resources to be spent rescuing some amateur trapped under the ice, so it was clear I would never have a chance to dive down there myself.
Henry told me about the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program of the National Science Foundation, to which anybody can apply. This was fortunate, as not being a pilot, scientist, mechanic or chef I had little to contribute to the community in Antarctica. I made a strange, wild application, explaining that though I was curious about insanity among mammals and, specifically, derangement in penguins, I wasn't going to make a film about the animals. My application made no secret of the fact that I was interested in certain species of ants that keep flocks of plant lice as slaves, milking them for droplets of glucose, and wondered why a sophisticated animal like a chimpanzee doesn't utilise inferior creatures, for example straddling a goat and riding off into the sunset. To my surprise, the National Science Foundation invited me down. There are Nobel Prize winners lined up hoping to go to Antarctica, so I have no idea why my application was successful. Once I finished the film, but before I screened it to anyone, the Foundation told me they hoped it could be used as an educational tool. I told them perhaps in a poetry class, but probably not a science one. I later learnt that James Cameron applied to make a film about Antarctica, though we'll probably never know what his plans were because his application was turned down. It seems that the minimum number of people in his crew would have been something like thirty.
Maintaining a single person per day in Antarctica costs about $10,000. Every piece of equipment has to be flown in from New Zealand, eight hours away by aeroplane, and every drop of water has to be produced through the desalination of ocean water; a single glass requires an equal amount of gasoline. Then there is transportation, heat, food, logistics and electricity to take into consideration. Knowing this, the plan was to fly down with the smallest crew possible: cameraman Peter Zeitlinger and me as sound recordist. Our base was McMurdo Station, the scientific centre and logistical hub that provides fixed laboratory facilities for research, which sits on an island in the Ross Sea, a bay the size of France, on a continent as big as North America, where a thousand men and women – all in pursuit of cutting-edge science – live together. From there, Peter and I travelled to different satellite camps, like the one from which the divers operate, collecting organisms for study. At least three new species were discovered while we were there.
_Did you plan anything before you left for Antarctica?_
Nothing. There was no testing of the waters; we were tossed down there and had to come back six weeks later with a film. I was flying into the unknown and had no idea who I was going to meet or what sort of film I was going to make. I looked at some photographs and read a little about Antarctica before we left, but knew that as soon as we arrived I had to keep my eyes open, act fast and follow my instincts.
The moment Peter and I stepped out from the aeroplane on the ice runway, he turned to me and said, "How, for God's sake, are we going to explain an entire continent to an audience back home?" I had a flash of an idea. I was forced to learn Latin for nine years, and ancient Greek for six, none of which I ever really enjoyed at school, though today I'm always digging into the literature of antiquity. Homer's epics have sunk in so deep that I could speak German in hexameters if I wanted to. One of my all-time favourites is Virgil's _Georgics_. Virgil grew up as a farm boy in northern Italy, and in his book he writes about agriculture, country life and working the land. The book is an incantation of the magnificence of the beehive and the horror of a pestilence in the goat stables. He writes about tree pruning and cattle in the field; he names the glory of the clouds moving across the land and the oxen moaning. My immediate response to Peter's question, after we had touched down in Antarctica, was, "We'll do it like Virgil in his _Georgics_. He never explains anything, he just names the glory of the land. Let's do the same."
_Encounters at the End of the World_ – which was edited down from about sixty hours of footage – is an invocation of all that is wonderful on the planet, an articulation of my amazement and wonder at the Antarctic landscape, a celebration of the continent. Virgil gave me great consolation while I was there, which is why at the end of the film I use music from a Russian Orthodox church choir with a basso profundo, one octave lower in pitch than a regular bass, an incredible voice that establishes the glory of one saint after another merely by naming them. One of my targets was Mount Erebus, which is more than twelve thousand feet high and of particular importance for scientific study because the inner Earth is directly exposed inside the crater. Only two other such volcanoes exist on the planet. The glowing magma continuously spits out lava bombs, some of which are the size of Volkswagens. There is a strange curiosity we humans have for the power of volcanoes, perhaps because they are capable of wiping out entire species.
_Was it a difficult film to make?_
Not particularly. Everyone seems caught in the cliché of human toil that Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton had to endure, but McMurdo is an ugly mining town, full of noisy construction sites, earth-moving machinery and climate-controlled housing facilities with warm beds, a cafeteria and bar, and an ATM machine, plus an aerobic studio and yoga classes. Out in the field, of course, it gets a little harder. We were there during the summer, in November and December, but if you stay throughout the austral winter – five months of permanent darkness – evacuation is impossible, so your wisdom teeth and appendix have to be removed as a precaution, even if they're perfectly healthy. Adapting to weeks of permanent daylight can be difficult. You have to wear serious protection when the sun is out, otherwise snow blindness sets in within hours.
We weren't allowed to bring our own boots and parkas; everyone is issued with these things upon arrival. If you use regular boots, you might be able to hold on to your toes down to about –25ºC, but after that frostbite sets in. We were sure to test our camera and sound recorder in a facility in Los Angeles at temperatures of around –20ºC. I took two recorders with me to McMurdo, but almost immediately had to abandon the more sophisticated one because it had tiny buttons and was impossible to operate while wearing gloves. As soon as we arrived at McMurdo we lost about a week because we were obliged to undertake a mandatory survival course – which involved learning to build trenches and igloos – a course in radio communications, and one in snowmobile riding. I found the authorities there too concerned for my personal safety, and resented having to spend so much time on these things; it was a little excessive for my liking. Having said that, three days after arriving I had an accident on a steep slope when an eight-hundred-pound snowmobile rolled over my body. For weeks afterwards I was sore everywhere and could barely bend down to tie my shoelaces.
The film benefited greatly from the spirit of the Antarctic Treaty, which came into force in 1961 and which I consider to be one of the finest documents of the civilised world. It banned military activity on the continent and established the area as a scientific preserve, committing an entire landmass to the principles of peace and knowledge. There is also an unequivocal ban on nuclear testing or dumping of radioactive waste. The treaty is one of the most potent manifestations of civilised behaviour among nations in modern history. I remember a time when at least a dozen countries claimed segments of the continent as their national territory, but Antarctica has no government as such; it belongs to no one, and while making the film I was witness to the extraordinary international co-operation you find there. In the film you see the mysterious, surreal, frozen sturgeon, which sits under the mathematically true South Pole, stashed away in some kind of shrine, surrounded by garlands of popcorn, in a tunnel that is permanently –70ºC. Russian scientists from the Vostok Station – which is particularly inaccessible – had run out of basic provisions and made it to the Amundsen-Scott Station asking for badly needed food. As a gift, they brought the fish and some caviar to barter for noodles.
If Antarctica represents anything, it's stark realism. Sam Bowser, a scientist and diver who works at the field camp, is a fan of sci-fi-B-movies, and is always showing his colleagues films full of monsters and extraterrestrials, like _Them!_ , starring giant ants that have mutated because of atomic-bomb tests in the middle of the desert. But this is kindergarten compared to the real world under the ice, the slimy blobs with ensnaring tendrils and ferocious mandibles that tear their prey apart. No wonder the mammals of prehistory retreated from the oceans to get on with their evolution in the relative sanctuary of dry land.
_You filmed with a wonderful array of people._
The vast landscape of the continent is unique, but _Encounters at the End of the World_ is more about the inhabitants of Antarctica than anything else. There is significant science being done there, which attracts a certain kind of person, and behind every door at McMurdo is an extraordinary character. With no indigenous population, no one there has anything in common other than a shared attraction to this immense, unspoilt and untouched area of the earth. Someone told me that everybody who isn't tied down falls to the bottom of the globe.
Some of the people in _Encounters_ I met only a few minutes before I filmed with them, and in some instances our conversation lasted not much more than the time you see them on screen. I encountered Doug MacAyeal, an American glaciologist, thirty minutes before his flight for New Zealand was due to leave, and found what he was talking about so interesting that I insisted he film with us. It was warm in that room, but I asked him to keep his enormous red parka on because it would have been ridiculous having him talk about ice floes if he had been wearing a T-shirt. We talked about this and that, but there was a lot of noise coming from a nearby group of Italians, who were celebrating and drinking Chianti because their national football team had just won a match. Once I had quietened them down only twelve minutes remained before MacAyeal's flight took off. I looked him in the eye and said, "I don't want to hear from the scientist. I want to hear from the poet." He nodded and started talking about how he had come to Antarctica to study an iceberg, and soon realised this particular iceberg wasn't just bigger than the one that sank the _Titanic_ , it was bigger than the country that built the _Titanic_. The sheer size of the continent is awe-inspiring. Perceptions of scale need to be recalibrated.
A utility mechanic who had escaped from behind the Iron Curtain was still too traumatised to talk about his experiences. His rucksack, containing a sleeping bag, a tent, clothes and cooking utensils, was by his side at all times; he was prepared to leave McMurdo at a moment's notice and explore new horizons. Then there was Stefan Pashov, a Bulgarian philosopher who operates heavy machinery at McMurdo. From the age of five his grandmother would read to him from _The Iliad, The Odyssey_ and _The Argonautica_ , literature that sparked something powerful within. "It's when I fell in love with the world," he explains. That really struck a chord with me; it was wonderful to discover such a kindred spirit so far from home. He found it perfectly logical that we met in Antarctica because it's where professional dreamers end up. Another young man, a linguist, was thriving in an environment where people with doctorates were washing dishes on a continent with no indigenous languages.
_In interviews you claimed no knowledge of Abel Ferrara and his original_ Bad Lieutenant.
Until this very day I haven't seen his film, nor any of his work. A few years after my _Bad Lieutenant_ came out I met Ferrara for the first time, at a film festival, and though we sat down to talk, we didn't do it over a drink because apparently he has problems with alcohol, and I had no desire to provoke anything. It was actually wonderful that even before I started making the film there was accompanying thunder from this man, who said he hoped I would rot in Hell for remaking his film. It was good music in the background, like the manager of a baseball team running out to the umpire, standing five inches from his face, yelling and kicking up dust. That's what people really want to see. At that meeting with Ferrara we laughed so much I barely recall what we talked about.
I agreed to do _Bad Lieutenant_ only after the screenwriter, William Finkelstein, gave me a solemn oath his script wasn't a remake. The only thing that connects my film to Ferrara's is that one of the producers owned the rights to the title and was interested in starting a franchise; it was never a question of different "versions." The two films have nothing to do with each other, and the title – which was forced upon me, and which I told the producers would waft after the film like a bad smell – is misleading. Calling it a remake is like saying Mel Gibson's _Passion of the Christ_ is a remake of Pasolini's _The Gospel According to St Matthew_ , though practitioners of "film studies" will surely be ecstatic to find a reference or two in my film to Ferrara's. I call upon the pedantic theoreticians of cinema to chase after such things. Go for it, losers.
The producers sent the script to my agent, but when it comes to negotiating contracts I prefer doing things myself, and chose to face them and their henchmen man to man. At our first meeting I sat with five people from the production company. My first question was, "Are any of you legal counsel for the production?" One of them identified himself. I asked him to stay in the room but not participate in the discussion, then said, "What I have to say here isn't the invention of some industry agent who is trying to sound important. I represent myself here. If you want to be in business with me, I need certain indisputable prerequisites. I decide who the cameraman, editor and composer of this film will be." They quickly accepted this, then asked me for my rate. "What do you mean by 'rate'?" I said. "How much do you get for directing a film?" they said. "What's your price?" My response to such a ridiculous question was the most coherent I could muster: "I'm priceless." How can I answer a question like that in any other way? With a film like _The Wild Blue Yonder_ I paid myself virtually nothing and used mostly my own money, but with _Bad Lieutenant_ I quoted them an exorbitant figure, immediately adding, "I guarantee you I'll finish this film under budget, so in effect you'll be saving money." The main producer wanted to shake on it immediately, but I resisted. I prefer the overnight rule. "If I have a contract in my hands at eight o'clock tomorrow morning," I told them, "we have a deal." I have a general understanding of Hollywood: if you don't have a deal in two days, you won't have it in two years either. The next morning a messenger was at my house with a signed contract, which I looked at carefully for a few minutes, signed without telephoning a lawyer, then handed back for delivery to the producers.
I appreciate the value of money and know how to keep costs down because I've been my own producer for so many years. If it's your own money, you had better learn to look after it. I demanded a say on the size of the crew and asked for daily access to the cash flow, which the producers acceded to. I needed to know if I could afford another half a dozen police cars in this shot or twenty more extras in that sequence. People often throw money at problems, but I have always preferred to use vigilance and flexibility in advance, diffusing situations that have a tendency to become problems. I put an end to things like having duplicate costumes for actors with only a few lines and waived my right to a trailer, a personal assistant and – that awful status symbol – a director's chair. "I just saved you $65," I told the producers. The completion-bond guarantor visited the set during production to see how things were going. "You charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to guarantee that this film will be completed, which makes you a complete waste of money," I said to him. "I am the guarantee that this film will be delivered on time and on budget."
I met with Eva Mendes in a New York hotel and won her over by joking about her not bringing her dog's psychiatrist to the set. Eva eventually showed up with only two people: a make-up woman and a chauffeur, who doubled as her bodyguard. Nicolas Cage's entourage was similarly small. I had very little time for pre-production, and in three weeks scouted forty locations, cast thirty-five speaking roles, put together a crew and production office, and did the required set design. Every penny of the budget showed up on the screen. I know what I want and shoot only that, and on most days we were finished at three or four o'clock in the afternoon. I would do a couple of takes, then move on. The crew weren't used to my method of working and at the start of the shoot suggested I get more shots so I would have more editing options, but I told them we didn't need any of that. "Finally," said Nicolas, "somebody who knows what he's doing." We finished two days ahead of schedule and $2.6 million under budget. That's unheard of in Hollywood, and it meant I earned a bonus. I delivered the finished film two weeks after principal photography was completed. The producer wanted to marry me, and immediately offered me half a dozen other projects.
_The film was shot in New Orleans._
The original script was set in New York, but the producer called me, quite embarrassed, apologetically explaining that New York was too expensive, and laying out the financial advantages of filming in post-Katrina New Orleans because of tax incentives. It was a move I immediately welcomed, as from the start I had the feeling we should make the film in a city genuinely in crisis and transition. At the time New Orleans was still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. It was as if every one of America's problems was located there, not least the crisis of government credibility, so as far as I was concerned it was the perfect place to set this story. I didn't know Nicolas Cage also wanted to go to New Orleans because he appreciates the culture down there, especially the music. I suggested we drop _Bad Lieutenant_ and name the film _Port of Call New Orleans_ , though in the end a rather clumsy compromise was struck.
The spirit of New Orleans is phenomenal; even a hurricane couldn't wipe it out. The police department read the script and, to my surprise, offered assistance. The city is more than just a backdrop to the story; it's almost a leading character, though in the film you don't see the usual postcard clichés, like the French Quarter, Mardi Gras and late-night smoky jazz clubs. There is latent danger on every corner. It wasn't only the levees that were breeched, it was civility itself. A highly visible breakdown of good citizenship and order took place in the aftermath of the hurricane. Looting was rampant and a number of policemen failed to report for duty; some of them stole brand-new Cadillacs from abandoned dealerships and vanished onto dry ground in neighbouring states. One of our locations was a street corner where two people had been shot dead the night before. We tried to incorporate this malaise into the story. The city was the perfect place to create a new form of film noir, the kind of cinema that erupts during periods of insecurity. Sometimes cultural history coincides with economic history, like the books of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, which are children of the Great Depression and which in turn spawned the best of film noir, the cinema of Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson.
It turns out that _Bad Lieutenant_ took the temperature of the time, of the imminent financial crisis. In the months leading up to the making of the film I sensed a breakdown was coming. When attempting to lease a car for my wife I was confronted with the news that I had no credit score, and so had to pay a much higher monthly rate. I questioned why this was, seeing that I have always paid my bills and have never owed money to anyone. But this was exactly my problem. I had never borrowed money, hardly ever used a credit card, and my bank account was in the black. The system penalises good housekeeping and encourages us to spend money we don't have. My immediate reaction was to withdraw my savings from Lehman Brothers, even while my bank manager frantically tried to persuade me to put even more money in. A few months later came Lehman's bankruptcy and the ensuing financial collapse.
We had almost finished shooting in New Orleans when Hurricane Gustav began to approach and whole areas of the city were evacuated. Nicolas Cage, cameraman Peter Zeitlinger and I decided we were going to stay behind. Once the storm hit, our plan was to crawl out and get some shots of a real hurricane, but we wrapped production a week before it arrived and left town. Gustav eventually ended up daintily hitting the city, like an old spinster's fart.
_What contribution did you make to the screenplay?_
The script is Finkelstein's, but as usual it kept shifting, demanding its own life, and I invented several new scenes full of what we might call "Herzogian" moments. The opening sequence was originally a man jumping in front of a New York subway train and the lieutenant saving him, but New Orleans has no subway. I wanted the story to start in the most debased way possible, and came up with the new beginning of the two detectives placing bets on how long it will take for the prisoner to drown. In that scene – for which Finkelstein wrote the dialogue – we initially used fresh water, but it looked too clean, so the set designer added dye, but that turned the water toxic. Someone had the idea of using instant coffee, but that would have been dangerous for the actors because caffeine seeps through skin and would probably have induced cardiac arrest. In the end we dumped two and a half thousand pounds of decaffeinated coffee powder into the water.
I added other moments, like the dancing soul and the alligator lying, run over, in the middle of the road with a nylon fish line attached to its leg, which I tugged on from off screen, so it looks as if the creature is still twitching. The iguanas, which the bad lieutenant sees thanks to the drug haze he is under, were my idea. There is nothing more wondrous than seeing Nicolas Cage and a lizard together in one shot. I was walking through the city and saw one of these creatures sitting up in a tree. "I need two of them," I told one of the producers. I filmed them myself in a thoroughly demented way, using a tiny lens at the end of a fibre-optic cable. Everyone on set asked me what the meaning of the shot was. "I have no idea," I said, "but it's going to be big." One of these little monsters bit into my thumb; its jaws were a steel vice. I struggled to shake it off as the entire crew laughed hysterically.
In the original script the relationship between the Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes characters was based purely on sex and drugs, but I wanted a love story with some depth, so I invented the sequence with the silver spoon. He talks about how as a child he thought that pirates travelled up the Mississippi river and buried their treasure under a tree near his home. Towards the end of the film he finds this spoon – which is actually a rusty little thing – and gives it to her, as if handing over his childhood dreams. The relationship between the two of them immediately becomes more profound. I cut several scenes of drug-taking involving the two of them because I have no connection to drug culture. This isn't moralising; I'm just telling you how things are. My most serious vice is fiendishly strong espresso. I've never taken drugs, though was accidentally stoned once, when Florian Fricke served me a pancake with some home-made marmalade. It was very tasty, but I had no idea it was laced with hashish. In the car, later that evening, I circled for half an hour around the block where I lived because I couldn't find my apartment. On _Bad Lieutenant_ we had a prop man who would dish out harmless white powder, and when Nicolas sniffed this prop cocaine he instantly transformed into someone else. For a moment I thought it was the real stuff.
_Cage gives a wonderful performance._
I first met him when he was an adolescent, at his uncle Francis Coppola's winery in the Napa Valley, during production on _Fitzcarraldo_. Then, soon after he won an Academy Award, we spoke about him playing Cortés in the conquistador film I was planning. By the time of _Bad Lieutenant_ we had been eyeing each other's work for decades and wondered how we had managed to elude each other for so long. Once I brought Nicolas the script and told him I thought we could do something completely wild and hilarious with this story, it was clear this was the project we had to work on together. He called me from Australia, and within sixty seconds we were in business. Neither of us was prepared to sign a contract unless the other was on board, which put the film on solid ground from the start.
_Bad Lieutenant_ isn't a film noir where an oppressive climate permeates; the whole thing is full of menacing humour. There's a light touch throughout, with a leading character who isn't in the least bit guilty about being so ferociously evil. On the second day of shooting Nicolas timidly said, "I hate to ask about 'motivations,' but why is this man so bad? Is it the drugs? Is it the destruction of the city? Police corruption? The hurricane?" My answer was, simply, "There is such a thing as the bliss of evil." Nicolas liked the physical comportment I wanted him to have throughout the film, with a slanted shoulder and his head sticking slightly out. "Your shoulder line should be slightly slanted," I said, "preceded by your gaze." He knew that sometimes, after we finished shooting a scene, I wouldn't turn the camera off because I sensed there was more to it. At the end of the film, after having committed innumerable evil deeds, the bad lieutenant takes refuge in a cheap hotel room, where he has an unexpected encounter with the former prisoner he rescued from drowning at the start of the film. The young man sees there is something wrong and offers to get him out of there. Both actors spoke their lines, but I kept the camera rolling, and after a full sixty seconds of silence Nicolas said to me, "What more should I add?" Without missing a beat I told him, "Do fish have dreams?" We shot the scene again with that line, and I added the final shot of them leaning up against the glass of a huge aquarium, where sharks and fish move as if caught in the dreams of a distant and incomprehensible world. I love the mysterious chuckle the lieutenant gives at the end. Who knows where such things come from? It reminds me of those final self-portraits by Rembrandt and Goya, of toothless old men laughing at who knows what.
_Do you consider yourself to be politically engaged?_
I'm certainly not apolitical. I have always been keenly aware of the forces that control the world, and am probably more informed than most people. Although I have never been a member of a political party, I have no problem with organised political movements, though prefer to formulate my own opinions, which means I often find myself on the other side of commonly embraced arguments. I appreciate Brutus, for example, who defended the Roman Republic against an emerging empire but is remembered primarily as the vile assassin of Julius Caesar. Caesar overextended the reach of Rome when he crossed over into Britain, and by doing so weakened the foundations of the Republic. Brutus had plenty of valid reasons to murder Caesar, and I can appreciate his farsightedness. He didn't want the cult of the emperor to dominate, which came to pass after Caesar, with figures like Nero and Caligula.
I made _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ at the height of the student protests, amidst the infighting on the Left, when the Maoists were attacking the Trotskyists, and vice versa, with more vitriol than they ever heaped on the Establishment. When it comes to a successful rebellion, timing, patience and clearly defined goals are the most important things, but the dwarfs in the film – a bunch of unprofessional revolutionaries – have none of those things. It isn't real damage they cause; these are more gestures of provocation and anarchy. A revolution for its own sake, without the necessary momentum behind it, is pathetic. Sometimes you have to wait fifty years for the right moment. The result was that the simpletons accused me of ridiculing worldwide protest rather than embracing it, which is probably the one thing they were right about. They were yearning to change the world, and insisted that whenever a filmmaker portrays a revolution, it has to be a successful one. There were very few reviewers of the period who didn't use wild revolutionary jargon and put ridiculous political demands on filmmakers. They were the kinds of people who felt that cinema has only one purpose: to serve the movement and contribute to the struggle of replacing the democratic order with socialism.
I told the agitators they were blinded by zealousness, that if they looked at _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ in forty years they might see a more truthful representation of what happened in 1968 than in most other films. Let's face it, the hippie movement had a certain charm, but it was part of the gross stupidity that pervaded the era. No one ever prevented anything – let alone a war – by putting a flower in the barrel of a gun. Nightmares and dreams have never followed the rules of political correctness. I've outlasted more trends than I can remember. The radical ideologies of 1968 weren't for me because, contrary to most of my peers, I had already been much further out into the world. The analysis of West Germany as a repressive and fascist police state that needed to be overpowered by a socialist utopian revolution, and those in charge quelled, never looked right to me. Young men and women from well-to-do families insisted we had to take up arms on behalf of the working class and liberate the impoverished and exploited peoples of the Third World from the yoke of imperialism. I asked if any of them had been to Africa or worked in a factory. None of them had. I had done both those things, but still I was anathema for these people.
Ten years after _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ I made my version of _Nosferatu_. Murnau's version seemed to sense what was going to happen in Germany a few years later; the film is the work of a visionary artist who felt the encroachment of real terror, even if he couldn't define it precisely. It's a kind of premonition, with the plague of rats as a prefiguration of the Nazi pestilence that soon swarmed over Germany. The legend of the vampire blossoms more freely in the face of external menace, so it's no surprise that the genre has never gone away. But though it might somehow have reflected the emotional and political temperature of the time, _Nosferatu_ can't be simplified down to a sociological level because there was no looming political cataclysm in West Germany. The country was marked instead by stagnation; we were moving slowly but steadily towards boredom and obesity.
Twenty years after _Nosferatu_ , with _Little Dieter Needs to Fly_ , I was criticised for not denouncing American aggression in Vietnam and asked repeatedly why the film made no political statement about the war. But I never saw either _Little Dieter_ or _Rescue Dawn_ as films about Vietnam; the war takes place in the margins of both films. These are tales in the tradition of Conrad, about the trials and tests of man, about loyalty, survival and friendship. It was never Dieter's aim to go to war; he just wanted to fly, and as a German the only chance to do this was to go and live in the United States. Once on the ground – before the war had found its true magnitude and horror, before napalm was dropped on civilians – Vietnam suddenly wasn't an abstract grid on a map. Dieter's attitude changed; he came to understand that there was great suffering taking place in this country he knew so little about. His story cuts across all ideological lines, taking audiences to a more profound level than mere politics or sloganeering. In the course of a single week I received a call from the United States Naval Academy wanting to know if they could show _Little Dieter_ to a class of naval cadets, and a fax from the Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran asking for permission to screen it as "an international film of special distinction." The mullahs must have approved the film otherwise it would never have passed the censors.
_Does political cinema make a difference?_
Film is capable of shifting our perception and understanding of things, and mobilising our fantasies. But though cinema and politics do occasionally meet, film isn't the right soil for political activity. Someone with a microphone or a rifle has always been a more powerful way of effecting change, though we shouldn't dismiss a handful of great films with a solid political core, like _The Battle of Algiers, Dr Strangelove_ and _Salt of the Earth_. I'm not on any kind of mission. If I had one, I would be a missionary.
After watching eight minutes of unedited footage, I knew that Joshua Oppenheimer's surreal _The Act of Killing_ , about the genocide in Indonesia that started in 1965, was an unprecedented work, more than just a piece of political agitation. I encouraged him during editing, insisting he not be a coward and leave anything out, including the final scene, which he was thinking of shortening or cutting completely. "Your life is worth nothing if you remove that ending," I told him. Outside Indonesia, _The Act of Killing_ became an important catalyst; the historic, legal and philosophical issues were taken up and debated at length throughout the world. Within the country, the film – in which various individuals happily confess to their role in many instances of torture, rape and murder – made something of an impact; a number of long-overdue newspaper and magazine articles were published that described the regime of corruption and fear, one built on the basis of the genocide, thus exposing generations of young Indonesians to the truth for the first time. But several perpetrators of crimes committed fifty years ago still wield power today – people viewed by many as heroes – and the far-reaching changes that the film might have instigated have yet to materialise. Compare this to Marcel Ophüls's _The Sorrow and the Pity_ , which became a wake-up call for French society, creating a ripple across the entire country, opening eyes to the fact that not everyone had been in resistance against the Nazis, that collaboration wasn't uncommon. To answer your question, art doesn't make a difference until it does.
_You planned a contribution to the 1978 collective film project_ Germany in Autumn.
I became involved with a group – including Kluge, Reitz and Schlöndorff – who were making a spontaneous film. It was an interesting idea, and I was actually in Fassbinder's apartment in Munich when he shot some of his sequence. The idea was to create a feature-length project comprised of various short films that would each comment on the activities of the Red Army Faction, including its kidnapping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a German business leader, and the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight by a group wanting the release of various imprisoned RAF members, both in 1977. I had no sympathy for the RAF because I knew their analysis of the political landscape was wrong and I also disapprove of murder; it was clear I could never find anything worthwhile in their means and ends. My idea for _Germany in Autumn_ was to film with Rolf Pohle, one of my few school friends, who had been politically active as a youth and was leader of the student council of Munich University. He became a member of the Baader-Meinhof Group and was sentenced to six years in prison, then along with other RAF members exchanged for a kidnapped politician and flew to South Yemen. Pohle ended up in Greece, where he went into hiding. He was eventually arrested, extradited to Germany and imprisoned in Straubing, the most severe of all Bavarian prisons, where he served out his sentence.
I visited Pohle there and found him in bad shape because he had been in isolation for a year and a half, unable to receive regular visitors. As a gift I brought him one of those small rubber balls that bounce wildly. They shoot with incredible speed in all directions; like a goalkeeper, you need quick reactions in response. I knew Pohle would want something to occupy his mind and remembered how fond he had been of these toys, but almost immediately it was confiscated by guards under the pretext of safety. What was so disquieting was that for the first twenty minutes Pohle spoke very loudly across the table. We had two guards sitting right there with us, listening to everything we were saying, but at arm's length he spoke as if he were talking to someone a hundred feet away. He had no feeling for intimacy because it had been so long since he had interacted with anyone. Pohle was eventually released and returned to Greece, where he died a few years later.
_Was it around this time you tried to establish a utopian state in Guatemala?_
No, that was long before, probably around 1964. By naming it a utopian state, you already name the stupidity of it. I wanted to go down to the Petén area and assist the locals because they clearly had a natural right to their own nation. They had their own language, culture and history, and lived in a special district that would have been perfect for a separate, independent country. I even wrote a constitution. The idea was to create a sovereign state, an independent republic, not just a makeshift community. The whole idea was a figment of my fantasies and is too embarrassing to talk about in detail. I had no right of belonging; I was an outsider to these people, and you can't build a state if you don't have the historical and cultural right. No viable nation can be constructed so abstractly. I never even made it to Guatemala because at the time there was a military regime in power and I couldn't get a visa. I reached the border with Mexico and discovered that the only way to get into the country was by swimming across the border river. Using a football as a floating device, I drifted towards the riverbank on the Guatemalan side. Suddenly I saw two sets of eyes on me, those of a couple of soldiers brandishing assault rifles. They clearly didn't have a clue what to do. I waved cautiously at them, then slowly, rather forlornly, paddled back to Mexico. My utopian community failed – rightly so – even before I crossed the border.
Around that same time I found myself in a small village in Mexico called Xichú. I was walking when the road disappeared underneath my feet, and I descended on solid rock, eventually encountering a remote community. An old man was sitting outside on a big chair that resembled a throne, surrounded by people. Someone explained to me that he was the father of 111 children, that the youngsters and women all around us were either his offspring or their mothers. This patriarch had created his own civilisation. It's a wild enough idea to have eleven children and form your own football team, but this man had created an entire league.
# The Song of Life
_Have you ever doubted your abilities?_
Never, which is probably why I have achieved certain things. I'm aware that I possess an almost absurd self-confidence, but why should I doubt my abilities when I see all these films so clearly before my eyes? My destiny was somehow made clear to me at an early age, and I have shouldered it ever since. There was never any question as to what I should do with my life. None of this is anything to brag about. Anyone who raises children has at least as much courage as someone who follows his "destiny," whatever that means. It's an utterly pretentious word.
Most film-production companies have a half-life, normally not beyond six or seven years, but mine still exists fifty years after I established it. I have persevered, having learnt from the struggles and defeats and humiliations. My hunger as a child helped define me, as did seeing my mother desperate and furious while struggling to feed us. Something terrifying I will never forget is playing basketball at school one day and having a violent collision with another player. An hour later I began seeing black spots and was blind for nearly an hour. There is nothing wrong with hardships and obstacles, but everything wrong with not trying. I think about the original trip I made down several Amazon tributaries before I filmed _Aguirre_ , not having the faintest idea what might be around the next corner. It's some kind of metaphor for my life, which has been lived on a tightrope, even a slalom. I couldn't tell you what has prevented me from slamming head first into a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour. I count myself lucky to have avoided the trapdoors.
I don't do anything on anyone else's terms and have never felt the need to prove anything. I don't have the kind of career where, once a project is finished, I check the _New York Times_ bestseller list to see about buying the next big thing, or wait for my agent to send me scripts. I have never relied on anyone to find me work. The problem isn't coming up with ideas, it is how to contain the invasion. My ideas are like uninvited guests. They don't knock on the door; they climb in through the windows like burglars who show up in the middle of the night and make a racket in the kitchen as they raid the fridge. I don't sit and ponder which one I should deal with first. The one to be wrestled to the floor before all others is the one coming at me with the most vehemence. I have, over the years, developed methods to deal with the invaders as quickly and efficiently as possible, though the burglars never stop coming. You invite a handful of friends for dinner, but the door bursts open and a hundred people are pushing in. You might manage to get rid of them, but from around the corner another fifty appear almost immediately.
As we sit here today there are half a dozen projects lined up waiting to be ejected from my home. I would like to be able to make films as quickly as I can think of them, and if I had an unlimited amount of money could shoot five feature films every two years. I have never had much choice about what comes next; I just attend to the biggest pressure. I basically have tunnel vision, and when working on a project think of little else. It's been like this since I was fourteen years old. Today, finishing a film is like having a great weight lifted from my shoulders. It's relief, not necessarily happiness.
_But you relish dealing with these "burglars."_
I am glad to be rid of them after making a film or writing a book. The ideas are uninvited guests, but that doesn't mean they aren't welcome. As a soldier who holds a position others have long since abandoned, I have always accepted the challenges and am prepared for the worst. Rest assured I will never beat a cowardly retreat. I shall continue as long as there is breath in me.
_You have never started a film you didn't finish. One also gets the feeling there are very few unproduced scripts in the drawers of your desk._
No sleep has been lost over the fact that I have written a small handful of screenplays that I haven't yet made. There are too many new ideas to spend time with for me to feel sorry for myself. One unproduced script of mine is the story of the conquest of Mexico, from the arrival of Cortés in Veracruz to fall of the city of Tenochtitlan, seen through the eyes of the Aztecs, for whom it must have felt like aliens landing on their shores. There are only three or four narratives in the history of mankind that have the same depth, calibre, enormity and tragedy. Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, Akhenaten and Jesus Christ are the obvious examples. When I first started work on the project, my idea was to reconstruct Tenochtitlan, which would have meant sets five times bigger than those built for _Cleopatra_. Even with computerised digital effects, those pyramids, palaces and twenty thousand extras would cost a fortune. The rules of the game are simple: if one of my films is a box-office hit that brings in at least $250 million, the Aztec project might conceivably be financed. While researching I studied the primary sources, including lawsuits filed against Cortés after the conquest. I wanted to make the film in Spanish and Classical Nahuatl – which I even started to learn – though at the time it was unthinkable to make a film like this in anything other than English.
_Have you ever taken a holiday?_
It would never occur to me. Perhaps I should disappear for a while, though at this point I don't feel under any stress. I work steadily and methodically, with great focus. There is never anything frantic about how I do my job; I'm no workaholic. A holiday is a necessity for someone whose work is an unchanged daily routine, but for me everything is constantly fresh and always new. I love what I do, and my life feels like one long vacation.
It isn't easy to survive in this business. After my first ten years of making films – during which I made something of an impact, but only with small audiences – I was exhausted. This is when Lotte Eisner helped me by pointing out my duties, giving me courage for the next decade. Not long ago I watched _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ for the first time in years and was thrown back to those early years in Germany. I saw Hombre from _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ and Bruno and Walter Steiner, and remembered that when making the film I was convinced it would be my last. It wasn't that I was discouraged or knew I wouldn't be able to continue, but that I was sure I wasn't going to live much beyond the age of thirty-two. I thought a metaphorical stray bullet would hit me, that my life wouldn't be a long one. I remember being convinced of this at the age of twenty-four, and feeling that each film would be my last. I knew I had to be careful about how I used my time, that I couldn't waste a single second or allow myself to be afraid of anything or anyone. Fear no longer exists for me. The man who frightens me has yet to be born.
_Nothing frightens you?_
A few years ago I was on an aeroplane that had to make an emergency landing. We were ordered to crouch down and push our faces into our knees. I outright refused, so the co-pilot came out from his cabin and ordered me to assume that undignified position. "If we're all going to perish," I told him, "I want to see what's coming at me. If we survive, I also want to see it. I'm posing no danger to anyone by sitting upright." In the end, the landing gear deployed correctly and we had a safe landing, but I was banned from the airline for life, which I'm happy to tell you went out of business a couple of years later. Being scared or not is only a question of the way you choose to deal with your own mortality. Once you're reconciled with that, it isn't an issue. When I made _Fitzcarraldo_ I was a captain ready to go down with his ship. Death has never impressed me.
Strangely enough, one thing that does worry me – and has done for years – is the first hours of shooting a new film. It's the same every time: I arrive on set and look around, see myself surrounded by a group of exceptionally competent people, and desperately hope one of them is going to take charge. I wonder who is actually going to be making this film, then quickly realise there's no escape. That person is me. It's like a kid who steps into the classroom when he and his friends all know that the teacher is going to shout at him. Over the years I have tackled this feeling with a primitive ritual. As some kind of protection, the assistant cameraman places a piece of bright yellow gaffer tape over my heart and across my back, as if I am now plainly visible as the person in charge. This protective shield helps me settle in and get through the first hour.
_Do you feel pain?_
That's a ridiculous question. Of course I feel pain. I just don't make a fuss about it.
_Your next project was a four-minute film based on a duet from a Puccini opera._
It was one of three films commissioned by the English National Opera; they had a new season starting and wanted to promote English-language opera. I was approached late in the day and was required to deliver the film – which had to be exactly the length of "O soave fanciulla," from _La Bohème_ – in two weeks. I told them I wanted to go to the remotest corner of Africa and immediately left for Ethiopia, on the southern border near Sudan, a volatile area where the Mursi tribe lives and every six-year-old boy has a Kalashnikov. André Singer, the film's producer, was trained as an anthropologist and twenty-five years earlier had spent time in Ethiopia working on his thesis. The structure of the film is simple. I placed four sets of couples in front of the camera. They both stare at us, turn and face each other, then walk away in different directions. Between each couple I cut a shot of a group of armed men. The result is a series of stylised images, each of a man and a woman. This is an archetypal situation: boy meets girl. All you need feel is that each couple will never see each other again.
_You wrote_ My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done _with Herb Golder._
Herb stumbled across a real criminal case in San Diego about a young man named Mark Yavorsky. He was a published poet, award-winning actor, outstanding athlete and basketball player with a near-genius IQ, and had performed in a theatrical production of the _Oresteia_ as Orestes, the character who murders his mother. At one point Yavorsky converted to Islam and travelled to Pakistan, where he was arrested as a lunatic and thrown in prison. On his return home his behaviour became increasingly erratic, and he murdered his mother with a prop sword. Yavorsky was locked away in a maximum-security facility for the criminally insane, and was released after nine years. Herb was fascinated by this case of matricide; he became entangled in the story and collected thousands of pages of courtroom transcripts and material relating to the investigation. I could instantly tell there was something intriguing here, but Herb never got around to writing the screenplay, so I proposed that he and I hide out in the Austrian countryside. "You aren't leaving until the script is finished," I told him, "and you aren't staying more than a week."
The hard core of _My Son, My Son_ is based on reality. Some of the strangest dialogue in the film is taken verbatim from Yavorsky's real statements and other sources, including his psychiatric evaluations, police forensic reports and Herb's interviews, though the hostagetaking of the flamingos and God as a box of Quaker Oats are my inventions. For the rehearsal scenes in the theatre, Herb pieced together dialogue by cherry-picking from Sophocles, Euripides and different choruses of the _Oresteia_. He offered up many profound lines from the original Greek texts, but we had to brush most of it aside. When you encounter abstract ideas on the page you can stop and ponder their meaning at leisure, but in a film they can overtake you and reverberate too loudly, and I felt the audience would be overloaded.
_Yavorsky believed that by sacrificing his mother, he could save the planet._
He had obsessive ideas about being crucified live on national television, and ten minutes into his trial the prosecutor, defence attorney and judge all agreed that Yavorsky was unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity. He was locked away, but because his crime was directed towards his own mother and no one else, he was eventually deemed to be no threat to society and released. Herb spent time with Yavorsky while he was researching the case and introduced me to him one time in the decrepit trailer park where he lived near Riverside, California. I walked into his place, which was full of strange memorabilia; the walls were covered with religious quotes and pornographic images. One of the first things that caught my eye was a poster for _Aguirre_ , in the corner surrounded by burning candles. I looked at this makeshift shrine and the crazed expression on Kinski's face, and immediately wanted to get out of there. The whole encounter was a big mistake; sometimes it's best to keep a distance from your sources. The screenplay had already been written by that point, so my trip was made more out of curiosity than anything else. You won't be surprised to hear that I chose not to maintain contact with Yavorsky.
There aren't many actors around of the calibre required to play the lead role in _My Son, My Son_. Although I only watched him for less than sixty seconds in a film, Michael Shannon was immediately at the top of my list. The moment I saw him, I trusted in him. Michael wanted to listen to the tape recordings we had of Yavorsky and even imitate his voice and the way he rambled when he spoke, but I discouraged this. Before we made _Rescue Dawn_ , I advised Christian Bale not to get too caught up in imitating Dieter Dengler; I wanted Dieter's spirit to emerge through Christian's own particular way of talking and moving. The end result was so powerful that even Dieter's two sons, who showed up in Thailand during production, kept calling Christian "Dad." I took the same approach with Michael Shannon and Yavorsky; I wanted him to invent and shape the character himself. Generally it's bad enough that a screenwriter is overloaded with material, but even worse if an actor is too. The only legitimate reason to study a real person before playing them in a film is if that person is Muhammad Ali. Learning to move and rap like him would be imperative.
_David Lynch helped produce the film._
David and I have a close affinity, and respect each other deeply. I appreciate his work, and though our films are very different, at times they touch each other. I first met him when I was working with Twentieth Century Fox on _Nosferatu_. I was in Hollywood when I ran into Mel Brooks and starting talking about David's extraordinary film _Eraserhead_ , which I had just seen. I was in Mel's office, raving and ranting about the director's obvious talent. I didn't even know his name. Mel kept grinning, and after letting me exhaust myself said, "Do you want to meet him?" Three doors down David was working on _The Elephant Man._
_My Son, My Son_ fell dormant for several years because we couldn't find any money, then one day I went to meet a producer who had worked with David for years, and all of sudden he walked in. We spoke about the state of cinema in general, about spiralling production and marketing budgets, about the fact that the average Hollywood feature costs tens of millions of dollars. "We should make films with a maximum budget of $2 million," I said. "Real stories, and the best actors. Not superstars." He asked if I had an idea for a film and when could I start. "Tomorrow," I said. David was immediately enthusiastic, but he didn't produce _My Son, My Son_ as such. He left us alone during shooting and only saw the film once it was completed, so though he was involved, what he really did was throw a match onto a powder keg, giving the project the spark it needed.
_My Son, My Son_ is one of the most concise pieces of filmmaking I have ever produced. The storytelling is disciplined from start to finish, with one scene blending into the next. A good part of the narrative is told in flashbacks, but audiences don't even notice because the transitions from past to present and back again are woven in so seamlessly. It all involved the kind of high-precision filmmaking I usually avoid. The story takes place somewhere with the appearance of absolute serenity, a well-ordered American suburb with a beautiful ocean, clean beaches, quiet parks and palm trees blowing in the wind, but also some kind of slowly advancing fear and horror. We filmed in San Diego. Nothing is as it seems or fully explained; we never see Yavorsky actually killing his mother, only the aftermath of the act. He makes a strange theatrical gesture with a sword, but the final horror of his crime lies only in the audience's imagination. What I like about the story is that it's a horror film, but without chainsaws and axes flying at you. There is a menace that creeps up on the audience anonymously; you never know from which direction it will appear. Sometimes the things you can't quite put your finger on are the scariest. The leading character is extremely dangerous, and there is some kind of existential terror about him, though this is revealed only through almost imperceptible signals here and there. He finds a basketball in a park and places it up in the branches of a tree, saying he wants to keep it there for a future basketball player. You sense he's either suicidal or homicidal. It isn't easy to nail down what makes him so frightening.
_Why did you make_ Cave of Forgotten Dreams?
The film is about the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave in the south of France, which was discovered in 1994 and contains what is the earliest-known human cave art, from thirty-two thousand years ago. My first intellectual awakening, my first real cultural fascination, independent of peers and family, came at a bookstore in Munich when I was twelve years old. On the cover of one of the books in the window was a painting of a horse from the prehistoric Lascaux cave. It shook me to my core; I felt a deep turmoil in my heart, an indescribable excitement that remains to this day. I had to have the book, and would walk past the store every week, heart pounding, to make sure no one had bought it. It seems I thought there was only a single copy in existence. I worked as a ball boy in a tennis club for more than half a year before I had enough money to pay for it. I still remember a shudder of awe when I first looked through its pages. Early fascinations rarely leave us. I still have the book, which turned out to be quite superficial.
When I was first allowed into the cave, some time before I made the film, I was struck by the freshness of everything. Cave bears became extinct twenty thousand years ago, but there are clearly bear tracks on the cave floor. In a recess is a footprint of a boy, next to one of a wolf. Did a hungry wolf stalk the child? Did they walk together as friends, or were their tracks made thousands of years apart? There are images of reindeer painted by someone and left incomplete, then finished by someone else. The stunning fact is that radiocarbon dating shows us that these additions came five thousand years later. Can we ever truly understand what was going on in the minds of these artists across such an unfathomable abyss of time? With the gorge of the Ardèche river, bridged by the Pont d'Arc, a two-hundred-foot-high natural rock arc, the landscape in the vicinity of the cave is equally extraordinary. The fact that it reminds us so much of Wagner and Caspar David Friedrich connects us to the artists who worked at Chauvet thirty thousand years ago; the landscape doesn't belong only to the Romantics. Stone Age man might have had a similar sense of its power, and it's no surprise that Chauvet is surrounded by a cluster of other Palaeolithic caves. I spoke to one of the primary scientists involved in the project, who suggested that Pont d'Arc wasn't just a physical landmark for the inhabitants of thirty thousand years ago, but most likely also played an imaginative part in their mythology.
_Is it clear what purpose the paintings serve?_
There are configurations of crouching bison in different caves, so perhaps travelling artists moved from cave to cave. But we don't even know if they were meant as art; perhaps they were used for target practice. The mysteries of Chauvet will likely linger for ever. We can only take an educated guess by looking at cultures that until recently were living a Stone Age existence, like Australian Aborigines or Kalahari bushmen. Through carbon dating we know that twenty-eight thousand years ago a torch was swiped against the cave wall to rekindle the flame. But when we see an altar-like rock that has a bear skull carefully placed upon it, nobody can definitively explain its meaning. Everything points to a religious ceremony, though it might just have been a child playing with a bear skull. When we see palm prints at different points on the walls, all clearly made by someone with a crooked little finger, we assume it's the work of the same person.
Much is known to us because of the modern-day archaeological instruments that we have at our disposal; every grain of sand on the cave floor has been measured with laser mapping. But even so, with no full and definitive answers to our questions about the cave paintings, we're forced to use our intelligence and capacity for vision. I admire the scientists working inside the cave; they are cautious in their declarations about Chauvet and have no time for spiritual, New Age interpretations. At the same time I appreciate people like Julien Monney, who tells us in the film that scientists are working to present a new understanding of the cave through scientific methods, but adds that their main goal – or at least his main goal – is to formulate stories about what happened in the cave thousands of years ago. Like me, Julien has a tremendous respect for both empirical science and the human imagination, and I was intrigued by him from the start of our conversations, not least because he was a circus performer before he became an archaeologist, someone able to walk parallel paths.
These aren't primitive scribblings on the cave walls, like the first attempts of young children. Art emerged fully accomplished, tens of thousands of years ago; Greek, Roman, Renaissance and modern art never got any better. This is the true origin of art, even of the modern human soul, and there is something wonderfully confident about it. At a time when most of Europe was covered with glaciers and ice, when the sea level was three hundred feet lower than it is today, we have on the wall of a cave in France the figurative and symbolic representation of the world. What's fascinating is the distant cultural echo of several cave images resonating through time, those innate visual conventions stretching from Chauvet until today, many millennia later. The only human representation in the cave is a painting of a bison embracing the lower part of a naked female body. We should ask ourselves why Picasso – who at the time had no knowledge of Chauvet – used the same motif in his series of drawings of the Minotaur and the woman. Another visual convention that has somehow lived through the ages is the galloping bison on the cave wall. In Norse mythology, Odin's horse Sleipnir is able to run so fast because it has eight legs, the same number as the Chauvet bison.
_In the film you talk about the "proto-cinematic" elements in the cave._
There is charcoal evidence that fires burned on the cave floor, but no humans ever lived in the cave, and among the four thousand bones found inside there are no human remains. It means the fires were probably used for illumination, not cooking. There might have been light penetrating into the recesses before the cataclysmic rockslide hermetically sealed the cave for tens of thousands of years, but the paintings start some distance from the entrance, which means people must have stepped in front of a flickering fire to create and then look at the images on the walls. In doing so, their shadows would have become part of those images, and with a fire burning in the middle of the cave the animals on the walls would have appeared to move. All this brought to mind one of my favourite sequences in all of film history: Fred Astaire dancing with his own shadow in _Swing Time_. Three huge shadows are cast on the white wall behind him and mischievously become independent, dancing without him, before Fred eventually catches up with them. When you guess how the sequence was done, it becomes even more awesome. They must have filmed Fred earlier, created the shadow image, projected it on the wall, then had him dance with the utmost precision to match it. Today this would all be created digitally.
_How did the French feel about a Bavarian making a film inside their cave?_
I did wonder how I could hope to gain access to the cave. After all, the French are rather territorial when it comes to their patrimony. As I see it, the cave belongs to the French, but at the same time to the entire human race. I had the feeling that I – and no one else – should make this film, and was fortunate because when I met with the French minister of culture he insisted on having the first word, and spent ten minutes explaining how much my films meant to him. It turned out that decades before, as a young journalist, he had even interviewed me once for French television, though I had no memory of this. Additional permits were needed from both the regional government where the cave is situated and the council of French scientists involved. What probably won them over was the fire burning within me.
Once the permits had been issued, I asked if I could see the cave before the shoot and explore the technical possibilities, and two months before we made the film I was allowed inside for one hour. When I got the green light I felt like an impoverished little girl in a fairy tale who wanders out into the cold, starry night, holds open her apron, and stands there as gold coins rain into it. I might be the first person to have gone into the cave who wasn't strictly a scientist. I went in as a poet, hoping to activate the audience's imagination. If _Cave of Forgotten Dreams_ were full only of scientific facts, it would be instantly forgettable. My idea was always to step aside and let the art do the talking. Of all my films, _Cave of Forgotten Dreams_ probably comes closest to the definition of a documentary as we are accustomed to using the word. It was my duty to document as clearly as possible the work of people who lived thirty two thousand years ago.
_You filmed in 3D._
When I saw photos of the cave, it looked as if the walls were flat or maybe gently undulating. Fortunately I made that trip inside before filming because the walls actually have dramatic concave niches, which were skilfully and expressively utilised by the artists for their paintings; for example, a protruding bulge of rock as the neck of a bison. It was instantly clear that the film had to be in 3D, especially because I knew we would be the only filmmakers ever allowed inside. 3D doesn't really interest me; I hadn't used it in the sixty films I had already made and have no plans to use it again. But shooting inside the cave in 3D was beyond legitimate. It was imperative. "We should be completely casual with 3D," I told Peter Zeitlinger, "as if we weren't trying to impress everyone with its scope." The intensity of the paintings comes through in the film because of the 3D imagery, and when audiences emerge they rarely speak about having seen a film. They talk instead about having actually been inside the cave.
From the minute Chauvet was located, the authorities understood the importance of this time capsule and did everything they could to preserve it. Today it's categorically closed to everyone, with the exception of a few scientists. None of this was a caprice on the part of the French. Scientists went in with great caution because at Lascaux in the Dordogne and Altamira in Spain the tourists' breath has caused irrevocable damage in the form of mould. I was allowed in the cave for four hours a day, for six days of shooting, with a crew of three people. Every minute counted. No matter what happened, we had to perform. We were permitted to bring only what we could carry in our hands, which meant no heavy equipment and only lights that emitted no heat. We weren't allowed to step off the two-foot-wide metal walkway, and at times I would hold Peter by his belt so he could lean over as far as possible, with the camera in his outstretched arm, and shoot into a dark corner. There is a fairly high level of gas in the cave at all times – both carbon dioxide and radon – and there was always a guard with us to measure levels. As if that weren't enough, 3D cameras are large and clumsy, full of high-precision mechanics, and have to be specifically reconfigured for different shots – close-ups, for example – so we were forced to piece the camera together on this walkway, in semi-darkness and with no technical support from outside, since the doors were always closed behind us to preserve the cave's atmosphere. We weren't even allowed to sneeze in there. One time our digital data recorder stopped working the minute we got inside, so we tore our battery belts apart and within fifteen minutes had created a special battery for this machine.
Some of the scientists told me that when they heard the sound of a beating heart inside the cave, they couldn't be sure if it was their own they were hearing. Several spoke of feeling eyes upon them, as if they were being observed from the darkest recesses. People ask me if being at Chauvet was like a religious experience. The answer is no; we were too busy being professionals. But once, after everyone else had left, I stood there for a few seconds in the darkness. It was truly awesome.
_Tell me about the crocodiles._
In the postscript to the film I explain how I stumbled across some mutant albino crocodiles. My voiceover tells us they live a few miles from Chauvet in enormous greenhouses, vast tropical biospheres warmed by coolant water pumped in from a nuclear power plant, one of the largest in France. I avoid explicitly saying they had mutated because of radioactivity, but audiences can draw their own conclusions. I wanted to speculate on how these animals might perceive the world around them and look upon the paintings on the walls at Chauvet if they ever escaped from the greenhouse and made their way inside the cave. The crocs have nothing to do with the rest of the film, but this epilogue wasn't explicitly for the sake of invention; it has to do with perception, about how our great-great-grandchildren might look back on our present-day civilisation. We obviously bring a different cultural context to Chauvet than that of the people who created the paintings. I'm curious about how we perceive the images on the walls of the cave more than thirty thousand years after they were created, and how they will appear to people a hundred generations from now. Perhaps we're the albino crocodiles of today. They fit beautifully in the film, even though, had I proposed to a Hollywood studio that I include albino crocodiles in a film about Palaeolithic cave paintings, I would have been escorted from the premises by security guards. I just really wanted to film some crocodiles, though it turns out I got it wrong. Months later someone told me they aren't crocodiles. Those are actually alligators.
_You re-edited some found footage about Siberian hunters into_ Happy People...
While driving in Los Angeles one day I noticed how close I was to a friend's place. Usually it's impossible to park outside his house, but that day there was a space, so I knocked on his door. When I walked in, he went to switch off his gigantic plasma screen, but I noticed something that interested me immediately. It turned out to be four one-hour-long films made by Dmitry Vasyukov, a young Russian filmmaker. They were about hunters and professional trappers in the forests of the Siberian taiga. Dmitry had shot his films over a full year, with each segment representing a single season. I found the images quite extraordinary; to my eyes these men looked almost prehistoric. But as a whole the films were too long and the music was poorly done, so I casually mentioned there should be an international version with a new soundtrack and a fresh voiceover, and suggested the film should be no longer than ninety minutes. Dmitry was delighted, and within a few weeks I had edited the material down, written and recorded a commentary, and incorporated Klaus Badelt's new score. I can't say much more about the project other than that I love these Russians and their dogs, the way they survive by living off the land in their tiny cabins miles from anywhere. They are truly free and happy people, unencumbered by rules, taxes, government, law, bureaucracy, telephones and radios. Whether making a set of skis or carving a dugout canoe from a tree, these are men equipped only with their expert survival skills and individual values, standards of conduct and rules. They live according to the dignity of nature, and despise commercial hunters who arrive in their territory and over-hunt and over-fish. One of the men in the film got a message to me saying he was worried that audiences would feel pity for him and his colleagues. But these are clearly proud people, and I respect and envy them. My ideal would be to spend a whole year out there, in the solitude of Siberia, a territory one and a half times the size of the continental United States.
_... then made a short film called_ Ode to the Dawn of Man _during the recording of the music for_ Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
I was in a seventeenth-century Lutheran church in Haarlem, a few miles outside of Amsterdam, recording the soundtrack with Ernst Reijseger and the Netherlands National Choir, when I suddenly realised the session had to be filmed. I was about to run out and buy a camera when someone handed me a rather unsophisticated single-chip one. There is no narrative, no commentary; it's just music, plus Ernst describing the new cello he recently had made. I used a seven-minute shot of him from _Ode to the Dawn of Man_ in "Hearsay of the Soul," my fourteen-minute multi-screen installation first seen at the 2012 Biennial at the Whitney Museum in New York, which features images by Hercules Segers. I was initially reluctant to participate in a contemporary-art event, but it turns out there are a few things in me that go beyond my regular work and that I'm unable to express through cinema or literature alone.
_What made you produce the feature-length_ Into the Abyss _and the eight-part_ On Death Row, _which contain conversations with men and women all of whom have been sentenced to death?_
_Into the Abyss_ could have been the title of several of my films. Walter Steiner, Fini Straubinger, Reinhold Messner, Timothy Treadwell and the men on death row are somehow all part of the same family. They belong together. Wherever I look I seem to be peering into a dizzying, dark abyss, whether that of the human condition or, as with _Cave of Forgotten Dreams_ , the recesses of human prehistory. By doing so, I've always tried to give audiences short flickering moments of illumination, some kind of understanding of who we are. When James Barnes tells us in _On Death Row_ that he dreams about washing the filth from his body and spends most of the time wishing for things he doesn't have – like swimming in the ocean on a hot day and the sensation of rain on his face – we learn something about human beings everywhere. When Hank Skinner describes the ecstasy of a washing machine because for seventeen years he has washed his clothes in a sink, leaving both his little fingers permanently crooked, and when Blaine Milam talks of how he was caught fermenting prunes in his cell to make what he calls wine, we learn something about ourselves.
_What interested you about the crime you detail in_ Into the Abyss?
The murderer Jason Burkett might be intimidating, but he never frightened me. However, I have met some dangerous people in dangerous situations, and though he looks like a pleasant, friendly young man, even a lost kid, no one – according to my instincts – was as deadly as the other perpetrator, Michael Perry. He's the last person I would want to meet at night under murky circumstances. When Perry and Burkett knocked at the door of their friend's mother, they had no plan beyond stealing her car and taking off. Then they realised she was alone, baking cookies, and Perry spontaneously decided it would be easier to kill her. They dumped the body in a pond before discovering they couldn't get the car beyond the gates of this private residential community, so waited until the woman's son returned home, lured him and his friend into nearby woods, shot both teenagers and used the electronic key to escape with the car, which was in their possession for only seventy-two hours. The fact that they ended up on death row is irrelevant, because even if both men had gotten away with life in prison, I would still have been intrigued by their crimes.
The story of _Into the Abyss_ was so incomprehensible that I knew it was the basis of a full-length film, not just an hour-long television programme. The utter nihilism of this triple homicide, with all its ramifications and resulting emptiness and pain, was so staggering that it caught my eye. A bank robber shooting a teller for cash is within the boundaries of comprehension, but the facts of this case were mind-boggling, and I felt there was an epic film to be made, the story of a group of people – perpetrators and victims – that touched on the deepest, darkest recesses of what lies inside us all. The killings were the epicentre, after which came numerous aftershocks that caused profound damage to many people in the community. The programmes I made as _On Death Row_ are different from _Into the Abyss_ in that they focus on individual perpetrators rather than a complex crime involving two perpetrators, three murder victims and four crime scenes. With _Into the Abyss_ , my interest spread to the chaplain, the former captain of the tie-down team, whose job it was to strap down the inmates for execution, and the victims' families. I quickly realised an entire tapestry could be woven around these senseless murders. Who are the perpetrators and the survivors? Who were the victims? What were the responses of the homicide detectives and lawyers? What did the crime scenes look like? How did the families react? When I started to investigate, all kinds of people on the periphery of the story edged towards the centre, and it became clear this was an American gothic tale of major proportions.
_How did you end up choosing the eight perpetrators you filmed for_ On Death Row?
For each film there was a selection process not dissimilar to the casting I would do for a feature film. The website of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice contains basic details of every inmate on death row, including a summary of the crimes they were convicted for. I picked what I felt were the most interesting ones, leaving out things like bank robberies and acts of lawlessness that are relatively easy to comprehend. I was looking for an array of cases, and didn't want, for example, four rapists. The crimes were all different in nature, and the eight films include a child murderer, a wife killer, a kidnapper and someone who randomly killed two people because he was angry that day. One of the perpetrators in the first season of _On Death Row_ is a woman.
These individuals inevitably led to a wider circle of people, from family members to law-enforcement representatives, coroners and attorneys, and certain questions relating to these surrounding characters emerged when it came to deciding who to pick for these hour-long films. How eloquently could the prosecution state its case? How coherent was the perpetrator's mother? The victims' and perpetrators' families often refused to talk, and occasionally I felt that a person I wanted to speak with wouldn't be articulate enough on camera. For _Into the Abyss_ I filmed a conversation with a former girlfriend of Michael Perry that I didn't use because she was rather boring; everyone else we recorded appears in the film. For _On Death Row_ I contacted the defence attorneys of every perpetrator I wanted to film with, and in one case a lawyer asked me not to meet with his client because it might jeopardise his chances in an upcoming hearing. "He has a tendency to say stupid things," the lawyer told me, "and it's only going to be to his detriment." I immediately cancelled our meeting, only twenty-four hours before we were due to film. Also important was the existence of police videos and audio recordings, and whether ongoing appeals might prevent me from using them in the film. If I were able to include this material, was it presentable? In the case of Blaine Milam, who appears in the second season of _On Death Row_ , I never wanted to see photographs of the young child he tortured and murdered, but they were accidentally projected on a wall in front of me. My response was similar to when I saw photos of the remains of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard in the coroner's office. Not even my worst enemies should see what I saw that day.
_Is there a particular technique to filming interviews like these?_
These aren't interviews, they are conversations. In situations like these you have to be open to whatever comes at you and move in whatever direction is necessary, so the starting point is never a catalogue of questions I bring with me, which is how a journalist functions. I would never want to talk to anyone with the aim of denouncing them; I want to show everyone at their best. That said, if you're filming a conversation with someone and they are clearly lying, gently encourage them to be ever more outrageous and wild. Audiences will spot the insincerity all the more easily.
What's important is the intense concentration involved. Learn how to listen carefully to whatever is said to you, and consider how the tone of your voice can impact directly on the responses to your questions. A question asked softly will often draw the same emphasis and inflection from whomever you're talking to. Also vital is knowing how to endure the silences – those instances of quiet introspection – for as long as possible. I nudge the conversation along in a particular direction, towards moments of great magnitude, then stop talking. It takes nerve to sit silently in front of someone you have invited to have a filmed conversation with, but you must learn to absorb the silences that inevitably arise, as you sit behind the camera, holding eye contact with the person you're talking to. By staring into the abyss, somehow I'm able to encourage them. This is never an obstinate silence; there is always empathy and understanding with the person, which is somehow manifested in my physicality and the attention I give with my eyes, even the way I sit and hold my head. Lingering silences often have more weight, emotion and tacit horror than things that could ever be said. The silences in my films go on for about as long as it's possible to hold such moments of quiet before an audience starts shuffling in its seats.
The case of Blaine Milam involved the murder of a little girl who was killed in a crazed exorcism. The damage inflicted on her body was so beyond all imagination that a well-seasoned homicide detective with thirty-eight years' experience fell mute when trying to articulate the facts. His five colleagues at the crime scene had accumulated more than a hundred years of expertise, but they had never seen anything like this. When I filmed him talking about the case, it was as if he had lost the power of speech. The camera holds on him for what feels like an eternity. The image appears to be frozen, but then you see one of his fingers twitching.
Shooting on _Into the Abyss_ was spread out over several months because of issues of access, but editing was relatively fast, in part because I shot less than ten hours of footage for the entire film, which is almost two hours long. Even if I had more time, I wouldn't have gathered much more material. Working through everything with editor Joe Bini was extraordinarily intense, much more so than during filming. There was no time to think deeply about what these people told me during the fifty minutes I spent with them, and little of what they were saying affected me at the time; I was completely immersed in our conversations. It hit me only later, when I was able to sit back, stop the film, rewind it and slowly absorb what was being said. It was as if Joe and I had been run over by a truck. This was an important moment for me, as I realised I don't necessarily have to fully understand the ramifications and meaning of something when I'm filming it. In situations like these it's legitimate for such realisations to come only later. Joe and I had both quit smoking, but every few hours we rushed out into the daylight to hang on to a cigarette. Usually we work eight- or nine-hour days together, but couldn't take more than five hours a day working on this material. That had never happened to me before. It was a feeling that followed me all the way home, and in the evenings I watched Fred Astaire films.
_What was it like filming inside those prisons?_
The state of Texas – which at the time had something like three hundred inmates on death row – is exceptionally media-friendly because the politicians are so convinced of their righteousness when it comes to capital punishment. But permission from the warden can still be denied without any explanation, and there were stringent rules imposed upon us, including security checks of our equipment, a crew limit of two or three people, and filming through two-inch-thick bulletproof glass. Thankfully, the guards placed radio microphones on the inmates, otherwise we would have had to record their voices via telephone. I was told that after exactly fifty minutes the guards would pull our plug from the electricity socket, but in most cases they gave us a few minutes more. One hundred and twenty seconds before our time was up I would feel a hand on my shoulder. It was an advance warning, a non-verbal way of telling us our time was coming to an end.
My experiences with the inmates were some of the most intense of my filmmaking life. I had done my homework by going through each individual's case file – sometimes hundreds of pages of police reports, witness interrogations, photographs and court transcripts – and was familiar with the crimes themselves, but I had never met the perpetrators before. The first time I ever laid eyes on these people is captured in the films; every conversation was a voyage into the unknown. Once they sat down in front of the camera, I had to settle in immediately and engage with them. The short time available meant instantly finding the right tone; I had to deliver. The one exception was Melyssa Burkett, the pregnant wife of Jason Burkett, who had some suspicions about the film, so I met with her beforehand. I always wore formal suits when filming in prison; there is a certain amount of respect that needs to be paid to a human being who is going to die in a few days. Visiting death row means meeting people whose lives are precisely structured around rituals and protocols, and more than that, who know exactly how and when they are going to die. At six o'clock sharp they will be led into the death chamber and strapped down. At 6.03 p.m. a lethal concoction will be injected into them. Less than ten minutes later they will be pronounced dead. When you sit opposite a man who is going to be killed by the state in eight days' time, most things become insignificant.
The balance and tone in these conversations was essential. My way of dealing with the inmates was risky because I spoke very directly with them, and it could have been all over in two minutes. Someone on death row can see a phoney coming a mile off, so in the first two minutes I looked Michael Perry in the eye and said, "The fact that destiny didn't dish out a good deck of cards to you doesn't exonerate you, and it doesn't necessarily mean I have to like you." For a moment he was taken aback, but ultimately liked me for being straightforward. In fact, every prisoner I filmed for _Into the Abyss_ and _On Death Row_ seemed to like me, and every one wrote to me saying they would gladly meet with me again. They all knew in advance – because I had written to them, explaining my position – that these films weren't going to be a platform for them to prove their innocence, which meant I took a fundamentally different approach to Errol Morris when he made _The Thin Blue Line_ , the purpose of which was to exonerate a man. At the same time, this wasn't an opportunity for me to reiterate their guilt. Michael Perry insisted he had nothing to do with the murders, that he had merely been caught in the company of the real killer. I purposely left out of the film anything that made it absolutely clear he was without question one of the two murderers, that he was apparently the one who shot the mother. I chose not to mention that Perry's girlfriend was an eyewitness to the killings of the two boys lured into the forest; she testified in court, which meant immunity from prosecution. I even gave Perry a chance to lie to the camera and insist he wasn't involved in the murders. He seemed to believe what he was saying, perhaps because of the ten years he had spent talking to himself. He was somewhat disconnected from reality, and reiterating his innocence became like a mantra to him. Some of the people I filmed for _On Death Row_ readily admitted their crimes to me, and James Barnes even confessed to two more murders while talking on camera. I immediately handed copies of the tapes to the authorities.
There was never any fake upbeat journalistic enthusiasm from me, no false sentimentality or commiseration, no activist's zeal. Above all, there was an understanding that these are human beings, alongside a genuine sense of solidarity with inmates concerning their appeals and legal battles to have their execution delayed or commuted to a life sentence. Their crimes are monstrous, but I didn't make these films to try and humanise these men and women. They already are human, and remain so no matter what.
_You clearly have thoughts about capital punishment._
The majority of people in Texas are pro capital punishment, and legislation reflects this, but it doesn't mean I have to agree with the practice. I made my position clear to everyone, and strongly disagree with the people I met in rural Texas who said, "Why do we even give them a trial? Just hang 'em high." The state should never be allowed to kill anyone, under any circumstances. In the worst cases, life in prison without possibility of parole is still better than execution. Even if my own child were killed, I wouldn't demand the execution of the perpetrator. Justice is a strange beast that attempts to settle the travails, tribulations and complexities of human exchanges, and the due process of law is one of the most invaluable achievements of civilisation. Capital punishment taps into the ancient concept of retribution, something we see in the history of almost every civilisation on the planet; in this respect America isn't exceptional. The most populous nations on the planet still have capital punishment: China, India, Pakistan, Japan, Indonesia, Egypt. The only exception is Russia, which recently abolished it. But statistics make it clear that the death penalty has consistently failed to deter anyone from committing a crime; it's a feeble instrument when it comes to controlling the chaos of human life. A shift in the use of capital punishment can come only through a change in collective thinking. No film alone has sufficient power.
When it comes to my own convictions, I have no intellectual argument, only a story, that of the barbarism of Nazi Germany. There was a systematic programme of euthanasia during the Third Reich, the industrialised extermination of six million Jews in a genocide without precedent in human history, as well as thousands of cases of capital punishment; you could be executed for telling a joke about Hitler. The argument that innocent men and women on death row have died is, in my opinion, secondary. As a German, I would be the last person to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice; I don't have voting power here and am a guest in this country. But as I say in _Into the Abyss_ , when it comes to a foreigner like me commenting on how things are done in the United States, I respectfully disagree. There have been public executions for thousands of years, but I would never attend one, and if you offered me a million dollars to film an execution, I would throw the money back at you. The chaplain in _Into_ _the Abyss_ suggested I go see one, adding that he hoped it wasn't botched. It sounded absolutely horrific to me. A legitimate question to Christians in the United States – particularly fundamentalists – is whether Jesus, who was crucified in public, would have been an advocate of capital punishment. Lisa Stotler-Balloun, whose mother and brother were murdered, says something important in _Into the Abyss_ that I have to accept, because I haven't gone through the same experiences she has. She talks of feeling a weight being taken off her shoulders when she witnessed Michael Perry's execution. I asked her if she would have been satisfied if Perry had received a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and she said it would have been a credible alternative, adding that some people don't deserve to live. I appreciated her honesty.
A few days before the first season of _Death Row_ was screened on television, George Rivas – who appears in one of the films – was executed. Before his conviction for capital murder, he had already received eighteen consecutive life sentences for robbing a series of stores and locking away their employees. Rivas was a gentleman thief, dressing up as a security guard, going into a store, calling everyone together and explaining he had been sent over by head office. Then he would pull a gun, apologise, explain he was there for the cash and lock everyone away in a back room. One man even insisted on being shot because he was having a bad day, and Rivas spent time dissuading him. For every employee he locked away, Rivas was given a life sentence. Then, with no prospect of ever gaining his freedom, he concocted an ingenious plan of escape. With six other inmates he took thirteen guards and maintenance workers prisoner, using their clothes and IDs, and escaped from a maximum-security facility. A couple of weeks later, on Christmas Eve, the group robbed a sporting-goods store for weapons and money, and Rivas shot a policeman to death. In addition to capital punishment for this murder, Rivas got a life sentence for every one of the guards and workers he had captured during his escape. All in all, together with his death sentence he had to serve thirty-one life sentences, and on top of all that another ninety-nine years for utilising the pickup truck of the maintenance workers, which he abandoned after less than thirty minutes. I could never condone the murder of a police officer – which is as bad as it gets – but the disproportionality of Rivas's punishment defies my sense of justice. In the film he explains that what they call the death penalty he calls freedom.
_The full title of the film is_ Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life.
Again and again the urgency of life seeped out of the footage. That _Into the Abyss_ is a life-affirming film was unexpected. Somehow this eluded me during shooting, and revealed itself only during editing.
Hank Skinner was twenty-three minutes away from execution, having received the last rites and eaten his final meal, when he was reprieved. Death row is in the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, but the unit has no death house, so prisoners are transported forty-three miles away to Huntsville for execution. Skinner hadn't seen the outside world for seventeen years, and all of a sudden he was shackled, placed into a van and surrounded by armed guards, who told him, "If somebody tries to free you, we are under orders to shoot you dead." He could see the world through the windows during this drive. "It was magnificent, it was glorious," he told me. "Everything out there looked like the Holy Land." Curious, I made the trip myself. All of a sudden, amidst this forlorn and drab area of Texas, I saw the glory of the world in all its magnificence, joy and beauty. There was something wondrous at every turn, from the abandoned gas station to the ramshackle little hut with the "Happy Worm Bait Shop" sign. It truly was the Holy Land.
Lisa Stotler-Balloun talks about her father dying and how one uncle hanged himself and another shot himself because he had cancer; this is in addition to her mother and brother being murdered. Yet her appreciation of life shines through. And how does a woman become pregnant when her husband is in a maximum-security prison? Burkett's wife was a paralegal working on his case when she fell in love with him, which itself raises questions about love and destiny. They married over the telephone, with bulletproof glass between them, and now she can meet him at a table with a guard sitting with them. They are allowed only to touch hands, so how did she become pregnant? Clearly there is contraband that enters prisons, but could there be contraband going the other way? Shortly after we filmed with her, a healthy baby boy was born.
Perhaps the most important scene in the film comes towards the end. After 125 executions, Fred Allen, the captain of the tie-down team, talks about how, out of the blue, just before an execution, he started to cry and shake violently. He had been an advocate of the death penalty for a long time, but being the last person to look into the eyes of those about to die gave him an insight into the process that he couldn't entirely explain. This man of extraordinary dignity and stoicism turned his back on the job literally overnight, and by doing so forfeited his pension. In the film he talks about "living your dash", the dash between the dates on your gravestone, everything from the time you're born to the moment of your death. When I look at Fred Allen, I see the best America has to offer. His story is a powerful argument against capital punishment. With his integrity and experience, Fred is a national treasure, as trustworthy as anyone on this planet. He talks about sitting quietly, watching nature around him. "I have time to watch the ducks and the birds," he says. "I watch the hummingbirds. Why are there so many of them?" I couldn't have found a better ending to any of my films. I nearly fainted when he said that, and told him there and then he would have the final word. I'm blessed Fred offered up such a mysterious and profound question. It doesn't get any better.
_Into the Abyss_ might also be a tale of God, because He is invoked by almost everyone in the film. The real question is: why wasn't He there to protect the innocent victims? The same question was asked by Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Auschwitz in 2006. "Where was God in those days? Why was He silent?"
_Your first film project was about people in prison, and one of your most recent too._
In the early sixties there was much discussion in West Germany about ensuring that the penal system became more about rehabilitation and resocialisation than punishment per se; it was an unrealistic dream, even if I do still think such attempts are worthy. This was the subject of an early project of mine – before even _Herakles_ – that thankfully never came to pass. I had gone to Straubing prison as a seventeen-year-old and met several men serving life sentences, but eventually dropped the idea. It was a well-meaning but immature project and I'm glad the film never materialised, though I did remain in touch with the prison warden for a while. My fascination with maximum-security facilities – where the most violent of all offenders end up, and where seemingly all traces of civilisation have disappeared – has clearly never left me.
_Into the Abyss_ points to the decay and lack of cohesion in families today, which means the fundamental issues of the film go far beyond the criminal case. Jason Burkett's father Delbert is also in prison, where he will almost certainly spend the rest of his life; he knows his son is never going to make it out either. It's powerful to hear him talk about how we should raise our children, about the baseball games and birthdays he missed, about how he should have encouraged his own children to finish high school – all the things that constitute the healthy upbringing of a child – and what he did wrong. Delbert testified on Jason's behalf at his son's trial, explaining that his children never had a chance, that their mother had to bring up all four of them on her own, that none of it was Jason's fault. He even said he wished he could do Jason's time for him, that he blamed himself for everything. When you hear Michael Perry talking about happier times – about a canoe trip in the Everglades he took as a thirteen-year-old, surrounded by alligators and monkeys – he seems oblivious to the fact that he's on death row. "I haven't felt this free in ten years," Perry told me at the end of our conversation. "While we were talking, I never felt I was in a cage." He spoke about the joyous moments he had experienced and what went wrong, about how close he was to a better life. Thirteen days before I met Perry, his father died. Perry was executed eight days after I filmed with him. I wanted to find out more about his family and upbringing, but his mother declined to appear on camera.
Perhaps by including Delbert Burkett in the film – a truly tragic figure – I'm asking audiences to assess themselves and think about how they live their own life. Over the years I had become somewhat dismissive of the kind of "family values" you see on television and in films, which is easy to do because they always prevail, with revolting regularity, in Hollywood happy endings. It was all too petty bourgeois for me. But today, as the father of three grown children out in the world living their own lives, and after talking with Delbert, I see things with fresh eyes. I don't think this kind of change necessarily happens with age; it's more about insight and actively dwelling on such things. Delbert reminded me that family loyalty is a priceless gift, that a parent must never abandon their child no matter what, that a parent's primary duty is to stand up to injustice on behalf of their child. Delbert was mature enough to admit what he did wrong as a father, even if his deep insights came too late.
_Jared Talbert talks about learning to read while in prison._
I recorded a conversation for _Into the Abyss_ with a woman who had worked in a bar in Cut and Shoot, a town near Conroe, where the murders had taken place, and who had known Michael Perry and Jason Burkett. She had a young man in tow and introduced me to him, saying, "This is Jared Talbert. You might be interested in talking to him because he also knew the murderers." I asked Jared to step aside while I filmed with this woman, then turned the camera ninety degrees – we didn't even move the tripod – to record a conversation with him. The second I shook Jared's hand I felt his callouses and knew he was a working man; I had those same callouses on my hands when, as a youngster, I worked as a welder. We connected immediately, and I said, "Now it's your turn to talk, welder to welder." He told the story of being stabbed through his chest with a fifteen-inch screwdriver, and of his friend throwing him a knife so he could defend himself. But Jared wanted to see his children that night, so he chose not to pick up the weapon and fight back. Half an hour after the attack on him he was at work, roofing a house. He spoke of how proud he was of his skills as a mechanic and his work in the local body shop, and told me how he had learnt to read only recently.
For me Jared is truly heroic, the best of the best. I have always been fascinated by the eloquence of illiterate people; some of the most enthralling conversations I have ever had were with people unable to read. How do you orientate yourself in a city when you can't read the street signs? How do you involve yourself in the most basic daily routines when you can't look at your address book? Memory becomes ever more important for such people. Jared and I had spoken with each other for only fifteen minutes, after which he needed a ride home so he could pick up some tools and get to work. I drove him back to his place. For ten minutes we rode silently in the car, though I felt he wanted to say something to me, and I know I wanted to say something to him. When he stepped out of the car, I turned to him and said, "Jared, wait a second." I walked around and stood in front of him. "I would like to tell you something," I said. "People always ask me whether spending time with death-row inmates is a life-changing experience. My answer is always no, it doesn't change my life. It might change my perspective, but it doesn't change the course of my life. Having met you doesn't change the course of my life either. But it does make it better." He paused for a second, hugged me briefly, almost in embarrassment – a hard quick hug – then turned around and walked off. I never saw him again.
In the cafeteria at McMurdo Station, when we were making _Encounters at the End of the World_ , I met a journeyman plumber and welder called David Pacheco. It wasn't easy to establish a rapport with him, so instead of shaking his hand when he left, I turned to the side and gently elbowed him. He loved this and did the same. We knocked elbows together and were immediately in business; it was an instant, non-verbal form of communication. A few years before that I was watching a Thai film and noticed a man in the background with an intense, intimidating look. I immediately decided I wanted him for _Rescue Dawn_ as the mute. His name was Chorn Solyda, and it turned out he spoke only a Cambodian dialect that nobody else understood, so on set we jokingly called him Walkie Talkie. Although no one could actually have a conversation with Chorn, I directed him anyway, without words, using my body to describe what I wanted. Decades before that, when I was making _The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner_ , something interesting happened. It was difficult to get Steiner to open up in front of the camera because he was embarrassed about being the focus of attention. One evening the crew and I grabbed him, hoisted him up onto our shoulders and ran through the streets. At that moment, because of this immediate physical sensation with the man, the film suddenly became quite clear to me. Only then did I know how to respond to the shots we had of Steiner flying through the air and really understand how to use them properly. At the same time, he became more comfortable talking on camera, as if he had reacted to this physical contact himself. It still wasn't easy to dig into him with words, but I felt a newfound connection.
These encounters with Jared, David, Chorn and Walter – these tactile experiences – are the story of my life, of all the people I have met and places I have visited, of my love of life and of moving around the earth. I feel most comfortable when it comes to physical contact, to being able to handle rolls of unexposed celluloid or a camera I can balance on my shoulder, to landscapes where I can touch the ground or grapple up a mountain or climb through the trees and vines of a jungle, where I can drive through the sand dunes of a desert or steer a boat through raging rapids. I spot these ideas, places and people and engage fully, without hesitation. When making a film, whenever possible, I serve as the actors' stand-in in front of the camera while the shot is being framed and the lights are set up, and I always do the slateboard myself because I like being the last person between the crew and the performers. It gets me closer to the action and also helps me know when everyone is ready; sometimes I stall and pretend to deal with some technical issue because I sense an actor needs a few more minutes to prepare. I never use a megaphone when directing; I prefer to gravitate physically towards the person I'm talking to, rather than shout from a distance. A grown man should have a good whistle, which is the most professional signal you can give a crew. Mine is vicious.
_Would you ever make a television commercial?_
I would rather work as a taxi driver. I don't want to make a moral issue out of this, so let me remind you what I said earlier about television and how the world of consumerism fragments our gift of storytelling. I have turned down many offers to direct television commercials over the years, though I did make a film called _From One Second to the Next_ , part of AT&T's "It Can Wait" anti-texting-and-driving campaign. AT&T explained that because of my death-row films, and because they wanted somebody who was able to look into the emotional depths in a raw and direct way, they thought of me. What they proposed immediately reverberated. From the start I knew that showing wrecked cars and mangled bodies wasn't the way to make this film. What I wanted to do instead was reveal the inner effects of the catastrophes. It was also important to make clear that deep and lingering wounds were experienced by both victims and perpetrators.
AT&T wanted four thirty-second spots. I knew that the moments of great suffering, of silence, would be of vital importance, and that I needed more time to tell the stories properly. Audiences had to get to know the real-life people involved in these tales, which couldn't be done in only thirty seconds. I explained to AT&T that as well as making the four spots, I would shoot a longer film, for no extra money and within the same period of time. This wasn't particularly welcome, but I took the initiative anyway. _From One Second to the Next_ contains four separate stories, each about how a catastrophic event invades a family. Entire lives are either wiped out or irrevocably changed in a single second, and in the case of those drivers who caused the accidents, they will forever carry with them a profound sense of guilt that pervades every action, every dream and nightmare. The film is more a public-service announcement than a commercial per se, and has nothing to do with consumerism. The whole AT&T campaign was actually about trying to dissuade people from excessive use of a product, not about selling anything to the public. It was about raising awareness, and within three weeks of the film being released more than two million people watched it on the Internet, in addition to it being screened at thousands of high schools and hundreds of safety organisations and government agencies across the United States, which means millions more people saw it within a very short period of time.
There was an immediate reaction to the film; hundreds of emails came in from children and their parents. One teenage girl told me she sat her mother down and said, "You text when you're driving me to school. That's not going to happen again." At the time the trend was shocking: something like a million accidents every year because of cellphone use, compared to almost none just a few years before. I heard about some mind-boggling cases, like a young man who killed a child because he was texting his girlfriend, who was sitting next to him in the same car. This is a phenomenon that represents a profound shift in our civilisation. I appreciate what the cowboy says at the end of the film: "Why don't they just talk to each other?" One thing that surprised me when I made the film was an almost complete absence of legislation relating to texting and driving; there were no relevant laws in many American states. If you ran over someone because you were texting, all you had to fear was a ticket. Just imagine, the same as for parking in the wrong space!
_Spoken like a true grandfather._
The purpose of _From One Second to the Next_ was simple: to make people aware of the consequences of their actions, which means the best evidence of its effectiveness is if the film correlates with a noticeable drop in fatalities on the roads. Many people told me it will help save lives, but I haven't checked the statistics. All I can say is that if there is only one accident less because someone has watched the film, the whole enterprise will have been worth the effort. There's an interesting philosophical question here. You can quantify certain events – such as the number of accidents and fatalities every year – but how can you quantify things that haven't happened? How can we quantify the number of people not texting while driving? How many wonderful wives have you never met in your life because they left the plaza fifteen seconds before you got there?
Time _magazine declared you one of the hundred most influential people on the planet in 2009._
I've never been ambitious for anything, be it a career, social status, wealth or fame; none of those things have ever particularly impressed me. In fact, I find the very idea of ambition completely foreign. It has always been noticeably absent in my thinking and actions. I would never describe myself as being influential and was genuinely surprised when the magazine told me I was being included. I immediately wrote back saying I didn't belong, that I would rather be counted as one of the anonymous three hundred Spartans, those foot soldiers who fought and perished with Leonidas at Thermopylae against the Persians. However, allow me to say one thing. When we were talking about the Rogue Film School, I said about how it has become clear over the years that young people see me as some kind of alternative to a certain kind of filmmaking, that I have developed tools to cope with the obstacles we all encounter when making films, that I have become some kind of beacon in the distance that gives people a sense of direction. They recognise that, against all odds, I have managed to make film after film despite the usual industry constraints. I seem to be a sign of hope for young people. Whenever I introduce one of my films, there is always a crowd of people wanting to talk to me; it's been like this everywhere I go for nearly forty years. A young man or woman might tell me how they quit their job or dropped out of school and started making their own films after seeing one of mine. In that respect, me being on the _Time_ magazine list isn't completely grotesque.
_Perhaps this book has helped contribute to that feeling amongst your admirers._
I couldn't say.
_What people seem to respond to in these pages isn't necessarily the talk about specific films, more your methods of functioning in the world and how you have gone about producing your work over the past fifty years._
Perhaps, yes.
_It's been more than ten years, and never have I heard you say whether this book is in any way important to you._
You are as much a prisoner of this project as I am.
_True. There's little enough dignity in this work. Years ago you even told me you cursed the day you decided to co-operate._
True.
_Are you happy we worked on this together?_
I live my life with as little reflection as possible, but recognise that this book is the only competent comment on my work out there, and that there is ever likely to be. In that respect, I'm glad it exists.
_You wouldn't lose any sleep if_ A Guide for the Perplexed _didn't exist_?
No.
_How do you think the book would read if we had met regularly over the decades and discussed your approach to filmmaking?_
Some of the basics probably haven't changed; my fundamental perspective on the world is the same. There's a tone I might recognise if I listened to forty-year-old recordings. People occasionally tell me I have "reinvented" myself over the years. Untrue. I leave that to someone like Madonna; she doesn't have much of a self, so has adopted a variety of roles throughout her career. I'm basically the same person I was when I was fourteen, with my shifting fascinations and way of looking at the world, even if I'm open to new ideas and have cast aside certain attitudes I had when I was younger. I try to live in my time, though I would have made a competent Palaeolithic hunter, bow and arrow or atlatl in hand. When I think about what animal I would have gone after if I had been around back then, the horse stands out. Their flight pattern is fairly predictable, which means they could be steered into a trap, like a pit dug in the ground and covered by leaves and branches. A stag would zigzag and most probably escape, while a bison would attack instead of running. It actually turns out I'm not entirely correct about this. When I spoke to various scientists during production of _Cave of Forgotten Dreams_ , I discovered that after sifting through Palaeolithic garbage heaps, it was determined that reindeer – not horses – were a primary source of meat back then. Regardless, I would have been a good Neanderthal. I can always get a fire started when needed.
I'm glad we didn't have those regular meetings you talk about. It's good we take a step back and don't see each other, sometimes for years at a time. You do your work, I do mine, then we collide again. It would be a triumph of everything pedantic about the world if we met regularly. And I will deny the world that triumph. After having ploughed through so many hundreds of pages of these interview transcripts no one will believe me, but I have never particularly liked talking about myself, to you or anyone else. My films are the rewards for the struggles over the years; they have always been more important than the person sitting here today. The focus should be on the work, not me. I prefer to keep a low profile, in part because, on occasion, I attract certain people I would rather keep my distance from. I'm not talking about the kind of stalkers who want to sleep in my bed and take a pillow home as a souvenir. Years ago a woman identifying herself as Barbara made thirty frantic calls in a single hour to my apartment. I thought she was the former girlfriend of one of the crew of _Fitzcarraldo_. "If it would help," I told her, "why don't you come by?" When she arrived, I realised it wasn't the person I was expecting. She was very confused, in a real crisis, and insisted I was at the heart of a worldwide conspiracy to destroy and exterminate her. As she reached into her handbag, she said, "You see, sir, my only salvation is that I slaughter [ _schlachten_ ] you first." I'm a friendly man, but at that moment felt obliged to lunge across the room and grab her bag, in which I found a loaded pistol. These days I prefer to sit with my back to the wall in restaurants.
I do the press junkets only because there's a necessity to build bridges to audiences, which might in turn make the next film easier to produce. Talking to journalists is part of the job; my way of keeping sane when having to say the same thing twenty times in a single day is to go into autopilot. I might be talking about a film I made last year, but in my mind I'm developing stories and ideas for films I'll be making next year. I always try to be gracious with the press, and have never been one of those directors who thrash about, exclaiming, "I absolutely hate interviews, but ask your questions anyway..." Whoever this "self" is, sitting in front of you here, is unimportant. Who cares about me? The only thing that counts is the work and what audiences see on the screen. At the end of the day only the films remain. They are the tracks in the sand as I move through life. Everything else dissipates.
_Have there been any big disappointments in your career?_
Not really. Things are good for me. When you're in Siberia and get into your car in the morning, you have to warm up the engine. Once warm, it works just fine. For years now, having learnt to cope with the disasters and struggles, I've been very warmed up. You won't ever see me hanging around licking my wounds.
I never sit and write a script about something that interests me, then feel detached from what I've just written as if having freed myself from it. For me, these two procedures – being fascinated by something, then processing it into a film – are simultaneous and inextricably linked. Perhaps there are a couple of my films that aren't as close to me as others, but I really do like them all, maybe with the exception of the first two. There is something fundamentally wrong with a director saying he dislikes his latest film. I want to grab him by the collar and ask, "So why did you make it in the first place? Why didn't you stop making it when you realised it was pushing against your instincts?" I love my films as I love my children. I'm like an African tribesman who needs only to cast a glance at his herd of fifty cattle to know whether one is missing, or a mother of six who, a second after entering a room, can tell if all her children are there. She doesn't even need to count them.
As a young man I discovered something that filmmakers need to learn as early as possible: a perfect film doesn't exist. No matter how much you tinker away at this scene or that frame, you have to accept there might be defects in your work. As a filmmaker, you have to learn to live with this, even if these flaws are amplified a thousand times when screened to an audience. It's the same way a parent has to live with his children. A new film is like a child that needs help when taking its first steps. Children are never perfect; one might have a limp, another might stutter. They all have their weaknesses and strong points. I actually love the most defective films even more than the others because they need my constant support and have to be protected from the world. It doesn't matter that every one of my films is flawed in some way; what's important is they are all alive. Like a child, a film grows up, finds a life of its own and learns to stand on its own two feet. At a certain point you have to unchain the boat, give it a gentle kick and let it float out into the middle of the lake. All my films have developed their own relationship with audiences, even those one or two that demand the same effort a mountain demands of a climber. At the summit we sit and bask, with drunken pleasure, in the view of a rarely seen landscape.
As you might have guessed, I look upon my profession with a certain suspicion. Cinema might give us insights into our lives and change our perspective on things, but there is much about it that's absurd. From a certain point of view cinema is nothing other than a projection of light, an illusion. It's utterly immaterial. And, of course, filmmaking can easily turn you into a clown. The careers of many directors have ended badly, even the most powerful and strongest among us; the fiercest of animals were eventually brought to their knees, even those with true vision, unafraid to deviate from the fashions of the day. Look at what happened to Orson Welles or Buster Keaton. Both were strong as an ox, both faded away and crumbled. These are most definitely cautionary tales. John Huston – who in his youth had been a high-ranking amateur boxer and literally died on set at more than eighty years of age – is an exception to the rule.
However vigilant we are, there is something destructive and disillusioning about the film business. Few filmmakers ever retire of their own free will, but the moment I feel I'm becoming an embarrassment, I shall walk away. I don't want to become like an ageing sportsman who should have quit years ago. In terms of careers, Buñuel is an interesting example. He made surrealist films in France, then went to Spain and the United States, then Mexico, where he made _Los Olvidados_ , which is a very fine film, and from there back to France, where he made a handful of features very different to anything else he had already done. Although they are so diverse, every one of Buñuel's films is recognisable as his work. He never stopped opening himself up to new experiences and ideas. It's something I respect him for. His vision stayed constant. Watch Buñuel's films from start to finish and see a life's evolution.
If a filmmaker has no other legs to stand on, he can be easily broken. When someone knows how to milk a cow, there is something solid about him. A farmer who grows potatoes or breeds sheep is never ridiculous; nor is a cattle rancher or a chef able to feed a table full of hungry guests. The eighty-year-old man who brought me a bottle of wine from his vineyard before my first opera opened in Bologna could never be an embarrassment, but the film producer who takes to the red carpet at every opportunity and keeps his awards polished will always look foolish. I have seen dignified ninety-year-old cello players and photographers, but never filmmakers. My way of dealing with the inevitable is to step out of my job whenever I can. I travel on foot, I stage operas, I raise children, I cook, I write. I focus on things that give me independence beyond the world of cinema.
_Cooking?_
I'm good with meat – steak and venison – but lousy with soup and sweets. A man should prepare a decent meal at least once a week. I'm convinced it's the only real alternative to cinema. I was once asked if I felt most alive when filmmaking. "No," I said without hesitation. "When I'm eating a steak."
_As you get older, does it become more difficult to exercise the required discipline?_
I've actually always been a lazy bum. Yesterday I sat down and rewrote a script I've been working on for a while. I should have done it a couple of days ago but got caught up in the football matches from Europe I have beamed into my living room. The only reason I did the rewrite yesterday is that the person who is producing the film was due at my place just after lunch, so at eleven o'clock I grudgingly turned off the television, stopped fiddling around with God knows what, and sat down at my computer because I couldn't put it off any longer. I work best under pressure, knee-deep in the mud. It helps me concentrate. The truth is I have never been guided by the kind of strict discipline I see in some people, those who get up at five in the morning and jog for an hour. My priorities are elsewhere. I will rearrange my entire day to have a solid meal with friends.
_Any final advice?_
I once saw a film celebrating the life of Katharine Hepburn, who I like as an actress. It was some kind of homage to her, but unfortunately it turns out she had these vanilla-ice-cream emotions. At the end she sits on a rock by the ocean and someone off camera asks her, "Ms Hepburn, what would you like to pass on to the young generation?" She swallows, tears are welling. She takes a lot of time, as if she were thinking deeply about it all, then looks straight into the camera and proclaims: "Listen to the Song of Life." I was cringing so much it hurt, and still smart just thinking about it. It really couldn't get any worse. Hearing these words was such a blow that I wrote it into the Minnesota Declaration, Article Ten, which I repeat here and now for you. I look you right in the eye and say, "Don't you ever listen to the Song of Life."
# [Ten Poems
by Werner Herzog ](9780571259786_tableofcontents.html)
Translated by Presley Parks
Originally published in _Akzente: Zeitschrift für Literatur_
June 1978
Jede der hellen Nächte lagen Mann und Weib
Im Ringen, und auf dem Dächern im Fächeln
Des Monds übten die Katzen wilde fremde
Begattung. Die Bäume reichten über die
Dächer, über die Bäume die Berge und
Über den Bergen zogen die Sterne hinter
Der Nacht her.
Da sprach der König: meine Kinder,
Habt Geduld. Warten wir ein paar Jahrhunderttausend,
Bis dahin wandern die Steine im Feld
Und vielleicht weint sogar einer einmal.
Every bright night lay man and woman struggling,
And on the roofs, fanned by the moon,
The cats practised wild fornication.
The trees extended above the
Roofs, above the trees the mountains, and
Above the mountains the stars followed
After the night.
So spoke the King: My children,
Have patience. We shall wait a few
Hundred Thousand years,
Until then the stones will wander in the field
And perhaps someone will weep even once.
DER MUHLENFRENZEL
Drüben, jenseits des Teichs
Lebt der Mühlenfrenzel.
Mit Forschung im Auge sitzt
Da ein Frosch vor der Fliege.
Manchmal ist dem Frenzel sein
Einziger Freund der Sturm-Sepp.
Der hat sein Lebtag lang
Nur Bärendienste geleistet.
Aus Angst vor dem Reden schlägt
Der Frenzel die Hand auf den Mund.
So geht alles seit Jahren
Den Richtigen Weg.
Und jeden Abend in den Monaten
Ohne den Buchstaben R
Stellt sich unverzüglich am Teich
Eine Stimmung ein.
LITTLE FRANZ FROM THE MILL
Over there, beyond the pond,
Lives Little Franz from the Mill.
With a searching eye, a frog sits
In front of the fly.
Sometimes Franz's only friend is
Sepp born by a Storm.
His whole life long he has
Only done bears' work.
Scared of speaking, Franz slaps
His hand over his mouth.
Thus, for years now,
Everything goes the right way.
And every evening in the months
Without the letter R
A festive mood appears, at once,
By the pond.
Die Stühle stehen leer
Und Farbe blättert von den Wänden
Schon wieder schmilzt der Schnee
Noch gleicht der Stuhl dem Stuhl
Das Zimmer einem Zimmer.
Nichts ist rot als der Fuchs
Nichts ist schwarz als die Raben
Dem Kampf zweier Schlangen
Gibt es nichts Gleiches.
Und die Reiher, heisst es
Zielen immer zuerst aufs
Auge des Gegners.
Ich fürchte mich davor,
Dass es sehr hell wird, dass
Türen und Fenster sich öffnen
Und hundert Gäste sich drängen
Ganz ungeladen.
The chairs are empty
And paint flakes off of the walls
Once again the snow is melting
The chair is still like a chair
The room like a room.
Nothing is red like the fox
Nothing is black like the raven
Nothing is like two snakes fighting.
And herons, so it is said, always aim first for
Their opponent's eye.
I fear that it will become very bright, that
Doors and windows will open,
And hundreds of guests will pour in,
All uninvited.
Ein wildfremdes Mädchen schrieb mir,
Sie sähe ständig Krokodile
Mit einem Brikett quer im Maul.
Sie schrieb: draussen auf dem
Himmelhoch heiligen Feld
Gäbe es Schatten vom Bäumen
Und Schatten von Menschen.
Nicht ohne Grund habe ein Rabe gehrächzt.
Die Erde erzeuge die Leichen
Und diese lägen fieberfrei.
Sie sitze kauend am Fenster
Und meine, sie kenne das Land.
A wildly strange girl wrote to me that
She keeps seeing crocodiles
Each with a brick sideways in its mouth.
She wrote: Outside, on the holy field
That is as high as heaven,
There are shadows of trees
And shadows of people.
Not without reason a raven crowed.
The earth produces corpses
And they lie there without fevers.
She sits ruminating by the window,
And thinks, she knows this land.
Man kann nicht verlangen,
Dass keiner nichts sieht:
Ist den nicht ein entlaufenes Schaf
Ein schlechtes Tauschobjekt?
Und da auf den Feldern
Liegen nur Steine wie Stein.
Auch die Bettler haben kein Geld.
Wenn nämlich einer vor Hunger stirbt,
Ist das oft ein Zeichen von Armut.
You can't wish
That no one doesn't see nothing;
Isn't a runaway sheep
A poor thing to barter?
And on the fields there lie only stones like stone.
The beggars also have no money.
Whenever one of them dies of hunger,
It is, in fact, often a sign of poverty.
An einer erschossenen Sau
Sogen sechs Ferkel nach Milch.
Auf gemeinsamen Beschluss hin
Stellten die Kinder jegliches Spiel ein.
Blindekuh und Sackhüpfen gab es
Von da an nur noch in Büchern.
Jemand stieg auf einen Turm
Und blickte lange nach Süden.
Das alles ist lange schon her,
Seitdem hat sich nichts mehr geändert.
Im Haus des Gehenkten
Spricht man nur noch vom Strick.
A sow that has been shot dead,
Six piglets suckle for milk.
With a group decision,
The children stop playing all games.
Blind man's bluff and sack-jumping
Were from then on only in books.
Someone climbed up a tower
And stared south for a long time.
All that was long ago,
Ever since then nothing has changed.
In the house of the hanged
They only speak of the rope.
Durch nassgeregnete Hecken
Regnet der Regen, regnet
Die Bergwand in Not.
Im Nebel steigen die Männer zum Berg
Und rufen sich laut.
Kalter Rauch weht um die Häuser herum.
Am Baum sind die Äpfel gefroren.
Wenn die Nacht sinkt,
Stirbt gas Gesicht.
Regen fällt neimals nach oben.
Through rain-wet bushes
Rains the rain, the face of the mountain
Rains in need.
In the mist the men climb the mountain
And yell loudly to each other.
Cold smoke blows around the houses.
The apples on the tree have frozen.
When the night sinks,
The face dies.
Rain never falls upward.
So zeigt sich der Nutzen der Fenster:
Ach, und hier, hier wächst ja ein
Bäumchen am Dach, und hier, im
Zwanzigsten Stock zeigt sich Gebüsch!
Vor einem Wald hat man alle Reden
Noch einmal gehalten.
In allen Gesichtern hat man geforscht
Jeden Stein umgedreht, dem Gelb
Selbst misstraut.
Lieber sich gar nicht mehr umsehen!
Da sind nur Gesichter im Kreis.
Hier, vor einem Kreidestrich
Geraten seltene Tiere ins Stocken.
Auch von den Hühnern in unserem Topf
Wissen wir wenig.
So, in this way, the use of windows reveals itself:
Ah, and here grows a
Little tree on the roof, and here on
The twentieth floor there is a bush!
In front of a forest they gave all the speeches
Once again.
In all the faces they searched,
Turned every stone, mistrusted
The colour yellow itself.
Better not to look around any longer!
There are only faces in a circle.
Here, in front of a chalk line
Rare animals come to a standstill.
And of the chickens in our pot
We also know little.
RAIN-IN-THE-FACE
Mit zweiundsiebzig, nach einem Joghurt
Legte mein Grossvater den Löffel beiseite
Und verlor den Verstand.
Im Garten sang er Lieder für Käfer
Und nannte sich Rudolf der Bär.
Er lernte sanfte Bärenlieder.
Früher trug er Anzug und Stock
Und trat oft für Recht und Ordnung ein.
Seine Kollegen hiessen nämlich
Nagel, Illemann, Muhr.
Zu der Zeit lebte schon mein
Liebster Indianer nicht mehr.
Er hiess Rain-in-the-Face
Und starb am Little Big Horn.
Sein Vater heiss Tretender Bär
Und seine Mutter Weisse-Kuh-Sieht.
RAIN-IN-THE-FACE
At age seventy-two, after eating a yogurt
My grandfather put aside his spoon
And lost his mind.
In the garden he sang songs for the beetles
And called himself Rudolf the Bear.
He learned sweet bear songs.
Before he had a suit and cane
And often stood up for law and order.
His colleagues were called
Nagel, Illemann, Muhr.
At that time my favourite Indian
Was no longer alive.
He was called Rain-in-the-Face
And died at Little Big Horn.
His father was named Kicking Bear
And his mother White Cow Sees.
Gestern Nacht wurde es
Ganz plötzlich still.
Under dem allerschwärzensten
Reglosen Himmel standen
Reglos die Bäume.
Nur unser Hund benagte leise
Die Fransen des Teppichs.
Am nächsten Morgen
Lag überall Reif.
Last night, all of a sudden,
it became utterly silent.
Under the blackest
Motionless sky, the
Trees stood dead still.
Only our dog nibbled quietly
On the frayed edges of the carpet.
The next morning
The land was covered with hoarfrost.
# [Thinking about Germany
by Werner Herzog ](9780571259786_tableofcontents.html)
## SACHRANG, 15 JUNE 1982
From the Mount of Olives chapel, just by the customs post, went the path through beautiful, tall, damp forest towards Sachrang, which I rapidly lost sight of as I climbed up via Mitterleiten. A construction machine was grinding heavy gravel next to the shell of a brick house they will never finish building. At Mitterleiten, I was overtaken by a farmer on his motorcycle. I knew who he was, but he didn't recognise me when I greeted him. Only hesitantly and with difficulty did I manage the first few strides. At the spot where the builders' rubbish was being dumped in the forest, where the lorries drive in over a bed of crushed roofing tiles between the trees, where the damp wind threatens to wrench off to the mountain plastic tarpaulins, held down by stones and looking like plundered corpses, where timid ducks fled before me from the ugly gravel ponds of the never fully completed building site, at this spot – after wandering around my past in my thoughts for a long time – I took leave of my beloved Sachrang, the scene of my childhood, and set off in great haste in the cool rain and through the dripping grass and yarrow up the mountainside. The fields smelt of mown grass, and I cast a glance across the valley at the Geigelstein, via which I would return after my long journey on foot. At this moment, I was filled with a sense of courage and certainty, stretching from border to border and from horizon to horizon. As I climbed up to the Spitzstein mountain hut, a loneliness increasingly settled on the countryside below me, very gently, much as a big strong animal might settle on the ground. For almost a whole hour, the innkeeper of the hut stared fixedly at me through a big telescope as I climbed the slopes towards him.
*
Steep descent to the Bavarian Alps. Several ugly alpine houses in an insignificant basin. This is the start of the woodland track to Wildbad Kreuth. At a stroke, after it had started to rain for a while on the way down, darkness descended as if heralding something biblical. For safety's sake I took refuge on a bench under the projecting roof of a hut, and didn't have long to wait before a violent storm arose, raging along the narrow valley and sweeping white and grey patches of mist in amongst the groaning trees. When it got worse and worse and I thought the rainstorm was at its most violent, something else occurred that made what had happened so far seem like a paltry beginning. Everywhere foaming white cataracts came rushing down from the steep wall opposite, then everything was shrouded in raging white clouds. These clouds broke up, revealing the treetops, and then fled away along the slopes in panic-stricken files. Like a curtain, the whole scene was then torn open, making visible raging cataracts of white foam and rivulets that hadn't existed before. The rain struck me just as a divine punishment strikes evil-doers. Waiting a long time until the worst was over, I gazed into this strange frenzy, knowing that no one else was witness to it apart from me. Given the curiously depressed state of mind I found myself in, I couldn't bear the thought of leaving the border and going down into some inhabited place in the valley, so I elected to head west and then steeply uphill in a somewhat southerly direction into the massif, though the rain had not ceased but merely stopped coming down at full force. The steep ascent took me at first alongside a raging waterfall. The stony path itself had been transformed into a swollen stream that got worse and worse further up. I was soon totally surrounded by cloud. When I arrived up on the Wild Man's col, the whole horizon suddenly opened up before me, permeated with a yellowish-orange glow in the rain. Deep into the heart of the massif, I could see mountaintops, valleys and forests shining for one glorious fleeting moment. It was like a sign of great promise for a whole thirsting nation. Meanwhile, behind me a billowing white curtain of mist was shooting upwards from the abyss, immediately afterwards closing off the scene behind me with a theatrical gesture. Then, by the side of an alpine hut marked by the ravages of time, I came upon two shiny, brand-new signs, one for the free state of Bavaria, the other for the Federal Republic of Germany. The Austrian sign was badly dented and merely said: "Attention, National Border."
I spent the evening up in the hut in conversation with the nineteen-fifties German champion in canoeing and wild-water racing, who told me about his life as a sportsman in the post-war period. He had often been so hungry, he said, that he had cried. On arrival in Wildbad Kreuth next morning I was tempted to go as far as the house of F. J. Strauss and invite myself in for a sandwich to keep me going. But then I simply didn't have the nerve to sit there chewing food in his company, with Germany's core ripped apart by barbaric absurdities. A farmer in rubber boots had tied a limping bull to the back of his tractor and was pulling it behind him along the main road. The bull was advancing reluctantly, snorting as it went, and when I looked upwards I saw the mountain peaks quite clearly bow to him.
*
The solemn sound of church bells from the valley. The fighting, strangling and murdering action of the forests also proceeds with silent solemnity. A pensioner, sitting on a bench, was asleep in the afternoon sun. "Good, good," he said in his sleep, and a little later, "Oh yes, good." On a sign next to the bench, indicating the border, written in felt pen and already almost worn away by the elements, stood the words: "Germany is bigger than the Federal Republic." In the forest the birds were starting to curse the forest. In the hut at the top of the Krinner Kofl I talked for a long time to a retired teacher from the Münster area. In response to my enquiries, he told me how the war had ended for him. In Holland, when the Canadians were advancing with their tanks and were only a few hundred feet away, he had – acting under orders – been taking prisoners at a farm beyond the advancing line of enemy tanks. By turning his weapon against his own superior officer, he'd prevented him from having the prisoners shot in the Dutch farmhouse. Then, together with the Dutch captives and the superior officer he'd now also taken prisoner, he had so to speak followed the enemy current, below the level of the raised road along which the Canadian tanks were advancing, under the cover of just a few bushes. But in attempting to overtake the enemy and get back to his own lines, he himself had been captured, together with his prisoners.
The innkeeper of the hut had mounted the silhouette of a chamois made of plywood up on the rock face, and it stood out against the sheer walls of the Karwendel range that were glowing in the rays of the setting sun. Lots of tourists, he told me, took it to be real. In an enclosure next to the hut there is a tame stag. A tourist, sitting only a hundred feet away, enjoying his afternoon coffee and cakes in the cafe for day trippers, picked it up in the viewfinder of his telescope and shouted to his wife, "Mum, Mum, look, there is a deer!" Taking the telescope from him, his wife, after studying the beast for some time, ticked him off, saying, "Egon, that's not a deer, it's a buck." The mentally retarded son of the forester living in the house near by came up and, emitting peculiar sounds from deep within his strange being, started to tug at me and then at a clever-looking hunting dog. The two of us patiently let him have his way. Later the boy followed me across to the hut of the alpine club, where I was just collecting my belongings together, and helped himself to my last piece of chocolate. I let him have it because he was making a move as if to take my binoculars and notebook too. As I had sacrificed such a small portion of my worldly goods without putting up any resistance, he seemed clearly content to put an end to his thieving spree there, merely lying down on the other articles which he would certainly have liked to have.
Just before Mittenwald, I saw a woman sitting on a bench by the educational nature trail and weeping. At a loss as to how to get myself past her, I greeted her cautiously. Looking at me through her tears, she returned my greeting without interrupting her weeping. Then I came to the barbed-wire fence of the Alpine Regiment's barracks, which seemed to go on for ever. There were signs warning of shooting practice. I left Mittenwald almost at a run. I never saw such commercial exploitation of the countryside anywhere. Paths spread with sand as in the grand parks of spa towns, educational nature trails and, walking on them, people who were themselves just as stunted. The Watzmann stood there in the wan light of evening, its rocks appearing to get colder and colder with their whitishgrey hues. It's a dogged mountain, the Watzmann. The woods became quite still, without a breath of wind. Two wild ducks were floating on a marshy pond, silently, like primeval dreams. Above them, doggedly, towered the Watzmann, while beyond the trees, the mountain slopes and the rocky crevices reigned an immense, quite transparent stillness. Walking around a large game fence, I came upon a big, almost factory-like site for the feeding of game animals, with great rakes for hay, salt licks, observation stands and one of those unimaginative huts too. In the field towards the forest two young deer were grazing together with a hind. When I appeared, they observed me closely for a while, trying to sniff out who this was that had come. "Herzog's my name," I said quietly and confidentially, and they set off at a majestically springy trot, disappearing into the wood.
Yesterday I lost an election I had put myself forward for as a candidate with no hope of winning. The whole thing took place in Hamburg, the victor being Leisler-Kiep, which struck me as strange. The various losing candidates, all members of parties except for me, were invited out onto a balcony high above the Elbe harbour. The balcony, though totally frozen over, had been deemed an appropriate enough backdrop for the television broadcast because of the spectacular view it afforded of the arctic ice fields stretching from here to the icy peaks of Spitzbergen. When it came to the congratulations, I, as the only non-party candidate, was last in line, waiting for the moment when the cameras would be switched off, and I had to hurry because the election winner was already turning to go. In the process I lost my footing, slid under the handrail of the frozen balcony and plunged into the yawning depths of the glacial tongues that fell away abruptly before me into the river Elbe. Filled with a sudden horror, I realised this was the end of me, but I had the presence of mind while still in the air to spread out my arms like a parachute jumper drifting diagonally into formation with his comrades below him, and thus to steer my fall in such a way that I plunged into the icy water of the river hundreds of feet downstream, just beyond the sharp edge of the broken-off ice floes. And since on this day the river was one of mercury, not water, this helped to cushion my breakneck fall. For a long time, presumably unconscious, I lay on the shore of the iced-up Elbe, and my memories of the subsequent period are only blurred. I can recall seeing a big ocean liner turn away after giving up the search for me. I can see the colour of the water it left in its churned-up, icy wake, a broad ribbon disappearing into the depths of the Spitzbergen archipelago. Lightning flashes in the distance brought some comfort. A band of rain lay firmly and resolutely over Germany. In an abandoned lift shaft there dwelt only despair beyond measure. On the ground, between rain-soaked nettles and in the fragments of broken tiles, a new faith in Germany begins to grow. I took out the tiny mouth organ I had been given, only the size of a thumbnail. It only has four notes, not enough to play the national anthem.
*
In Balderschwang people had set up their garden swing chair precisely so as to get the best view of the meadow. So there they sat, as on a summer holiday, taking a look at the cows. I climbed to the right, higher and higher into the mountains. It was already late, and light rain set in. Two cows followed me for a long time, as if expecting to hear the message to end all messages from me. "You're no cows," I said to them, "you're princesses," but even that didn't stop them. Only when I crossed a rain-soaked, blotchy snow field did they stay behind. On top, by the cable-car station, I had a vast, far-reaching view over Germany. Stretching out as far as the hazy, orange-tinted horizon I could see valleys and hills, becoming gentler and dotted with farms and hamlets as the land grew flatter in the far distance. To the west, bathed in a silver that slowly turned to reddish gold, lay Lake Constance. Pale, stormladen clouds hovered over the whole scene, and far to the west, as in Old Master paintings, oblique reddish-orange rays of the setting sun were breaking through shafts of rain. Without casting a shadow, a subdued light settled evenly on silvery dark woods and silvery bright fields. In this shadow-free sheen, Germany looked as if it were submerged under water. It was a submissive country. I sat down. In chaotic flight, swallows were darting just above the hilltop away into the evening light. As if numbed, Germany lay there indecisively. In concert halls, you get this second of indecisiveness and silence when, listening to some little-known orchestral work, nobody is quite sure whether the piece has ended or not. In a whole hall full of people, everyone is waiting for everyone else, until the applause starts, bringing release to the audience. It is just such a second of dread, of fearful, frozen expectation, only extended over a long period lasting for decades, that Germany is inescapably caught up in. There it lay, this un-land, just as things unlucky and unloved exist; this un-territory, then, that clings tight with its broken limbs to the name Germany. It lay before me, visible from frontier to frontier.
A big bough came crashing down to the ground from a tall tree. My country lay there in the middle of Europe, of all countries the only one that had remained in the very core of its being barbaric. A country filled with longing, lost amidst aims that were not identifiable, unredeemed, obliged to admit that it had become homeless within its own territory. Having eaten their fill, people were going to bed. On Lake Constance, a swan was swimming from this shore to that.
Germany has given away all its secrets in two world wars.
*
Everywhere there is the smell of hay. The countryside is heavy with cherries. In Stein am Rhein elderly women, a whole busload of them, were passing through the city gate from a car park outside it and advancing in the direction of the town hall. "About turn, about turn," shouted a tour guide, wearing a small, brightly coloured checked hat, and since the file of women had already spread out considerably, the command was passed only hesitantly down the line, before eventually even those at the very front turned round in order to take photos of the half-timbered gateway from the inside. Beyond the town, I took a look at the Rhine's strong current, the swans, the wooden rowing boats. What I was looking at was another century. I dipped my arms deep into the water, bent over it and drank. You can drink the Rhine. I ate some bread with it. On the paths there are either brusque commands addressed to walkers, such as, "Keep out! Mortal danger!" "No entry, automatic firing devices!" or the most stupid of verses involving spoonerisms. There appears to be no kind of language in between. By the Freiwald chapel there is the start of a wildlife reserve. The sign saying so would, in fact, be enough, but underneath it you then have the following on a plaque: "Bear in mind, walker, that you're passing through nature, where there lives many a poor creature. We therefore entreat you to remain on the marked paths, for in order to live the dear animals need their peace. Do your bit to help protect both wildlife and woods. Please stick to the paths."
Later on I saw in front of me the brush of a fox disappearing round a bend in the path, but the way the bushy tail vanished did not suggest flight. Quickening my steps and moving really quietly, after the bend I suddenly found myself standing directly behind the fox. He whirled halfway round, looking to my mind as big as an Alsatian dog. Given the extreme astonishment with which he contemplated me, he was only half able to cower down, and he remained standing like this for a moment without further reaction. He seemed to be listening to find out whether his heart, having stopped, was starting to beat again. Then, with an agile turn, he was off, running steeply down through the wood. From down below I could still hear the snapping twigs of fear some time afterwards. Then the peace of nature was restored in Germany. Basically, however, it was only an ostensible peace, nothing more than naked indifference.
The first person I encountered in the valley was a little girl on a plastic tricycle that wouldn't steer properly any more. She gave new names to all things. The dreams she had at night she called "films in her pillow."
Up in the mountain ranges with their massive farms and in the valleys below – I had the increasingly intense impression – there is nobody left alive. No dogs, no cattle, no hens, no human beings; all is totally still. Now a few birds are singing, quite tentatively, in the woods. So far, fortunately, I have been under tree cover during the day. The sun would be the death of me. I wish I could join a circle of monks, be their godless guest. A friendly notice in the woods, painted on a sign, said that all things born in the forest had met face to face with the great Lord God, and that you yourself were blessed by God if you remained dutifully silent.
I hope, if only on account of this sign, that the first atom bomb falls on the Black Forest!
*
The railway station in Offenburg was full of French recruits with their short back and sides. Obviously they are allowed home over the weekend, and their mood was correspondingly high-spirited. When a girl walked by in tight white trousers, two of them turned on their heels to salute her. All day long the air was full of swallows going about their business. What can anyone do to protect me against the Black Forest? I succeeded in doing something extraordinary, something I discovered myself more by chance than anything else. I managed to describe a gathering of roughly a hundred women in such tiny writing that you needed a microscope to have any chance of deciphering the scribbles that crossed the paper like strings of beads. It then transpired that with this miniature handwriting I had not only described the gathering in the form of a text, but that the fine lines and loops also actually yielded a sketch of the women, sitting there in distinct rows on the benches and looking out attentively from the sheet of paper. Even shadows round the eyes and fleeting glimpses of facial features were identifiable because of the varying strength of pressure from my drawing pen, yet on the other hand it was clearly a piece of handwriting. Taking a handy microscope with me, I went to the cafe where Einstein was sitting with colleagues in the open air eating cake. At that time he was younger than he normally looks in the photos one knows of him, and his name had not yet become a household word. I showed him my writing, and he was astonished. We talked about information storage. At one point he choked on a piece of cake, and I slapped his back hard between the shoulder blades until his face returned to its normal colour.
*
Then I got held up in Strasbourg. Unable to leave, I was living in a ground-floor room that opened onto a narrow, park-like garden. The reason why I had to stay was, I think, that I was ill. During the endless afternoons, I liked most of all to take a cushion and lie across the threshold of the door on the garden side, gazing up into the big, wide-spreading tree that stuck doggedly to its position there in the sultry heat of the day. An oppressive breeze started to blow, causing all the leaves to tremble, flicker and shimmer like those of a boundless aspen. I could see the movement of every single one of the millions upon millions of leaves as something separate and unique, and yet at the same time I saw the collective movement of them all, as when a wind ruffles the smooth surface of a gigantic lake. All at once the lake now becomes old. Earlier periods of its history come and go. Dwellings built on piles emerge and vanish; quiet, peaceful prehistoric reptiles laze in the swamps by the shore; and finally the lake grows flat, the ruffling of the trees in the forest merging with a bashful ruffling of its reeds. Right at the end, pterodactyls circle over the reeds, their jerky flight paths not at all like those of birds but resembling those of powerful bats. There are as many of them as one sometimes sees gulls over the sea. However, when I return to the flickering of the leaves and can see it all simultaneously, my whole life, lying there so ill on the threshold, starts to quiver finely. An extraordinarily imperious North African man strides past, then a stocky, ugly woman with a Great Dane the size of calf. I can feel the oak doorstep under me, bleached by the sun and full of grooves made by the rain. A coating of dry algae was growing in the grooves of the wood's grain like a film of plaque on bad teeth. Two men are stepping solemnly and quietly into the open from a farm. Everything has an air of morning about it, still sleepy, as on Sundays. During the night the men have been helping out with the birth of a foal, and one of them still has a blade of straw in his hair.
*
In Strasbourg I was sitting on a bench, and after a while an Algerian came and sat down politely beside me. Soon afterwards another Algerian came up, carrying a white plastic bag. He shook the hand of his friend next to me, then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, shook mine too, which I found deeply moving. I had switched over to the French side of the border. Germany lay beyond the Rhine like an invention of the imagination. The fact that I'm walking is also more of an invention than anything else, only it's a bad one because something horrific is dogging my steps. Lots of people were crossing the bridge to Germany, slowly, their movements stretched out as in slow motion, while beneath them the Rhine was flowing at an even slower, more crippling pace. The grasses under its surface were swaying immensely slowly in the turgid flow of the currents. Everything, it seemed, was about to come to a definitive standstill. In Strasbourg Minster, bikers were walking quietly through the silence of the church, only their tight-fitting leather suits making slight creaking noises. They were carrying their helmets under their arms like mediaeval knights. At night, out in the open fields where I was sleeping, the cows groaned in their dreams right by me. In the morning, very early, I woke up with a fright I had never known before. I was totally numb. Germany had gone, everything had gone. It was as if I had suddenly lost something entrusted to my special care the evening before. Or perhaps it was like being expected to take over guard duty for a whole army one evening, only to discover that one has in a mysterious way suddenly gone blind, and the troops are thus without protection. Everything had vanished, leaving me totally empty, without pain, without joy, without longing, without love, without warmth and friendship, without anger and hatred. Nothing, nothing remained. I was like a suit of armour without a knight in it. Slowly I at least began to experience something like fright. I only awoke fully when the sun, filled with hate, was shining in my face. I saw black swans. Heavy boughs were falling in the deadly still forest. For every five fish there are eighty anglers. Even on Sundays they make steel. The River Saar is unfortunately burnt out. Near a slag heap, four workers were running after an injured pheasant. I am collecting wheat fields for my dreams. At night the valleys and villages became empty. I slept out on a hillside under the open sky, my shoulder aching strongly, which caused me to just lie there motionless in the silence. Hours later in the night, caught in distress between the lights of the valley and the stars above, I got up, and was sick. Towards morning I managed to get some sleep, but it was already getting light and soon the sun rose. Above me on a branch I heard a bird first shake itself and tidy up its plumage before eventually starting to sing.
When it is all up with Germany, when human beings cease to exist, and ants and cockroaches have taken over, and subsequently algae in the oceans that have started boiling; when the earth is then extinguished and the universe goes dark, collapsing in on itself to nothing, it is possible that something abstract will remain behind, perhaps something akin to a state of happiness. But I have a deep fear inside me that what will fill the darkness and the space that no longer exists will be a form of stupidity. It does not need a particular place, it is everywhere. Happiness, at least, requires open space.
*
In Waldkirch I ended up on a road very busy with traffic that I avoided by walking along parallel to it in the forest. However, the path changed quite abruptly into a woodland nature trail with signs, serving at the same time as a fitness trail equipped with sets of rings, horizontal and high bars. Instructions for the use of these were posted on boards. On one of the high bars I encountered a muscular, very young man in white karate trousers. Swinging his legs wildly, he was kicking out in all directions into the air, then immediately afterwards doing pull-ups. I left this terrible path as quickly as I could, and since Waldkirch itself gave the impression of being one great town-size fitness trail, I steadfastly refused to pay it attention, practically not seeing the place at all. I lay down in a field of beet where, since big green leaves sprouted from my ears, I was well camouflaged. Then I grew electricity pylons in place of my arms and, using these steel tongs as hands, I fetched down lowflying aeroplanes from the sky, often two at a time. Then a black dog ran along the isolated tarmac road at full gallop. It had leapt straight from a Hieronymus Bosch picture, directly from hell, in fact. A man wanted to get rid of his Alsatian because it was always moulting too much on the carpet. Taking the dog with him on a business trip, he released it at the service station on a motorway. Weeks later the animal turned up at home again, emaciated but whimpering with joy. The beast's instinct and loyalty had led it home over a distance of a several hundred miles. Thereupon, its owner put an end to it by mixing rat poison into the starving dog's first meal.
Low-lying clouds, a gentle wind, the fields have wings and raise themselves towards the sky. The people here seem like albinos turned in on themselves, aseptic, free of pain, without sins, without vices, without joy. The leaves were trembling in the wind, and I knew they were whispering to one another, so I listened closely. Although I understood only a little, about this much I was clear: in the Hürtgenwald, in the Hürtgenwald, all hell had broken loose. The countryside, however, lies flat, bored. The maize fields are bored as they slowly ripen, and the cows are lying around bored too. Above me, low-flying jet fighters are pursuing each other. What with all the flies, it's impossible to think, even of something evil or stupid. For days now, a line of poetry I made up has been beating with gnawing intensity in my brain, ringing with every step I take, impossible to blot out. What I had written was: "The Watzmann's racing, the Watzmann's racing, hey-de-ho, my wooden leg is blazing!" And now I'll never get it out of my mind again. It's the same to this very day, by the way. Whenever I'm walking, the verse comes into my head and simply won't go away. It's a terrible thing. "The Watzmann's racing, the Watzmann's racing, hey-de-ho, my wooden leg is blazing!" May God protect you from this poem! Meanwhile, the hawks are entering their names in eternity.
*
A loving couple, country dwellers, were looking at each other for ages without exchanging a word. They did so for as long as the money they had put in the fruit machine lasted. At one point, a few coins came rattling out into the dish, but they didn't turn to look at them. Crouching, as if ready to leap, mean-looking park benches made of faded plastic were waiting for me to arrive. I sat down on one of them, under the dripping branches of a weeping willow. I saw mechanical heathers, arranged military-fashion in pots. Then I saw mechanical hens. When one of them started to run after seeds, they all took to running.
Today is a grey, cold, wet and motionless day. By a miserable field I had seen an abandoned fire engine surrounded by nettles and clumps of grass, and in retrospect I couldn't rid myself of the idea that a fireman must have committed suicide in the derelict vehicle. I saw lots of toads lying as if crucified on the edge of the road, their bright, spotted bellies turned upwards. They hadn't made it right across, yet lying there stretched out, they looked as if nothing at all was the matter with them, except that their entrails had come out through their mouths.
For a long time during my misty walk through the woods, I, the misty, solitary wanderer, was called after by a buzzard who was probably even more solitary. Thus I find myself walking over the Eifel range, taking short, very hurried strides. Totally unprepared for it, I suddenly came upon an American airforce base. Surrounded by a fence, it looked very strange. There were lorries mounted on concrete plinths, carrying radar screens that turned ceaselessly in circles. There were warning signs, strong electricity generators, a baseball pitch and broken-down American cars behind the fence, while in the damp mist the radar screens circled ceaselessly on the camouflaged lorries. All the way along the fence, I peered closely into the base and into the open windows of the barracks, but I didn't spot a human soul. I took it that the Americans stationed here must long since have fled. When rain began to fall heavily, I turned off into a forest clearing, suspecting that there might be a raised hide there. And indeed I soon found one, well roofed over. At the foot of a ladder was a metal sign, indicating that according to such-and-such a paragraph it was forbidden to enter these forestry premises. Diagonally opposite, on the other side of the clearing, is another such hide, no doubt bearing the same sign. I see more hides than human beings. Human beings are increasingly taking refuge in the mine works, in crevasses and in the earth's interior because it's warmer there, as the earth's core is still glowing a little, whereas the universe is freezing. The raised hides are staring at one another out of their empty rifle slits. The foresters smoking their pipes up there in them are the only people left throning over the land, like high priests. As I walked up the track to Rescheid, the rain stopped. At the edge of the track, there are dark wild roses. Emerging from the forest, I found the hills full of lapwings. They flew away listlessly as I came a bit nearer. To the west the view disappears deep into the haze of Belgium. Wide ranges of hills, lined with dark hedges; little wooded hillocks; the hamlets darkly scattered. To the right, the land drops away for a long distance; you can see the steam rising from the valleys, no more. There lies Germany. What on earth am I doing in this area, forsaken by both God and man? Astonished at myself, I paused by a stop for the "motor vehicle post bus." When there is serious flooding, of course, the motor vehicle post gets delivered by motor vehicle barque instead. O God, who art not, take me to the last of all countries, and you human beings – since that would bring more comfort – please put me in the last of all villages!
*
The first thing the farmer did that raised people's suspicions was to sell his hens one day and to keep peacocks from then on. After going to church on Sundays, he would crouch down on the floor in a corner of the pub with his beer, no longer recognising anyone. He ordered a telephone connection for the little hut on his allotment because he wanted to phone God from there, but he was worried about the right dialling code.
Walking down the Rhine, I found the greyish-brown river under a gloomy sky full of rain clouds. The lines of jet fighters were compressing the already flat scenery more profoundly and depressingly, making it appear thin. The ferry that according to the map should be here no longer exists. Everything else is still in place: the landing stages on both sides, the ferry's inn, a West German flag, chairs made of red and white plastic. At the landing stage, a man was standing holding a dog on a lead that unreeled mechanically. Next to him was a girl with Down's syndrome, keeping one eye almost shut. She had very bad teeth. "Ship, ship," she said to me, stressing the words strangely and looking at me as she did so. I nodded to her because there were lots of ships. One, a pleasure boat, was passing by quite close, going up the Rhine. It pulled by us like a strangely stressed word. The people on board in their deckchairs, with sunglasses on, had an unreal air about them, like sentences producing no meaning. Orderly thinking, which is not without its ugly side, is only to be found hiding in the geometrical fields. In the evening, Bocholt died away very quickly. There was nothing, I mean absolutely nothing left in the town. On discovering a few helpless schoolboys who were helplessly groping helpless schoolgirls – and taking care in the process that their mopeds shouldn't fall over – my heart beat, and I was what you might call relieved to have encountered living creatures. Increasingly, instead of being a matter of walking in a circle round a country, walking round Germany is turning into a circling round into myself. Often I don't notice at all now that I'm walking, and then I'm startled because I seem to have been walking around myself as one walks around a hill.
Most of the time I was walking along avenues of tall deciduous trees with very smooth black tarmac between them. Birds sing; peaceful, noon-day aircraft above the extensive countryside; ivy on tall beech trees. I stumbled upon a sheep, a triangular wooden yoke fastened round its neck. Things dreamt up in scarlet settle upon me. I don't recall having passed through Wrede, though I know I did. I found a flat cola can that must have lain there flattened for two winters because it was a faded whitish yellow rather than red. And then the people vanished. You couldn't see how it happened. All at once they simply were not there. There was nobody in the supermarket; the shelves were full, the fruit fresh and the milk had a new date stamped on it, but no one was buying, and there were no girls at the checkouts. The houses were empty, their doors open.
Had something occurred that had been announced on the radio? Had a war broken out and people taken flight? Was I, walking and without a television set, the only one not in the know? Then it struck me that heavy curtains had been drawn everywhere and indoors, in the houses, all the furniture – tables, chairs, sofas – had been covered up with sheets to protect them against dust, the light and the elements. Then I realised something else. What was lying there motionless under the sheets, without ever a hope of change or liberation, was not the furniture at all, but the people themselves.
The last thing to be done was that a group of ladies resolved at a ripe old age to learn collectively the butcher's trade. In order to demonstrate that their intentions were serious, they set fire to a moped outside the nearest inn. Schoolchildren walked by, talking in low voices as if something had happened, about which I was the only person to know nothing. A girl was cautiously carrying a plastic cup filled with a Madeira cake. In the dry bark of a pine tree a fishing hook was sticking, together with a neatly coiled-up line, but there is no water to fish in for miles around here. With expert skill, one of the schoolchildren squashed a large beetle underfoot. Somebody was trying out a power saw. Someone else was looking for a station on the radio. One was smoking, one sleeping, one sharpening a scythe. Pine needles are blowing down out of the trees. Even when reflecting upon it, I wasn't at all clear why a rope should have been stretched in a dramatically tight diagonal between two trees. When a bird abruptly stopped singing, a profound silence struck me like a heavy blow. There it lay totally silent, the country. Germany was holding its breath, for a terribly long while. A black bird fluttered away between the trees, sounding like a badly reproduced sound effect in the cinema, so unreal was it, but this was because the silence was so bottomless. With the most horrific of silences, the whole universe had alighted gently and lethally on Germany. From the border on which I was standing, I looked to my right across the hills, that's to say on Germany, which seemed to be suffering the silence as in a fit of cramps and painful convulsions. To my left, I listened across the border, longing deeply to be able to hear at least the snorting of invaders or the frenzy of heathen hordes. I could not manage to walk any further; I was rooted to the spot on the line of the border. Yes, there were things there worth recording: the horror of the silence, the heat of the summer in the extensive pine woods, the smell of resin, the dried-out needles. At night, the stars are too many in number. And one could also mention the word "bliss," the word "yolk," no-man's-land, kicking the bucket, ninety-one. Today, the refugees are no more than part of a bill to be paid. A schoolchild who had painted a watch on their wrist with a biro wrenched me from my stupor. And with that, my Germany started to move again too.
*
I then almost reached the North Sea, but fell ill and made my way back from there. This is now the last journal entry. At night the moon ought to have risen, but it did not appear again. The nocturnal earth grew large, gigantic when measured against its usual dimensions. In fear, by the light of my cigarette lighter, I wrote my name on the inside of my wristwatch's strap. In the dawn light, when the mist slowly lifted, Germany lay there before me as in a haze like an unwritten novel. Right by a fence there lay a torn-open bag of cement. It had been left there heedlessly for a long time in the rain and had now turned into a grey lump of stone with cracks in it. A pig was standing there, sniffing in a baffled manner for a long time at the chunk of cement, and not moving. I raised my eyes. I knew, I had to admit to myself that I couldn't go on, that I had fallen ill and had to go home. But where was that? To move back, I had to get away from the border, go diagonally through the interior of the country. Looking to the south, I saw Germany lying there, just as a tall woman may lie, beautifully and peacefully, her right leg stretched out, her left slightly bent at the knee, her head and body in a pool of bright-red blood, her face looking up at the sky, eyes wide open. Both her hands were stretched out, palms turned upwards, as if she wanted the whole universe to fall on her like a gentle rain. For the rest of the day, Germany lay there like that, as though the blood had been drained from it. I didn't go home, I stood guard. So it – Germany, the country – lay there in orderly fashion, its facial features composed, totally at peace, all its inner storms having blown themselves out. Everything nasty and hateful, all the detritus and terrible fear that the universe is filled with, are now at an end as far as Germany is concerned. It lies there before me, its fields ripped open, gazing at the universe above it and only tentatively hoping for its rebirth. Everything has dissolved, producing the most pointless state of affairs imaginable: a void frozen in symmetries. Into the outstretched, upturned hands, into the meadows and fields, into exhausted nature and into the opened eyes there now fell a light rain. Then I saw the blades of grass straighten up as the rain dripped from them. Against my better knowledge, something forced its way inside me. Very carefully, I ran my fingers over it. It felt like a ray of hope.
Translated by David Horrocks
Originally published in _Frankfurter Rundschau_
22 December 1984
# [The Minnesota Declaration
Truth and fact in documentary cinema ](9780571259786_tableofcontents.html)
### LESSONS OF DARKNESS
by Werner Herzog
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoid of vérité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinéma Vérité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the nightwatchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail." Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinéma Vérité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylisation.
6. Filmmakers of Cinéma Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can't legislate stupidity."
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species – including man – crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, Minnesota
30 April 1999
# [Shooting on the Lam
by Herbert Golder ](9780571259786_tableofcontents.html)
## I. THE LAST NOMADS
My first experience of working with Werner Herzog was on his short film _Les Gauloises,_ about the champion French rugby squad. We drove from Bayreuth to Frankfurt, where Werner wanted to record the cry of hammer throwers at the German National Athletic Championships for the soundtrack of the film. He wasn't satisfied with the sounds of rugby players that he had originally captured on the playing field. Despite their fierce combat, the roars of the combatants did not express the real inner force of their struggle, their true inner life. He wanted something deeper than the grunting, groaning and panting he had recorded, something more like the bellow of a bull, the kind of deep exhalations that mark strenuous athletic competition as a true test of life. He waxed enthusiastically about these rugby players, who were men, he said, like the heroes in Homer. They are much too proud to play for money. They play as a matter of pride. They perform fierce rituals through which they prepare themselves for their matches, exercising and taking meals and drinking large quantities of beer together, like warriors preparing for a battle.
For _Les Gauloises,_ Werner wanted a sound worthy of the men he knew. He was looking for a sound he had once heard that had made a deep and indelible impression on him: the cry of the hammer thrower, the roar emitted by these leonine creatures at the moment they burst out of their wind-up spin and the iron hammer leaves their hands with thousands of pounds of pressure behind it. Later, as the television producers were preparing our passes so we could be on the field close to the competitors, Werner told them that they miss something essential in their coverage of live sports when they omit the vital in- and exhalations of human breathing, which, he said, express the inner spirit and strength of a man. He pronounced their sports coverage sterile and inadequate, that they scanted something fundamental about such competitions: the inner sounds of powerful exertion, struggle and pain that signal athletics as a true test of life.
Before we left for Frankfurt, Werner and I paused in the small parking area to watch a ceremony being performed by an ancient shooting club, men in traditional Bavarian costumes armed with rifles and sporting colourful sashes and assorted badges signifying their various accomplishments. They were honouring a young man who had proven the best marksman. The whole procedure was highly ritualised. Werner – who at the time was directing a production of Wagner's _Lohengrin_ at Bayreuth – told me I was witnessing something absolutely authentic and indeed very ancient, as such confraternities of marksmen had protected Bavaria for centuries. These ceremonies, he told me, reinforced an ancient code of conduct and values essential to survival. By contrast, he found the whole bourgeois, touristic culture of Bayreuth – the pretentiousness of the aesthetes drawn to the world of opera and the cult-like worship at the shrine of Wagner – suffocating and oppressive. I sensed he felt relieved and liberated to get away. The ancient ceremony somehow augured a rite of passage to something more real.
As we drove off, he insisted we first stop in town and pick up a few essentials. I was, of course, keen to know what Werner Herzog considered essential. First, he needed a part for the exhaust of his van, as it had started making strange noises. After we took care of that, he insisted we make one more stop, at a bookstore. As we entered he asked me pointedly if I had read Büchner's _Lenz_ – this, he said emphatically, I must read – the short stories of Kleist, the poetry of Hölderlin, the _Nibelungenlied_ , the Icelandic Eddas, the _Götterlieder,_ but more importantly the _Heldenlieder_ , and above all, _The Saga of Grettir the Strong_. Before I could answer (some I knew, some I didn't), he pulled several volumes off the shelves (those compact little German Reclam editions), bought them for me, and we were on our way. As we drove off he told me he regretted he had so little time to read, but that when he did it was things like books about lion taming.
It was a grey day, and it started to rain as we drove through the Bavarian countryside, hilly greenswards dotted with villages, with more distant and formidable mountains always in view. Because _The Saga of Grettir the Strong_ did not appear to be in the little volume of Eddas he had purchased for me, Werner told me the story, one of his favourites. Set in the eleventh century, Grettir's story is that of an Icelandic strongman who lived on into a newly Christianised era, where a rugged individual like him increasingly had no place. He carried on the brave fight against ogres and ghouls and revenants and monsters, even as the rest of the world was on the verge of "enlightenment" and believed its salvation lay in the laws of civil society and faith in Christ. Grettir, of course, knew otherwise. He knew the beast didn't just go away, it merely assumed other forms. To this day I remember the way Werner told the story, with his particular emphases. More sinned against than sinning, Grettir's fate was to become an outcast and an outlaw, a man whose strength was so great that his good deeds often backfired on him. He would shake someone's hand and rip it from his socket. He scratched his father's back and tore off the skin. He would slap a man on the shoulder and kill him. A man whom no one could control, and who naturally fell afoul of those who endeavoured to do so, they made him an outlaw and hunted him down like some kind of beast. He was forced to live in remote mountains and caves, driven to ever lonelier and more desolate places. Sometimes he even took in bounty hunters, men whom he knew were there to kill him, just to ease his loneliness. Although stronger than any twenty men and afraid of nothing, human or supernatural, Grettir was nonetheless afraid to be alone in the dark, where he was haunted by the eyes of Glam, the most terrible monster he had slain. Living atop the isolated isle of Drang, a rocky crag in a deep fjord opening up into the Northern Sea, he died treacherously, murdered by his enemies. Werner told me that a line in _Aguirre_ – "Long arrows are coming back into fashion," spoken by one of the doomed Spaniards on Aguirre's fleet of rafts as he is struck in the chest, just before pitching into the water – is taken from _Grettir_. Pierced through the stomach by one of Grettir's enemies, his brother Atli utters the words "Broad spears are the fashion these days" as he dies.
His eye always on the horizon and attuned to the landscape, its contours as well as its inner story – which so often becomes an expression of the inner landscape of the characters in his films – Werner told me about the geological and then early history of the region we were passing through, revealing almost matter-of-factly a vast and impressively detailed knowledge. His best stories had to do with men being outwitted by the terrain, the unending undulation of mountains and valleys, as if lost in their own fever dreams. He regaled me with detailed accounts of battles in antiquity and the Middle Ages that never took place because the two armies, on the march and determined to fight, were simply unable to find one another. In the silence that followed the thoughts settled. The road had been mostly empty of traffic. Then at one point, as if out of nowhere, we found ourselves completely surrounded by a German motorcycle gang. Grizzled, broad-backed, rough-looking men, on big bikes in full biker regalia, rode up alongside us, and then finally passed us on either side. They really did look like ancient Vikings or a lost warrior tribe. Werner lit up. "Look at that," he said. "The last nomads."
## II. KNEES AND THIGHS
_My Best Fiend_ was made in the immediate aftermath of _Wings of Hope,_ as we were already in Peru, even though no budget for the film had been formalised. We were all free to leave if we wished – Werner would understand and pay anyone's way home – or to pick up the camera and our gear and head straight back into the jungle from which we'd only just emerged to make another film for which none of the details had yet been worked out and nothing was as yet planned. I remember our pre-production meeting at the hotel in Lima. Werner said there was no money yet and thus no contracts of any kind for anyone, and asked who was in. I think everyone assented. I wrote the following in my journal, which gives, I think, something of the flavour of what it is like heading off into the jungle to make an inspired and serendipitously impromptu film with Werner.
At lunch we discussed our options. Werner drew a map and rehearsed the alternatives. First we go to Cusco then Machu Picchu where the opening sequence of _Aguirre_ was shot. Then we can either backtrack to Lima and fly back to Pucallpa, then south to the city nearest Rio Camisea with an airport. Or, part of the team – Werner, someone, either Peter or Eric to operate camera, and possibly me to do sound – might float by raft from Machu Picchu to Rio Camisea where _Fitzcarraldo_ was shot. We would have to pass through the Pongo. It's dry season, but this could still be quite dangerous. Plus there would be nothing to eat between Machu Picchu and Rio Camisea. We might find a few scattered huts with Indians cooking bananas, but that's about it. Once through the Pongo there is no way back, unless the others have met us by boat coming from the south. We would take only a skeleton crew on the raft because there would be no way to feed the whole group. And we don't even know if we can find rafts or people to make them on the river below Machu Picchu...
And so it went, along these lines, though we ultimately decided to make our way across the Andes first by train, till the tracks ended, then by van, climbing up through winding passes on cliffedge dirt roads to nearly five thousand metres, level with a great glacier. There were three days of travel before we would even reach the river, to places with virtually no way in and no way out, to small towns of only seven huts, vast mountain meadows stretching across the horizon with grazing llamas and alpacas, and finally down into the Urubamba Valley, where the jungle suddenly thickens and takes over, as if swallowing the mountain, getting tangibly deeper with every minute. From this point travel was entirely by river, just as Werner had described, with massive rocks, cascading waterfalls and the jungle seeming to pour itself in steeply from every side. But all this was quite tame and leisurely compared to what Werner must have been up against when making _Aguirre_ and _Fitzcarraldo_ under the most challenging circumstances. In the bustling port of Pucallpa on the Ucayali, which is an unimaginable sight, with the boundless energy of the whole of Amazon life teeming ubiquitously around it – hundreds of shirtless, muscled, sun-baked men loading and unloading ships, carrying heavy loads, even massive wooden crates, up a steep embankment on their backs with a binding strap gripping their foreheads, women cooking chicken and fish and yucca and bananas standing behind small carts, fishmongers and butchers hawking their bloody wares, merchants at makeshift stalls selling everything from high rubber boots to medicinal barks from deep in the jungle to engine parts and electrical equipment, people lazing and in animated conversation and drinking, life everywhere, men, women, strong-featured with powerful expressive eyes – Werner looked out across the port to the Ucayali and then, pointing to the chaotic bustle of virile, sweating, swearing, pulling, hoisting men, turned to me and said, with a feeling of deep fondness for the place, "Imagine trying to organise this into _Fitzcarraldo_. This is pretty much how it was and how we lived for three years."
Because it was necessary that Werner appear physically in _My Best Fiend,_ we decided to film atop Huayna Picchu, as this was a mountain of destiny. The opening shots of _Aguirre_ were filmed here, the army of men descending the narrow defile we were about to ascend. The climb is an almost vertical four-hundred-metre ascent to an altitude of nearly four thousand metres, up steeply pitched and well-worn stone steps carved by the Incas hundreds of years ago. The four of us took turns carrying the heavy 16mm camera. Some steps were worn down almost completely in places, and the stones underfoot – sometimes slick from rain – made it difficult at times to keep from slipping. In places the path narrows and one has to hug a boulder as one inches along a slender ledge. The drop is, needless to say, sheer. When we reached the summit we filmed Werner looking off into the hovering clouds, made more dramatic that day by the strong sun they were hiding. On the way down, along the steep steps, we got a few shots of Werner running up the steps towards us from a lower elevation and then disappearing into a passageway. Half joking, I told Werner that his brisk ascent had looked too leisurely and wasn't very convincing. Suspecting I might be right, Werner decided on another take. This time he literally bounded up those treacherously steep steps like a mountain goat, taking an astonishing ten seconds off his previous time. I was absolutely certain I could not have matched this feat. It was not merely the speed, but the balance and footing. It brought back to me the very first time I climbed a flight of stairs with Werner in an office building in Munich. He bounded two at a time. The alacrity with which he attacked the stairs took me by surprise. I really had to strain to the utmost to keep up.
Werner wanted some shots taken of him standing on top of the giant boulders on the upper stretch of the Urubamba river. It had rained all morning, and the giant boulders – smooth as glass from a thousand years of raging water of unimaginable force exploding over and around them – were especially slippery. As it was the dry season, the river was low, and the boulders, completely submerged when the river is high, protruded some thirty or forty feet above the river below. A fall, needless to say, would be fatal. The cameraman Peter Zeitlinger was harnessed and tied to someone else who was also roped. Because our stills photographer had refused to venture out onto the slippery rocks, Werner directed me to climb a rock higher than all the others, where I could shoot stills without obstruction. I could barely keep my footing, so tried to stay low, hugging the slick rock, but Werner walked nimbly across these vitreous surfaces and then bounded from boulder to boulder, sometimes leaping across crevices several feet wide, with a straight drop into an abyss of raging river below. He moved with the sureness of a mountain goat. I watched in amazement as I looked at the others roped and harnessed. (I did, somehow, manage to take one of the best photos of Werner, in mid-leap over the abyss, that I have ever taken.) He wasn't showing off or taking some unwarranted risk; he was merely making his way through this landscape – this river and these rocks of destiny where he had filmed both _Aguirre_ and _Fitzcarraldo_ all those years before – with absolute self-assurance.
As gravity would have it, what goes up must come down. On what was one of our first trips together to the Telluride Film Festival, we attended a picnic at the top of one of the ski lifts. We had intended that afternoon to see a screening of a film, but had lost track of time and suddenly realised it was starting in only a few minutes. There was a huge line for the chairlift and we knew if we waited, we would miss the film. One of the event organisers offered us the next chair, as Werner is always a special guest – even patron saint – at Telluride, but Werner didn't want to jump the line. Instead, he turned to me and said, "Let's just run down." And, with that, he bolted down the mountain.
## III. DANCING SOUL
In the fall of 2001 I published a translation from the ancient Greek of Euripides' play _The Bacchae_. I conceived it as a text for performance – just as Euripides had intended it to come to life on a stage – and worked my version out through readings and rehearsals with actors and dancers. My goal was to be true to the spirit of the original and to capture something not only of Euripides' complex tone and heightened poetic language (alternating as always in Euripides with colloquial speech), but also something of the play's structured dramatic power and scenic forms, something you cannot render by merely translating words (or writing learned endnotes). Naturally I sent Werner a copy. Around that time he was scheduled to reprise his production of Wagner's _Tannhäuser_ for the Houston Opera Company and suggested I meet him there. I asked him if there was anything he needed me to bring, as I always did whenever we were to meet up. Once he needed me to meet him in Vienna – from where we were flying to Thailand for _Little Dieter Needs to Fly_ – with three pairs of handcuffs we would need for the film. (They sent up a red flag at security and I almost missed the plane. I had to surrender them to the captain upon boarding, and they were given back to me when I arrived in Vienna.) This time Werner said, "Bring only one thing: a Greek text of _The Bacchae_." He added that he had questions about some of my renderings.
By the time I arrived, Werner had already marked in my version the passages he had queried, and we spent much of the afternoon prior to opening night in his hotel room reading these passages against the Greek original, which he read aloud as fluently as if he were a professor of Greek, even though he probably hadn't studied the language since he was sixteen years old. There were any number of things he queried, but he was particularly focused on my translation of the lines from the opening chorus of the play: _θιασεύεται ψυχὰν/ ἐν ὄρεσσι βακχεύων/ ὁσίοις καθαρμοῖσιν_ (ll. 75–77). The expression is, admittedly, not easy to put into English. The chorus is singing of the glories of the god Dionysus. The lines literally mean something like, "the one who joins his soul with the Bacchic holy throng, inspired with Bacchic ecstasy in the mountains, in sacred purifying rites." As I was composing my version in sprung rhythms to be sung or chanted by a chorus moving to the words, the lines broken into tercets to indicate rhythmical phrases, I rendered it as "so wholly there/ on the mountain/ dancing his soul/ over and into/ the pack of Bacchus." "Wholly" is a homonym of "holy" and so does the double duty I wished it to, but Werner wasn't entirely convinced. He liked the "dancing soul" but thought it didn't go far enough in expressing the mysterious notion in the Greek.
The rapt Bacchae dance in the thrall of the god of ecstasy, Dionysus. They are not merely dancing _on_ the mountain; their souls have become one _with_ the mountain ("wholly/holy there"). Throughout the play, the landscapes through which the Bacchae move are described as alive, wild with god. At one point, the whole mountain is said to explode into an ecstasy when the Bacchic throng moves. Their dancing souls and the inspirited landscape fuse. The world they pass through merges with their dreams. When I think about it now, the passage Werner questioned is about as vivid an evocation of experiencing "ecstatic truth" – the mundane transformed into the miraculous – as any to be found in the whole of Greek literature. How uncanny that Werner – whose spirit is, like that of the Bacchae, consecrated to the ecstasy of truth and whose vision transforms landscapes into ecstatic dreams – should, of all the passages in the play, hone in on these lines and the difficulty, indeed near impossibility, of rendering them.
## IV. THE HUNT, OR WHAT IS INCIDENTAL
One thing that always strikes me about Werner's work is the nobility of human passion found there, a passion in no way invalidated by the impossibility of the quest or dream. The miracle at the heart of his films is mankind's relentless struggle to find meaning, despite the indifference and hostility of the universe. However barren and parched the wasteland, however ice-encased and sheer the mountain, however fathomless the abyss, however dense and overgrown the jungle, the human spirit digs in, sends up its flare and ultimately – like Stroszek and his fireworks in _Signs of Life,_ the existential flight of Walter Steiner, the scientists studying neutrinos in the upper atmosphere in _Encounters at the End of the World,_ the painters inside the Chauvet cave – writes its will across the sky in stars. The physical and metaphysical (the latter often arising in the fierce struggle to overcome the crushing gravity imposed by the former) are of a piece in Werner's work.
I always marvel at the way Werner manages to wring the sublime from the banal. He has a poet's vision, one that arises from a stark, almost scientifically disciplined view. He admires Virgil's _Georgics_ because of the poet's objective and rigorous attention to the minute particulars of life's details, requiring the keenest powers of observation like those of a scientist, but combined with a poet's sympathy. For Werner, like Virgil, a physical sense of place – a felt connection to the landscape over which one sweats – is essential to the full realisation of a human life. Virgil's didactic poem on the dignity and meaning of working the earth is rich in close observation and study of the wonder and hostility of nature: its beauty, mystery and abundance, but also its savagery and horror; its indifference to us, but also its uncanny, incomprehensible power; its seasons of life, death and renewal, but also man's tragic isolation; nature's implacability and general law of inhumanity, but also those rare moments of _anagnorisis_ , or recognition, when something like a familiar spirit – man fused with, mirrored by, implicated in nature's exuberant larger pattern of existence – can be glimpsed. In _Grizzly Man_ , Werner speaks in the voiceover narration of a moment of strange beauty, a deserted scene with reeds swaying in the wind, which we watch as he describes it. Treadwell had walked out of frame, having finished filming his staged scene, but had left his camera on, and this simple image of the wind blowing through the reeds – a found moment of unabashed nature just being nature, gusting, rustling, a wind suddenly out of nowhere mysteriously stirring, without regard to human intentions or framed by a cameraman's eyes – was accidentally recorded. Robert Graves described such moments in poetry as the very essence of it, epiphanies of "things," ordinary and yet mysterious, that make the hair on the back of the neck stand on end: "an apparently unpeopled or eventless scene... when owls hoot, the moon rides like a ship through scudding cloud, trees sway slowly together above a rushing waterfall, and a distant barking of dogs is heard, or when a peal of bells in frosty weather suddenly announces the birth of the New Year."
Werner is not beholden to modern sentimentality, or notions of propriety, or pleasing nostrums like political correctness, or any of the politely observed decorums and petty pieties of people not in the habit of saying what they really mean, think or feel. Like the horseman whom Yeats bids from the grave to pass him by, Werner casts a sober eye, on life, on death. When a mutual friend informed us he had been diagnosed with cancer and that there was a change of plan, Werner responded with fatal lucidity, "That is the plan." But by saying Werner looks at reality with a kind of objective detachment, I do not thereby mean that he stands apart or remains aloof from it. I know of no one more in love with the world, more full of the capacity for wonder and awe, or more connected to what he sees. He looks at the world around him, takes it all in, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, and transforms it into an experience in cinema. Seeing the trees – one by one, for what they actually are – for the forest is as important to Werner as the other way around. This is the nature of Werner's engagement with what he sees, an intensity of observation on the verge of fusion with his subject.
Werner's landscapes in film may be, as he calls them, fever dreams or inner landscapes, but their power comes from his genuine ability to dream them, to ensoul them with visionary power. In his essay that closes this book, physicist Lawrence Krauss defines genius as the ability to create something out of nothing. I would only add: to create something so utterly remarkable, wondrous and original that no one could ever have imagined it being created out of that nothing, even if one had been given a full breakdown of the original elements.
Werner is more a predator than a grazer. The senses are always working the horizon for sustenance, the strategy for the chase being wrought minutely by instinct, the whole being braced for the struggle leading to the kill. Like a predator, he takes his spoils quickly and his rest at whatever hideaway happens to be near by and convenient. The hunt – his creative activity – is everything, and all else (possessions, meals, accommodations, social life) incidental to it.
Herbert Golder is Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University, and the Editor-in-Chief of _Arion, A Journal of Humanities and the Classics_. He has worked with Werner Herzog since 1988 on films such as _Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Wings of Hope, My Best Fiend, Invincible, The White Diamond_ and _The Wild Blue Yonder._ He played Rabbi Edelmann in _Invincible_ and co-wrote the script for _My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done_.
# [Afterword
by Lawrence Krauss ](9780571259786_tableofcontents.html)
I will always remember the first time I met Werner Herzog. It was an incredibly disappointing experience. I was not disappointed in him, but rather in myself.
As a graduate student in the late seventies and early eighties, movies provided much-needed respite from the combination of long hours and the constant feeling of insecurity that arose from being surrounded by a community of overachievers, each of whom was eager to relate their brilliance and accomplishments at the slightest opportunity. Being a graduate student at MIT, I frequented art-movie houses, I admit in part because of social pressure from my peer group, but also because the movies were generally much better and more interesting than American films.
It was here that I first fell in love with Werner Herzog's films. They were like nothing I had ever seen before, a visual feast combined with raw emotion, and sometimes, it seemed to me, celebrating the edge of madness. The first one I remember seeing was _Aguirre, the Wrath of God,_ in 1977, around the time I started graduate school. It was also the first collaboration between Herzog and the unforgettable Klaus Kinski. I later learnt that the madness portrayed on screen mirrored the manic volatility of Kinski the man. At that time I could only assume this was balanced by an equal volatility in Herzog the director.
Next for me was _Fitzcarraldo_ , which came out in 1982, just after I had completed my PhD, staying in Boston to move from MIT to Harvard, and much closer to the movie theatre I frequented. My own situation had changed, and I felt like a big deal, no longer a lowly graduate student but a real person with an important enough job that I could now hold my own during cocktail-party conversations. However, when I learnt that for _Fitzcarraldo_ Herzog had actually not only moved a real steamboat up and over a mountain deep in the Amazon, but had also essentially shot the film twice, in two equally remote locations, having lost Jason Robards and Mick Jagger in the process and replaced them with the unstable Kinski, my own accomplishments during the period seemed far less inspired, or demanding.
Which brings me to my disappointment upon first meeting Werner. I had been asked to be a judge at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005, not because of my film expertise, but rather, I think, because I had written a book called _The Physics of Star Trek,_ and the Sloan Foundation was sponsoring a prize for the best feature film incorporating scientific themes or characters. Since I knew science, and _Star Trek_ was drama, I suppose they decided I had sufficient expertise to judge the combination of the two in a feature film. As it turned out, the twenty or so movies we had to judge were terrible. None fit the bill. If there was a realistic scientific character, the rest of the plot or cinematography was miserable. If the plot was scintillating, the science was awful. We judges ultimately met as a team and decided to enlarge the competition beyond pure fiction, and to include documentaries with a narrative theme, ones that hinged on a story. That year Werner's gripping documentary _Grizzly Man_ , about Timothy Treadwell, who spent thirteen summers filming and living with grizzly bears in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were killed and partially eaten by one of them, was in competition.
The movie was visually riveting, and highly unusual. It was based for the most part on over a hundred hours of footage shot by Treadwell himself, material that Herzog praises for its visual quality during the film, which he narrates. What made _Grizzly Man_ so memorable for me was not the visual background, but rather Werner's remarkable narration. It would have been easy to present Treadwell as a two-dimensional character, a nut who felt a Disneyesque kinship with bears. But Werner clearly felt some real kinship with the loner Treadwell, who scorned human companionship in favour of time with these wild creatures.
One scene captured for me the vital message of the film, and was the reason I was so pleased we awarded our prize to it at Sundance. There is a moment near the end with some of the last footage taken by Treadwell, perhaps of the very bear who killed him. The camera pans in for a close-up of the bear's face and eyes, staring at the camera, and Werner narrates: "What haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature." The message is clear: don't mess with Mother Nature. Nature is neither good nor bad, nor does it care about us or our desires. The natural world is violent, and most of it is not suited for our existence. Our whims, our imagination and our happiness reside within us, and shouldn't be imposed on a natural world that would carry on just as well without us. I still find this message profoundly moving, and I have never seen this commentary on our pitifully vain anthropocentric view of the universe expressed so pithily and in such a haunting context anywhere else.
The reception honouring the prizewinner was where I first met Werner and his wife Lena. They walked in the door together, hand in hand, seeming larger than life, and at the same time as if they were prepared to endure the event for the sake of the film, and then escape as quickly as politeness could allow. But my biggest surprise was the discovery that Werner was not the old man I had expected. All the time I had been watching his films while a graduate student and young postdoc he was not that much older than I was, and had already established his reputation as one of the most prolific, energetic and inventive filmmakers on any continent. He had done all this while I had taken the easy and traditional route towards a PhD and an academic career. So much for having felt so full of myself at the time.
I have since been privileged to spend many hours with Werner. On one occasion he encouraged me to skip a physics meeting at Caltech to be a guest speaker at his highly coveted Rogue Film School, where he interviewed me about what it might be like to film in four dimensions. In turn, Werner was my guest at an Arizona State University Origins Project event, where we screened his 3D film _Cave of Forgotten Dreams_ , and later had an on-stage discussion about early modern humans with one of the world's leading palaeontologists. Werner had earlier explained to me, as only he could, without an ounce of inappropriate vanity, that it was the first film that really required 3D filming. As he described it, the detailed Palaeolithic cave paintings, which the film focused on, incorporated the curvature and shape of the walls to embellish the animal figures. Without 3D, that feature would have been completely lost. To achieve this Werner had built his own cameras and reassembled them on the spot, all while restricted to a thin metal railing in the dark, inside a cave in which fewer people have stepped than have walked on the moon, with just six days to film the entire project. I have often insisted to Werner that it seems he doesn't like to make a film unless it is difficult, but he insists equally strongly that this is nonsense.
Werner is a genius. I say this without intending hyperbole. I have worked with some very talented people in my own field, including numerous Nobel Laureates, but I would call only a few of these colleagues geniuses. It is not a matter of intelligence alone. It is the ability to create, out of thin air, stories, explanations and images in ways that could not have been anticipated by others. Often, when presented with a completed work – for example, Einstein's special relativity – it's possible to imagine how, if one had had the initial idea, one could have puzzled through to the end. Yet for some creations – like those of Newton, for example – the road from beginning to end seems as remarkable after the fact as before it. I feel that way when I talk to Werner, listen to his plans and watch the end results.
Ultimately, the Werner Herzog I have come to know is not the wild man of his press clippings. He is a caring, thoughtful, playful and essentially gentle human being. Possessing a restless mind, with a fertile and creative imagination, he is a man interested in all aspects of the human experience. Self-taught, he is widely read and deeply knowledgeable. I like to think that one of the reasons we enjoy each other's company is that we both share a deep excitement in the human experience. I particularly enjoy listening to the childlike wonder with which he expresses his insights and ideas, something many other people lose early on. In this sense, I think that if Werner had chosen a different road to travel, he could easily have been a scientist – an experimental one, I am certain, because of his desire to experience directly the phenomena he imagines – and his career might easily have taken him to the wilds of the Amazon or the Antarctic end of the world. Maybe in a parallel universe that is precisely what he is doing. I only hope that in that universe I am making films. At the same time Werner possesses attributes I can only admire and wish I shared, including deep bravery. He is fascinated by the dark side of life, and recognises the universe is a deeply inhospitable place, and that to imagine otherwise is foolishness. But he runs headlong into the fray to capture every aspect of this universe that he can on film. He is not foolhardy. He always knows what the possible consequences are, but he finds a way to do it anyway.
Werner has a unique way of answering questions, without pretence or worries about the possible reception of his words. He speaks his mind directly and to the point. Moreover, without being cloying in any way, in conversation he reveals the unexpected challenges and sometimes completely fortuitous circumstances that colour the end results, and that have resulted in some of the most remarkable films of the last century. I think a particularly illuminating aspect of the real Werner was on display during the same weekend we screened his 3D film in Arizona. In what was the most amazing hour of radio I have ever participated in, Werner joined me and another friend, the remarkable writer Cormac McCarthy, along with _Science Friday_ host Ira Flatow, to talk about early modern humans, their culture and technology. I will never forget as these two icons discussed the science in detail and with authority, demonstrating to everyone that to be cultured in the modern world doesn't mean shying away from science, and moreover that you don't have to be a scientist either to be interested in the natural world or to gain some expertise. The programme ended with Werner reading aloud from McCarthy's novel _All the Pretty Horses._ It was a magical moment, and a magical connection between two creative artists willing to explore sides of the world that many would otherwise be glad to pretend don't exist.
Lawrence Krauss is Foundation Professor of Physics in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, and Director of the Origins Project. His books include _Fear of Physics, The Physics of Star Trek_ and _A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing_. In 2012 he was awarded the National Science Board Public Service Award and Medal.
# Bibliographic Essay
The primary focus of this short essay – merely a starting point for those studying Herzog's work – is Werner's own output. Those seeking more detailed information on the reviews, articles, chapters, doctoral theses and other ephemera about Herzog's life and work are encouraged to access his official website (http://www.wernerherzog.com) for Professor Herbert Golder's expansive (though by now somewhat out of date) bibliography. Several of the academic titles mentioned below also contain substantial bibliographies.
Herzog's own publishing house Skellig produced two volumes of his prose screenplays (in German) in 1977. Volume one contains _Lebenszeichen_ , _Auch Zwerge haben klein augefangen_ , _Fata Morgana_ ; volume two (also published in English by Tanam, in 1980) contains _Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes_ , _Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle_ , _Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit._ Over the years Carl Hanser Verlag has published several Herzog scripts in German: _Stroszek_ and _Nosferatu_ (1979), _Fitzcarraldo_ (1982; also Knaur, 1982), _Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen_ (1984) and _Cobra Verde_ (1987). In 1987 Verlag Volk und Welt issued _Fitzcarraldo_ and _Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen_ together in one volume. _Cobra Verde Filmbuch_ was published by 1987 by Edition Stemmle and contains a German translation of Bruce Chatwin's essay "History in the Making," Herzog's short piece about the background to the film ("Die Geschichte des Films"), the transcript of Steff Gruber's interview recorded during production, nearly eighty pages of Beat Presser's colour photographs of the film, and several pages of his black-and-white production shots.
There exist several books of Herzog's screenplays in other languages, notably French. _L'Avant-scène cinéma_ published _L'énigme de Kaspar Hauser_ in 1976 and _Aguirre, la colère de dieu_ in 1978. In 1981 Hachette P.O.L. Issued _Scénarios_ , which contains _Signes de vie_ , _Les nains aussi ont commencé petits_ , _Fata Morgana_ and _Aguirre, la colère de Dieu. Le pays où rêvent les fourmis vertes_ was released by P.O.L in 1985, and _Cobra_ _Verde_ by Jade-Flammarion in 1988. Two Herzog volumes have appeared in Italian ( _La ballata di Stroszek_ and _Nosferatu, il principe della notte_ , Ubulibri, 1982; and _Fitzcarraldo_ , Guanda, 1982) and one in Spanish ( _Kaspar Hauser_ , Elias Querejeta Ediciones, 1976). _Cobra Verde_ was translated into Catalan and published in 1988 by Laia Libros.
_Heart of Glass_ (Skellig) was published in 1976, and contains Herzog and Herbert Achternbusch's prose script of the film, intercut with Alan Greenberg's interviews with Herzog and his thoughts compiled on the set of the film. The book is an important, early representation of several of the ideas in _Herzog on Herzog_. Greenberg issued a slightly different version of the book in 2012 as _Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass_ (Chicago Review Press), with colour photographs. Paul Monette's novelisation of _Nosferatu_ , based on Herzog's script, was published in 1979 (UK: Picador; US: Avon), and in 2004 the British Film Institute published S. S. Prawer's monograph on _Nosferatu_ in its Modern Film Classics series (reissued in 2013 with an introduction by Brad Prager).
Herzog's _Fitzcarraldo_ has spawned several books. The English edition of his original script (which differs substantially from the completed film, it being the basis of the original Robards/Jagger version) was published by Fjord Press, the Dutch by Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, the Italian by Guanda, the Polish by Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, and the French, alongside _Nosferatu_ and _La Ballade de Bruno_ ( _Stroszek_ ), by Mazarine (all 1982).
The Greek edition, published by θεμελιο, followed in 1984. Schirmer/ Mosel published _Fitzcarraldo Filmbuch_ the same year, which contains a foreword by Herzog and the dialogue transcript (both in German), followed by more than a hundred pages of colour still frames taken from the film. The volume also includes ten pages of extracts from Herzog's diaries written during production. In 2004 Herzog published these journals in full as _Eroberung des Nutzlosen_ (Carl Hanser Verlag). Various foreign editions exist, including Italian ( _La conquista dell'inutile_ , Oscar Mondadori, 2007), French ( _Conquête de l'inutile_ , Capricci, 2008), English ( _Conquest of the Useless_ , HarperCollins, 2009) and Spanish ( _Conquista de lo inútil_ , Blackie, 2010). Short extracts from Herzog's jungle diaries also appear in _Burden of Dreams_ (North Atlantic Books, 1984), edited by Les Blank and James Bogan, a book that contains a collection of journal extracts by Blank and his fellow filmmaker Maureen Gosling written on the set of _Fitzcarraldo_ , as well as reviews and photographs, plus a dialogue transcript of the film _Burden of Dreams_. (Blank's film was issued on DVD in 2005 by the Criterion Collection, a release which also contains his 1980 short _Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe_ and an eighty-page booklet with edited extracts from the Blank/Gosling journals. Herzog, alongside Blank and Gosling, contributed a commentary to the release, as well as a thirty-eight-minute filmed interview.) The booklet _Der Fall Herzog_ is a partisan collection of documents and essays about the production of _Fitzcarraldo_ , edited by Nina Gladitz. Gerhard Kaiser's _Fitzcarraldo Faust_ , a monograph on _Fitzcarraldo_ (Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung), was published in 1993.
Herzog's prose book _Of Walking in Ice_ was first published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 1978 (reprinted 1995, then re-released by Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag in 2009 and Hanser in 2012). The English translation followed in 1980 (Tanam) and was reprinted by Jonathan Cape (UK) in 1991 and Free Association (US) in 2007. The French edition, entitled _Sur le chemin des glaces_ (Hachette), was published in 1979 (re-released by Editions Payot & Rivages in 1996), and Italian ( _Sentieri nel ghiaccio_ , Guanda), Japanese (Orion Literary Agency) and Swedish ( _Att gå kylan_ , Norstedt) translations appeared in 1980. A Dutch edition ( _Over een Voettocht door de Kou_ , Uitgeverij Bert Bakker) appeared in 1981 (re issued 2006 by Prometheus). A Spanish edition ( _Del caminar sobre hielo_ , Muchnik/Alphaville) was published in 1981 and re-released by Tempestad in 2003. The Brazilian edition ( _Caminhando no gelo_ , Paz e Terra) was issued in 1982 (reissued by Tinta-da-China in 2011), the Finnish ( _Jäinen matka_ , Like) in 1990 and Danish ( _Om at gå I is og sne_ , C&K Verlag) in 2014. An audio recording of the original German text, read by Herzog, was released on CD in 2007 by Winter & Winter.
Herzog has published a small number of articles, essays and reviews over the decades, and a fairly comprehensive list can be found on his website. These include two articles from 1964: "Rebellen in Amerika" and a review of Mikhail Romm's 1962 film _Nine Days of One Year_ , both published in German film magazine _Filmstudio_. In 1968 Herzog wrote a short piece that also appeared in _Filmstudio_ called "Mit den Wölfen Heulen," about the politics of the German film industry and his refusal to allow his short film _Last Words_ "to be used as a political instrument" at the Oberhausen Film Festival (this article is quoted from in the essay "Visionary Vehemence" above). He wrote reviews of the Taviani brothers' film _Padre Padrone_ (see page 68) and Peter Schneider's book _Der Mauerspringer_ in 1978 and 1982 respectively. In 1986 Herzog published a magazine article about ski flying in _Der Spiegel_ , and four years later one about the Wodaabe in _Stern_. He wrote the foreword to his wife Lena's book _Pilgrims_ , describing the environment in which he filmed _Wheel of Time_ , and in his foreword to Lena's volume of photographs shot on the set of _Bad Lieutenant_ (Universe, 2009) offers a vivid, brief account of the film's production. His review of Wolfgang Buscher's book _Berlin–Moskau: Eine Reise zu Fuss_ ("a journey on foot") appeared in 2003. Herzog published two articles – one long, one short – in _Arion, A Journal of Humanities and the Classics_ in 2010 and 2012. The first, which can be found on both the _Arion_ and official Herzog websites, is entitled "On the Absolute, the Sublime and Ecstatic Truth." The second is "On Pope Benedict's Address to the Bundestag."
Other miscellany worth mentioning are _Und die Fremde ist der Tod_(MaasMedia, 2004), a dual-language book of "Excerpts and Drawings by Bruno S," and Miron Zownir's film about Bruno, _Die Fremde ist der Tod_ (2003). Beat Presser's book of photographs _Werner Herzog_ (Jovis, 2002) contains production shots taken on the sets of _Fitzcarraldo_ , _Cobra Verde_ and _Invincible_ , as well as photographs taken during the staging of two operas in the mid-eighties. (The book also includes the testimonies of several Herzog collaborators over the years, including Volker Schlöndorff and Herbert Achternbusch.) A summary of Herzog's work up until 1978 was issued by Filmverlag Autoren. Entitled simply _Werner Herzog_ , it's a useful collection of approximately a hundred pages, and includes articles, interviews, reviews and photographs. Herzog's translation of Michael Ondaatje's _The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems_ was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 1997, and again by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag in 1999.
Herzog has never been shy about talking to the world's media, especially if doing so will help sell his films to the public. There are three lengthy interviews of note. Andrea Rost edited _Werner Herzog in Bamberg: Protokoll einer Diskussion_ , a conversation in German from 1985. Grazia Paganeli's interview, originally conducted in English, appears in Italian in her book _Segni di vita: Werner Herzog e il cinema_ , an illustrated catalogue published in 2008 by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema to celebrate a retrospective of Herzog's work. (The book includes a number of critical essays, alongside a selection of photographs from Herzog's archive, and was also issued in Portuguese and Greek by, respectively, IndieLisboa and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival.) In 2008 _Manuel de survie: entretien avec Werner Herzog_ , a short interview book by Emmanuel Burdeau and Hervé Aubron, appeared in French (a Spanish translation was released in 2013). A collection of previously published interviews with Herzog, edited by Eric Ames, appeared in 2014, released by the University Press of Mississippi. The first iteration of this book (2002, as _Herzog on Herzog_ ) has been published in numerous foreign-language editions.
Herzog has by now been fully integrated into the cross-currents of university departments and presses worldwide, and several of the following books are full of impeccable academic prose. Timothy Corrigan's _Between Mirage and History, The Films of Werner Herzog_ (Methuen, 1986) contains eleven essays about the films, and was for many years the only fulllength study in English. Two books in English – Brad Prager's _The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth_ (Wallflower, 2007) and Eric Ames's _Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog_ (University of Minnesota, 2012) – have appeared more recently. Prager also edited a six-hundred-page collection of essays entitled _A Companion to Werner Herzog_ (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). In German, Chris Wahl's _Lektionen in Herzog: Neues über Deutschlands verlorenen Filmautor und sein Werk_ (Text und Kritik, 2011) is an assembly of essays about Herzog's reception in Germany, Italy, France and the United States. There are three full-length studies of the films in French: Emmanuel Carrère's _Werner Herzog_ (Edilig, 1982), Radu Gabrea's _Werner Herzog et la mystique rhénane_ (L'Age d'Homme, 1986) and Valérie Carré's _La quête anthropologique de Werner Herzog: documentaires et fictions en regard_ (Press Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2007). There are two studies in Italian, one by Paolo Sirianni (Scambio Editrice, 1980), the other by Fabrizio Grosoli (La Nova Italia, 1981), and one in Hungarian by Muhi Klára and Perlaki Tamás (Mùzsák Közmüvelödési Kiadó, 1986). Lucia Nagib's 1991 book _Werner Herzog: O cinema como realidade_ was published in Portuguese and includes a twenty-four-page interview. Antonio Weinrichter's _Caminar sobre hielo y fuego: los documentales de Werner Herzog_ appeared in 2007. In 1979 Carl Hanser Verlag published _Werner Herzog_ , which contains a lengthy interview in German and commentaries on the films (up to _Woyzeck_ ). The relevant chapters in the same publisher's _Herzog/Kluge/Straub_ (1976) are similarly structured. _Postscript: Essays in Film and the Humanities_ (Jacksonville University and Georgia Institute of Technology) devoted much of its summer 1988 issue to Herzog's films. The German magazine _Film-dienst_ published several articles about Herzog's documentaries in its summer 2010 issue. Moritz Holdfelder's "unauthorised" biography of Herzog was published in German (LangenMüller) in 2012. While Holdfelder did not interview the subject of his book or have access to Herzog's archive, he did conduct interviews with several of Herzog's collaborators, including Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Eva Mattes and Alexander Kluge.
Apart from the two Les Blank films mentioned above, there are a small number of worthwhile documentaries about Herzog. Thomas Mauch's short film from 1972 _Der Welt zeigen, dass man noch da ist_ [ _Show the World We're Still There_ ] features footage shot on the set of _Signs of Life_ , _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ and _Aguirre_ , and audio of Herzog and Kinski. _I Am My Films_ , parts of which were filmed in Herzog's Munich apartment by Erwin Keusch and Christian Weisenborn in 1979, includes a conversation between him and Laurens Straub, footage shot on the set of _Stroszek_ and of Herzog listening to a recording of Kinski screaming at him during the production of _Aguirre_. (Its lacklustre sequel, _I Am My Films: Part 2... Thirty Years Later_ , filmed in Herzog's Los Angeles home by Christian Weisenborn, was produced in 2010.) In 1982 the British arts programme _The South Bank Show_ produced Jack Bond's hour-long film, which was broadcast to mark the release of _Fitzcarraldo_. It includes Herzog reading the Robert Walser poem featured at the end of _The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner_ , driving around the menhirs of Carnac, showing us his home town of Sachrang, football training alongside his Schwarz/Gelb München teammates, and in conversation with Lotte Eisner. Herzog's own half-hour _Werner Herzog_ : _Filmmaker_ (1986) – which recycles its best moments from _The South Bank Show_ and _Burden of Dreams_ – includes footage of him drinking beer at the Oktoberfest. _To the Limit and then Beyond_ is an hour-long "film essay" by Peter Buchka containing good interview material, produced in 1989 by Bayerischen Rundfunk.
In 1993 Milan released _Best of Popol Vuh: Werner Herzog_ , which contains Florian Fricke's music from _Aguirre_ , _Nosferatu_ , _Fitzcarraldo_ , _Cobra Verde_ and _The Dark Glow of the Mountains_. A 2010 box set, released by SPV, entitled _Popol Vuh: The Werner Herzog Sountracks_ , contains a pamphlet with photos and liner notes, and five CDs: music from _Aguirre_ , _Heart of Glass_ , _Nosferatu_ , _Fitzcarraldo_ and _Cobra Verde_. Winter & Winter released Ernst Reijseger's soundtracks to _My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done_ (2010), _Cave of Forgotten Dreams_ (2011) and, on a single CD entitled _Requiem for a Dying Planet_ , _The Wild Blue Yonder_ and _The White Diamond_ (2006). In 2013 Winter & Winter released _Eroberung des Nutzlosen_ , a recording of Herzog and Reijseger's performances in Berlin. Cooking Vinyl issued Richard Thompson's music for _Grizzly Man_ in 2005.
For more in English on modern German cinema, Sabine Hake's _German_ _National Cinema_ (Routledge, 2001) is a good summary, though for specifics on New German Cinema, James Franklin's _New German Cinema_ (Columbus Books, 1986) and Thomas Elsaesser's _New German Cinema_ (Rutgers University Press, 1989) are more substantial. Elsaesser and Michael Wedel's _The BFI Companion to German Cinema_ (BFI, 1999) is also a solid alphabetical listing, while Eric Rentschler's _West German Filmmakers on Film, Visions and Voices_ (Holmes and Meier, 1988) is a useful collection of writings by West German directors (including Kluge, Straub, Syberberg, Achternbusch, Schlöndorff, Wenders, Fassbinder and Herzog), and also contains the texts of the Oberhausen, Mannheim and Hamberg Manifestos. There is a longer German edition, edited by Helmut Prinzler and Eric Rentschler, entitled _Der alte Film war tot_ (Verlag der Autoren, 2001).
In recent years there has been an explosion of all things Klaus Kinski. His crazed autobiography, of which there exist two versions, is a grotesque and sensational rant. _Ich bin so wild nach deinem Erdbeermund_ (the opening line of a François Villon poem; literally: _Lusting for your Strawberry Lips_ ) was first published in 1975 (Rogner & Bernhard), with a French edition the following year ( _Crever pour vivre_ , Belfond). Two English editions were released as _All I Need Is Love_ (Random House, 1988) and _Kinski Uncut_ (US: Viking, 1996; UK: Bloomsbury, 1997), both shorter versions of the German _Ich brauche Liebe_ (Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1991). _Kinski_ (Parthas, 2000) is a collection of photographs by Beat Presser. _Ich, Kinski_ , published by the Deutsches Filmmusem in Frankfurt, and _Klaus Kinski "Ich bin so wie ich bin"_ (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag) (both 2001) are collections of essays and photos. _Fieber: Tagebuch eines Aussätzigen_ , a collection of Kinski's own poetry (with photographs), was published by Eichborn Verlag (2001). Two biographies exist in German, one by Peter Geyer (Suhrkamp, 2006), the other by Christian David (Aufbau, 2006). Kinski's _Jesus Christus Erlöser_ (Surhkamp, 2006) is a book detailing his 1971 performance in Berlin. A recording of the event was released in 2006 (Random House Audio) and a DVD issued in 2009. _Kinski Vermächtnis_ is a mammoth scrapbook, edited by Peter Geyer and O. A. Krimmel, published by Edel in 2011, and contains a wealth of writings, documents and photographs. Many of Kinski's audio recordings (all in German) have been released over the past few years, notably the twelve-CD set _Kinski Spricht: Werke der Weltliteratur_ (Deutsche Grammophon, 2003). In 1990 Amadeo released a CD of Kinski readings entitled _Ich bin so wild nach deinem Erdbeermund_ , and in 2001 Deutsche Grammophon published _Klaus Kinski_ , a single CD of readings from, among others, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. Klaus Kinski Productions produced an audio version of Kinski's book _Fieber_ , with Ben Becker reading the poetry (2001). In 2002 Random House Audio released _Klaus Kinski: Hörspiele_ , readings from the archives of Hessischen Rundfunk, and in 2006 issued a 1956 recording of Kinski playing the title role in _Henry IV._ Three DVDs of filmed interviews with Kinski (entitled _Kinski Talks_ ) were released between 2010 and 2012 by Klaus Kinski Productions, and his film _Kinski/Paganini_ is available on DVD. Kinski's daughter Pola published a memoir entitled _Kindermund_ [ _Child's Mouth_ ] in 2013 (Suhrkamp), in which she details the decade-long sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father.
The following is an incomplete list of DVD/Blu-ray editions of Herzog's films. Most titles in the Anchor Bay Entertainment (US) DVD box sets from 2004 (one with the five Kinski features plus _My Best Fiend_ , the other containing _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ , _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ , _Fata Morgana_ , _Lessons of Darkness_ , _Heart of Glass_ , _Stroszek_ and _Little Dieter Needs to Fly_ ) include audio commentaries recorded by Herzog. The two box sets issued by Opening (France) in 2006 contain a selection of features and documentaries alongside a two-hour filmed interview. A six-disc set was released by Arthaus (Germany) in 2007, four of which ( _Kaspar Hauser_ , _Fata Morgana_ , _Stroszek_ and _Signs of Life_ ) include commentaries by Herzog in German. In 2011 Werner Herzog Filmproduktion published the thirteen-disc box set _Documentaries 1962–2005_ , and the following year from StudioCanal (Germany) came the five Kinski films on Blu-ray. The British Film Institute's eight-disc DVD/seven-disc Blu-ray sets from 2014 consist of eighteen digitally remastered features and shorts (some of which include audio commentary), plus a few extras, including _The South Bank Show_ (see above). A slimmed-down version was issued (Blu-ray only) by Shout! (US).
# Filmography
"I have worked with the same crew now for fourteen years, and some of them are among the best there are in the world today. They are the real authors of my films; we have a similar outlook and sensibility. I decide on the subject matter, and we do everything else together."
Werner Herzog
_Cinéma_ , October 1979
1957
**A Lost Western** [unreleased]
Fiction, 6 minutes, 8mm, b/w
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Location:_ Munich
1962
**Herakles**
Fiction, 12 minutes, 35mm, b/w
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jaime Pacheco
_Editor:_ Werner Herzog
_Sound:_ Werner Herzog
_Music:_ Uwe Brandner
_Production Company:_ Cineropa Film
_Featuring:_ Mr Germany 1962
1964
**Spiel im Sand (Game in the Sand)** [unreleased]
Non-fiction, 14 minutes, 35mm, b/w
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jaime Pacheco
_Editor:_ Werner Herzog
_Sound:_ Werner Herzog
_Music:_ Uwe Brandner
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
_Location:_ Austria
1966
**Die beispiellose Verteidigung der Festung Deutschkreuz (The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz)**
Fiction, 15 minutes, 35mm, b/w
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jaime Pacheco
_Editor:_ Werner Herzog
_Sound:_ Uwe Brandner
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Arpa-Film
_Location:_ Burgenland (Austria)
_Cast:_ Peter Brumm, Georg Eska, Karl-Heinz Steffel, Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg
_Premiere:_ April 1967, Oberhausen Short Film Festival
1967
**Letzte Worte (Last Words)**
Fiction, 13 minutes, 35mm, b/w
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Thomas Mauch
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Herbert Prasch
_Music:_ Folkmusic of Crete
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
_Locations:_ Crete, Kos (Greece)
_Premiere:_ April 1968, Oberhausen Short Film Festival
1968
**Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life)**
Fiction, 87 minutes, 35mm, b/w
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Thomas Mauch
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Herbert Prasch
_Music:_ Stavros Xarchakos
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
_Locations:_ Crete, Kos (Greece)
_Cast:_ Peter Brogle (Stroszek), Wolfgang Reichmann (Meinhard), Athina Zacharopoulou (Nora), Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg (Becker), Wolfgang Stumpf (Captain), Henry van Lyck (Lieutenant), Florian Fricke (Pianist)
_Premiere:_ June 1968, Berlin Film Festival
1969
**Massnahmen gegen Fanatiker (Precautions against Fanatics)**
Fiction, 12 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Dieter Lohmann
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Werner Herzog
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
_Location:_ Munich
_Cast:_ Petar Radenković, Mario Adorf, Hans Tiedemann, Herbert Hisel, Peter Schamoni
_Premiere:_ March 1969, Oberhausen Short Film Festival
1969
**Die fliegenden Ärzte von Ostafrika (The Flying Doctors of East Africa)**
Fiction, 45 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Executive Producer:_ Eleonore Semler
_Camera:_ Thomas Mauch
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Werner Herzog
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for the African Medical & Research Foundation)
_Locations:_ Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania
_Participants:_ Dr Michael Wood, Dr Ann Spoery, Betty Miller, James Kabale
_Premiere:_ March 1970, ZDF (German television)
1970
**Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen (Even Dwarfs Started Small)**
Fiction, 96 minutes, 35mm, b/w
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Thomas Mauch, Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Maximiliane Mainka
_Sound:_ Herbert Prasch
_Music:_ Florian Fricke (Popol Vuh) and folk songs of Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa, Canary Islands
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
_Location:_ Lanzarote (Canary Islands)
_Cast:_ Helmut Döring (Hombre), Gerd Gickel (Pepe), Paul Glauer (Erzieher), Erna Gschwendtner (Azúcar), Gisela Hertwig (Pobrecita)
_Premiere:_ May 1970, Cannes Film Festival
1970
**Fata Morgana**
Non-fiction, 79 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Hans von Mallinckrodt
_Music:_ Leonard Cohen, Blind Faith, Couperin, Mozart, Handel
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
_Locations:_ Southern Sahara, Cameroon, Canary Islands
_Participants:_ Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg, James William Gledhill, Eugen des Montagnes
_Premiere:_ May 1970, Cannes Film Festival
1971
**Behinderte Zukunft (Handicapped Future)**
Non-fiction, 43 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Werner Herzog
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for North Rhine-Westphalia)
_Locations:_ Munich, Hannover, Los Angeles
_Participants:_ Adolph Ratzka
1971
**Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit (Land of Silence and Darkness)**
Non-fiction, 85 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Werner Herzog
_Music:_ Bach, Vivaldi
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for North Rhine-Westphalia)
_Locations:_ Munich, Niederbayern, Hannover
_Participants:_ Fini Straubinger, Else Fährer, Ursula Riedmeier, Joseph Riedmeier, Vladimir Kokol, Heinrich Fleischmann, Resi Mittermeier
_Premiere:_ October 1978, Mannheim Film Festival
1972
**Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God)**
Fiction, 93 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Thomas Mauch
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Herbert Prasch
_Music:_ Florian Fricke (Popol Vuh)
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Hessischer Rundfunk
_Location:_ Peru (Urubamba Valley, River Huallaga, River Nanay, Cusco)
_Cast:_ Klaus Kinski (Lope de Aguirre), Helena Rojo (Inez de Atienza), Del Negro (Carvajal), Ruy Guerra (Ursúa), Peter Berling (Guzman), Cecilia Rivera (Flores), Daniel Ades (Perucho)
_Premiere:_ December 1972, Germany
1973
**Die grosse Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner (The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner)**
Non-fiction, 47 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Benedikt Kuby
_Music:_ Florian Fricke (Popol Vuh)
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for Süddeutscher Rundfunk)
_Locations:_ Oberstdorf and Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany), Planica (Slovenia)
_Participant:_ Walter Steiner
_Premiere:_ November 1974, Munich
1974
**Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser)**
Fiction, 109 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Martha Lederer
_Sound:_ Haymo Henry Heyder
_Music:_ Florian Fricke (Popol Vuh), Mozart, di Lasso, Albinoni, Pachelbel
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen
_Location_ Dinkelsbühl, Ireland, Spanish Sahara
_Cast:_ Bruno S. (Kaspar), Walter Ladengast (Daumer), Brigitte Mira (Kathe), Hans Musäus (Unknown man), Willy Semmelrogge (Circus Director), Michael Kroecher (Stanhope), Henry van Lyck (Cavalry Captain), Enno Patalas (Vicar Fuhrmann), Florian Fricke (Florian), Clemens Scheitz (Scribe)
_Premiere:_ November 1974, Dinkelsbühl
1976
**Herz aus Glas (Heart of Glass)**
Fiction, 97 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog, Herbert Achternbusch
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Haymo Henry Heyder
_Music:_ Florian Fricke (Popol Vuh), Studio der Frühen Musik
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen
_Locations:_ Bavaria, Skellig Rock (Ireland), Graubünden (Switzerland), Alaska, Monument Valley, Yellowstone National Park, Niagra Falls
_Cast:_ Josef Bierbichler (Hias), Stefan Güttler (Factory Owner), Clemens Scheitz (Adalbert), Volker Prechtel (Wudy), Sonja Skiba (Ludmilla), Brunhilde Klöckner (Paulin), Wolf Albrecht (Sam), Thomas Binkley (Lute Player), Janos Fischer (Ägide)
_Premiere:_ November 1976, Paris Film Festival
1976
**Mit mir will keiner spielen (No One Will Play with Me)**
Non-fiction, 14 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Haymo Henry Heyder
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Institut für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht
_Location:_ Munich
1976
**How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck...: Beobachtungen zu einer neuen Sprache (How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck...: Observations on a New Language)**
Non-fiction, 45 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Thomas Mauch
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Walter Saxer
_Music:_ Shorty Eager and the Eager Beavers
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Süddeutscher Rundfunk
_Location:_ New Holland, Pennsylvania
_Participants:_ Steve Liptay, Ralph Wade, Alan Ball, Abe Diffenbach
_Premiere:_ June 1976, Hof International Film Festival
1976
**Stroszek**
Fiction, 108 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Thomas Mauch
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Haymo Henry Heyder
_Music:_ Chet Atkins, Sonny Terry, Tom Paxton, Beethoven
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen
_Locations:_ Berlin, New York, Wisconsin, North Carolina
_Cast:_ Bruno S. (Stroszek), Eva Mattes (Eva), Clemens Scheitz (Scheitz)
_P_ _remiere:_ May 1977, Munich
1977
**La Soufrière: Warten auf eine unausweichliche Katastrophe (La Soufrière: Waiting for an Unavoidable Catastrophe)**
Non-fiction, 30 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Ed Lachman
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Werner Herzog
_Music:_ Rachmaninov, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for Süddeutscher Rundfunk)
_Location:_ Guadeloupe
_Premiere:_ March 1977, Bonn
1979
**Nosferatu – Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre)**
Fiction, 103 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Harald Maury
_Music:_ Florian Fricke (Popol Vuh), Wagner, Gounod
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Gaumont, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen
_Locations:_ Czech Republic, Netherlands, Mexico, Slovakia
_Cast:_ Klaus Kinski (Count Dracula), Isabelle Adjani (Lucy Harker), Bruno Ganz (Jonathan Harker), Jaques Dufilho (Captain), Roland Topor (Renfield), Walter Ladengast (Dr van Helsing)
_Premiere:_ January 1979, Paris
1979
**Woyzeck**
Fiction, 81 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog (from the play by Georg Büchner)
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Harald Maury
_Music:_ Fiedelquartett Telč, Rudolf Obruca, Benedetto Marcello, Vivaldi
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen
_Location:_ Czech Republic
_Cast:_ Klaus Kinski (Woyzeck), Eva Mattes (Marie), Wolfgang Reichmann (Hauptmann), Willy Semmelrogge (Doctor), Josef Bierbichler (Drum-Major), Paul Burian (Andres)
_Premiere:_ May 1979, Cannes
1980
**Glaube und Währung (God's Angry Man)**
Non-fiction, 44 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Thomas Mauch
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Walter Saxer
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for Süddeutscher Rundfunk)
_Location:_ Glendale, California
_Participant:_ Dr Gene Scott
_Premiere:_ May 1981, ARD (German television)
1980
**Huie's Predigt (Huie's Sermon)**
Non-fiction, 43 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Thomas Mauch
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Walter Saxer
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for Süddeutscher Rundfunk)
_Location:_ New York
_Participant:_ Bishop Huie L. Rogers
_Premiere:_ June 1981, ARD (German television)
1982
**Fitzcarraldo**
Fiction, 137 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producers:_ Lucki Stipetić, Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Thomas Mauch
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Jaurez Dagoberto Costa, Zezé d'Alice
_Music:_ Florian Fricke (Popol Vuh), Verdi, Bellini
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, Filmverlag der Autoren
_Locations:_ Iquitos, Río Camisea (Peru), Manaus and Iquito (Brazil)
_Cast:_ Klaus Kinski (Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald), Claudia Cardinale (Molly), José Lewgoy (Don Aquilino), Paul Hittscher (Captain), Huerequeque Enrique Bohórquez (Huerequeque)
_Premiere:_ March 1982, Munich
1984
**Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen (Where the Green Ants Dream)**
Fiction, 100 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Lucki Stipetić
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
_Sound:_ Claus Langer
_Music:_ Fauré, Bloch, Wagner, Klaus-Jochen Wiese, Wandjuk Marika
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, Filmverlag der Autoren
_Locations:_ Melbourne, Coober Pedy (Australia)
_Cast:_ Bruce Spence (Hackett), Wandjuk Marika (Miliritbi), Roy Marika (Dayipu), Ray Barrett (Cole), Norman Kaye (Ferguson), Colleen Clifford (Miss Strehlow)
_Premiere:_ May 1984, Cannes Film Festival
1984
**Ballad of the Little Soldier (Ballade vom kleinen Soldaten)**
Non-fiction, 45 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Lucki Stipetić
_Camera:_ Jorge Vignati
_Editor:_ Maximiliane Mainka
_Sound:_ Christine Ebenberger
_Music:_ Folk songs performed by Isidoro Reyes and Paladino Taylor
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for Süddeutscher Rundfunk)
_Locations:_ Nicaragua, Honduras
_Participants_ Miskito Indians of Nicaragua
_Premiere:_ October 1984, Hof International Film Festival
1984
**Gasherbrum – Der leuchtende Berg (The Dark Glow of the Mountains)**
Non-fiction, 45 minutes, 16mm and Super 8, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Lucki Stipetić
_Camera:_ Rainer Klausmann
_Editor:_ Maximiliane Mainka
_Sound:_ Christine Ebenberger
_Music:_ Florian Fricke (Popol Vuh), Renate Knaup, Daniel Fichelscher
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for Süddeutscher Rundfunk)
_Location:_ Karakorum, Pakistan
_Participants:_ Reinhold Messner, Hans Kammerlander
_Premiere:_ June 1985, ARD (German television)
1987
**Cobra Verde**
Fiction, 110 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog (from the novel _The Viceroy of Ouidah_ by Bruce Chatwin)
_Producer:_ Lucki Stipetić
_Camera:_ Viktor Růžička
_Editor:_ Maximiliane Mainka, Rainer Standke
_Sound:_ Haymo Henry Heyder
_Music:_ Florian Fricke (Popol Vuh)
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen
_Locations:_ Dahomey (Benin), Elmina, Tamale (Ghana), Cartagena, Cali and Guajira (Colombia), Juazeiro do Norte, Bahia (Brazil)
_Cast:_ Klaus Kinski (Francisco Manoel da Silva), King Ampaw (Taparica), José Lewgoy (Don Octavio Coutinho), Salvatore Basile (Captain Fraternidade), Peter Berling (Bernabé), Guillermo Coronel (Euclides), His Royal Highness King Nana Agyefi Kwame II of Nsein (Bossa Ahadee)
_Premiere:_ December 1987, Munich
1988
**Les Français vus par... les Gauloises**
Non-fiction, 12 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Rainer Standke
_Sound:_ Bernard Aubouy
_Production Company:_ Erato Films
_Locations:_ Paris, Toulouse
_Participants:_ Claude Josse, Jean Clemente, the rugby team of Stade Toulousain and the Sporting Club of Graulheit
1989
**Wodaabe, Die Hirten der Sonne (Wodaabe, Herdsmen of the Sun)**
Non-fiction, 52 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Patrick Sandrin
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Maximiliane Mainka
_Sound:_ Walter Saxer
_Music:_ Gounod, Mozart, Handel, Verdi
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for Süddeutscher Rundfunk)
_Location:_ Southern Sahara (Republic of Niger)
_Participants:_ Members of the Wodaabe
_Premiere:_ June 1989, Südwest 3 (German television)
1990
**Echos aus einem düsteren Reich (Echoes from a Sombre Empire)**
Non-fiction, 93 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Rainer Standke
_Sound:_ Harald Maury
_Music:_ Bartók, Prokofiev, Lutoslawski, Schubert, Shostakovich, Bach, Esther Lamandier
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, SERA Filmproduktion, Films sans Frontières
_Locations:_ Central African Republic, France, Venice
_Participants:_ Michael Goldsmith, François Gilbault, Augustine Assemat, Francis Szpiner, David Dacko, Marie-Reine Hassen
_Premiere:_ November 1990, Paris
1991
**Cerro Torre: Schrei aus Stein (Scream of Stone)**
Fiction, 105 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Hans-Ulrich Klenner, Walter Saxer, Robert Geoffrion (from an original idea by Reinhold Messner)
_Producers:_ Walter Saxer, Henry Lange, Richard Sadler
_Camera:_ Rainer Klausmann
_Editor:_ Suzanne Baron, Anne Wagner
_Sound:_ Christopher Price
_Music:_ Heinrich Schütz, Wagner, Ingram Marshall, Sarah Hopkins, Alan Lamb, Atahualpa Yupanqui
_Production Companies:_ Sera Filmproduktions GmbH, Molecule, Les Stock Films International, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, Canal+
_Locations:_ Patagonia (Argentina), Munich, Australia, Grenoble (France)
_Cast:_ Vittorio Mezzogiorno (Roccia), Stefan Glowacz (Martin), Mathilda May (Katharina), Donald Sutherland (Ivan), Brad Dourif (Fingerless), Al Waxman (Stephen)
_Premiere:_ September 1991, Venice Film Festival
1991
**Das exzentrische Privattheater des Maharadjah von Udaipur (The Eccentric Private Theatre of the Maharaja of Udaipur)**
Non-fiction, 85 minutes, 16mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Rainer Klausmann
_Editor:_ Michou Hutter, Ursula Darrer
_Sound:_ Herbert Giesser
_Production Company:_ Neue Studio Film GmbH (for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen and Österreichischer Rundfunk)
_Location:_ Udaipur (India)
_Participants:_ André Heller, Manipuri Jagoi, Deb Des Baul, Pusekhan Hayatm, Huyel Lallong, Devi Bhakta, Pazur, Damodara Marar, M. Mariyan Pillai, Raghu Presed, V. P. Paul
_Premiere:_ November 1991, ORF (Austrian television)
1991
**Film Stunde (Film Lessons)**
Non-fiction, 4 × 60 minutes, Betacam, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Gerda Weissenberger
_Camera:_ Karl Kofler, Michael Ferk
_Editor:_ Albert Skalak
_Production Company:_ Österreichischer Rundfunk
_Location:_ Vienna
_Participants:_ Michael Kreihsl, Jeff Sheridan, Peter Turrini, Volker Schlöndorff, Kamal Saiful Islam, Philippe Petit, Ryszard Kapuściński
_Premiere:_ December 1991, ORF (Austrian television)
1992
**Lektionen in Finsternis (Lessons of Darkness)**
Non-fiction, 52 minutes, Super 16, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Lucki Stipetić
_Camera:_ Paul Berriff, Simon Werry, Rainer Klausmann
_Editor:_ Rainer Standke
_Sound:_ John G. Pearson
_Music:_ Wagner, Grieg, Prokofiev, Pärt, Verdi, Schubert, Mahler
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Canal+, Premiere Medien GmbH
_Location:_ Kuwait
_Premiere:_ February 1991, Berlin Film Festival
1993
**Glocken aus der Tiefe (Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia)**
Non-fiction, 60 minutes, Super 16, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producers:_ Lucki Stipetić, Ira Barmak
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Rainer Standke
_Sound:_ Vyacheslav Belozerou
_Music:_ Choir of the Spiritual Academy, Saint Petersburg, Choir of the Zagorsk Monastery, Choir of the Pühtica Dormition Convent
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
_Location:_ Siberia (Russia)
_Premiere:_ November 1993, Stockholm Film Festival
1994
**Die Verwandlung der Welt in Musik (The Transformation of the World into Music)**
Non-fiction, 90 minutes, Super 16, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Lucki Stipetić
_Camera:_ Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Editor:_ Rainer Standke
_Sound:_ Ekkehard Baumung
_Music:_ Wagner (Choir and Orchestra of the Bayreuth Wagner Festival)
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for ARTE and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen)
_Locations:_ Bayreuth, Linderhof Castle
_Participants:_ Wolfgang Wagner, Sven Friedrich, Yohji Yamamoto, Plácido Domingo, Dieter Dorn, Heiner Müller, Waltraud Meier, Siegfried Jerusalem
_Premiere:_ July 1996, ZDF (German television)
1995
**Gesualdo, Tod für fünf Stimmen (Death for Five Voices)**
Non-fiction, 60 minutes, Super 16, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Lucki Stipetić
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Rainer Standke
_Sound:_ Ekkehard Baumung
_Music:_ Gesualdo, Wagner
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen)
_Locations:_ Ferrara, Castel Gesualdo, Arezzo, Venosa, Naples
_Participants:_ Pasquale D'Onofrio, Salvatore Catorano, Angelo Carrabs, Milva, Angelo Michele Torriello, Raffaele Virocolo, Vincenzo Giusto, Giovanni Iudica, Walter Beloch, Principe D'Avalos, Antonio Massa, Alan Curtis, Gennaro Miccio, Silvano Milli, Marisa Milli, Gerald Place, Alberto Lanini, Il Complesso Barocco, Gesualdo Consort of London
_Premiere:_ November 1996, ZDF (German television)
1997
**Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Flucht aus Laos)**
Non-fiction, 80 minutes (theatrical), 52 minutes (English/German television), Super 16, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Lucki Stipetić
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Ekkehard Baumung
_Music:_ Bartók, Carlos Gardel, Glenn Miller, Kongar-ol Ondar, Wagner, _Dvořák,_ Bach, folk music of the people of Sayan Altal and the Ural mountains
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Café Productions (for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, BBC and ARTE)
_Locations:_ Thailand, San Francisco, Tuscon, San Diego, Wildberg (Black Forest)
_Participant:_ Dieter Dengler
_Premiere:_ February 1998, Portland International Film Festival
1999
**Mein liebster Feind (My Best Fiend)**
Non-fiction, 95 minutes, Super 16, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Lucki Stipetić
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Eric Spitzer
_Music:_ Florian Fricke (Popol Vuh)
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Café Productions, Zephir Film
_Locations:_ Peru, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Munich, Paris, San Francisco
_Participants:_ Klaus Kinski, Eva Mattes, Claudia Cardinale, Beat Presser, Guillermo Rios, Andres Vicente, Justo Gonzalez, Benino Moreno Placido, Baron und Baronin von d. Recke, José Koechlin von Stein
_Premiere:_ May 1999, Cannes Film Festival
1999
**Gott and die Beladenen (The Lord and the Laden)**
Non-fiction, 43 minutes, digital video, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producers:_ Martin Choroba, Joachim Puls
_Camera:_ Jorge Vignati
_Editor:_ Joe Bini, Thomas Staunton
_Sound:_ Francisco Adrianzén
_Music:_ Gounod, di Lasso
_Production Company:_ Tellux Film
_Locations:_ Antigua, San Andrés Itzapa (Guatemala)
_Premiere:_ January 2000, ARD (German television)
2000
**Julianes Sturz in den Dschungel (Wings of Hope)**
Non-fiction, 70 minutes (theatrical), 42 minutes (German television), 49 minutes (English television), Super 16, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Lucki Stipetić
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Eric Spitzer
_Music:_ Wagner, Stravinsky
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), BBC
_Location:_ Peru
_Participants:_ Juliane Koepcke, Moisés Rengito Chavez, Juan Limber Ribera Soto, Richard Silva Manujama, Ricardo Oroche Rengite, El Moro
_Premiere:_ February 2000, ZDF (German television)
2001
**Pilgrimage**
Non-fiction, 18 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Jorge Pacheco, Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Erik Söllner
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Neil Pemperton
_Music:_ John Tavener ( _Mahámátra_ performed by BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, performed by Parvin Cox and the Westminster Cathedral Choir)
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion (for BBC)
_Locations:_ Mexico, Siberia
_Premiere:_ March 2001, London
2001
**Invincible**
Fiction, 130 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producers:_ Gary Bart, Werner Herzog, Christine Ruppert
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Simon Willis
_Music:_ Hans Zimmer, Klaus Badelt
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Tatfilm Produktion
_Locations:_ Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Christmas Island (Australia), Black Island Studios (London), Monterey Bay Aquarium
_Cast:_ Tim Roth (Hanussen), Jouko Ahola (Zishe Breitbart), Anna Gourari (Marta Farra), Jacob Wein (Benjamin Breitbart), Max Raabe (Master of Ceremonies), Gustav Peter Woehler (Landwehr), Udo Kier (Count Helldorf), Herb Golder (Rabbi Edelmann), Gary Bart (Yitzak Breitbart), Renata Krössner (Mother Breitbart)
_Premiere:_ September 2001, Venice Film Festival
2002
**Ten Thousand Years Older** [part of Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet] Non-fiction, 10 minutes, Super 16, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Lucki Stipetić
_Camera:_ Vincente Rios
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Walter Saxer
_Music:_ Paul Englishby (performed by Hugh Masekela)
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
_Location:_ Brazil
_Premiere:_ May 2002, Cannes Film Festival
2003
**Rad der Zeit (Wheel of Time)**
Non-fiction, 80 minutes, Super 16, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producers:_ Werner Herzog, André Singer
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Eric Spitzer
_Music:_ Prem Rana Autari, Sur Sudha-Autari, Vaidya Bihaya, Lhamo Dolma, Florian Fricke (Popol Vuh), Shresta Surendra
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Café Productions
_Locations:_ Graz (Austria), Bodhgaya (India), Mount Kailash (Tibet, China)
_Participants:_ Dalai Lama, Manfred Klell, Tenzin Dhargye
_Premiere:_ March 2003, BBC Television
2004
**The White Diamond**
Non-fiction, 87 minutes, Super 16, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producers:_ Werner Herzog, Annette Scheurich, Lucki Stipetić
_Camera:_ Henning Brümmer, Klaus Scheurich
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Eric Spitzer
_Music:_ Ernst Reijseger
_Production Companies:_ Marco Polo Film, NDR Naturfilm, Nippon Hoso Kyokai, BBC
_Locations:_ Bedford (England), Guyana
_Participants:_ Graham Dorrington, Marc Anthony Yhap, Jason Gibson, Jan-Peter Meewes
_Premiere:_ November 2004, Halle (Germany)
2005
**Grizzly Man**
Non-fiction, 103 minutes, Super 16, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Erik Nelson
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Ken King
_Music:_ Richard Thompson
_Production Company:_ Real Big Productions (for Lionsgate Films and Discovery Docs)
_Location:_ Katmai National Park (Alaska)
_Participants:_ Timothy Treadwell, Amie Huguenard, Jewel Palovak, Carol Dexter, Val Dexter, Sam Egli
_Premiere:_ January 2005, Sundance Film Festival
2005
**The Wild Blue Yonder**
Non-fiction, 81 minutes, HDCAM, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Henry Kaiser, Tanja Koop, Klaus Scheurich
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Joe Crabb
_Music:_ Ernst Reijseger
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, West Park Pictures
_Locations:_ Niland (California), McMurdo Station (Antarctic)
_Cast:_ Brad Dourif, Michael McCulley, Ted Sweetser, Roger Diehl, Donald Williams
_Premiere:_ September 2005, Venice Film Festival
2006
**Rescue Dawn**
Fiction, 126 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Werner Herzog
_Producers:_ Steve Marlton, Elton Brand, Harry Knapp
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Paul Paragon
_Music:_ Klaus Badelt
_Production Company:_ Top Gun Productions
_Location:_ Thailand
_Cast:_ Christian Bale (Dieter Dengler), Steve Zahn (Duane Martin), Jeremy Davies (Eugene DeBruin), Chorn Solyda (Walkie Talkie)
_Premiere:_ September 2006, Toronto Film Festival
2007
**Encounters at the End of the World**
Non-fiction, 99 minutes, HDCAM, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producers:_ Henry Kaiser, Erik Nelson
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Werner Herzog
_Music:_ Henry Kaiser, David Lindley
_Production Companies:_ Discovery Films, Creative Differences
_Location:_ McMurdo Station (Antarctic)
_Participants:_ Scott Rowland, David Ainley, Stefan Pashov, Doug MacAyeal, Ryan Andrew Evans, Kevin Emery, Olav T. Oftedal, Regina Eisert, Clive Oppenheimer, Libor Zicha, Karen Joyce, Sam Bowser, David Pacheco
_Premiere:_ September 2007, Telluride Film Festival
2009
**Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans**
Fiction, 122 minutes, 35mm, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ William M. Finkelstein
_Producers:_ Stephen Belafonte, Nicolas Cage, Randall Emmett, Alan Polsky, Gabe Polsky, Edward R. Pressman
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Jay Meagher
_Music:_ Mark Isham
_Production Companies:_ Millennium Films, Edward R. Pressman Films, Saturn Films, Polsky Films
_Location:_ New Orleans
_Cast:_ Nicolas Cage (Terence McDonagh), Eva Mendes (Frankie Donnenfield), Val Kilmer (Steve Pruit), Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner (Big Fate), Fairuza Balk (Heidi), Jennifer Coolidge (Genevieve), Tom Bower (Pat McDonagh), Brad Dourif (Ned Schoenholtz), Irma Hall (Binnie Rogers), Michael Shannon (Mundt)
_Premiere:_ September 2009, Venice Film Festival
2009
**La Bohème**
Non-fiction, 4 minutes, HDCAM, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Andre Singer
_Camera:_ Richard Blanshard
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Music:_ Puccini
_Production Companies:_ Sky Arts, English National Opera
_Location:_ Ethiopia
_Premiere:_ September 2009, Venice Film Festival
2009
**My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done**
Fiction, 93 minutes, HDCAM, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Screenplay:_ Herbert Golder, Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Eric Bassett
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Greg Agalsoff
_Music:_ Ernst Reijseger
_Production Companies:_ Defilm, Paper Street Films
_Locations:_ San Diego, Kashgar (China), Tijuana (Mexico), Peru (Urubamba Valley)
_Cast:_ Michael Shannon (Brad Macallam), Willem Dafoe (Detective Hank Havenhurst), Chloë Sevigny (Ingrid Gudmundson), Udo Kier (Lee Meyers), Michael Peña (Detective Vargas), Grace Zabriskie (Mrs Macallam), Brad Dourif (Uncle Ted), Irma Hall (Mrs Roberts)
_Premiere:_ September 2009, Venice Film Festival
2010
**Cave of Forgotten Dreams**
Non-fiction, 90 minutes, 3D, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producers:_ Erik Nelson, Adrienne Ciuffo
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Eric Spitzer
_Music:_ Ernst Reijseger
_Production Companies:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Creative Differences, ARTE
_Locations:_ Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, France
_Participants:_ Jean Clottes, Julien Monney, Jean-Michel Geneste, Michel Philippe
_Premiere:_ September 2010, Toronto Film Festival
2010
**Happy People: A Year in the Taiga**
Non-fiction, 90 minutes, Video, colour
_Director:_ Dmitry Vasyukov
_Co-Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producers:_ Christoph Fisser, Vladimir Perepelkin, Nick N. Raslan, Charlie Woebcken
_Camera:_ Alexy Matveev, Gleb Stephanov, Arthur Sibirski, Michael Tarkovsky
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Robert Getty
_Music:_ Klaus Badelt
_Production Company:_ Studio Babelsberg
_Location:_ Siberia, Russia
_Premiere:_ November 2010, Germany
2011
**Ode to the Dawn of Man**
Non-fiction, 30 minutes, Video, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Camera:_ Werner Herzog
_Editor:_ Maya Hawke
_Sound:_ Werner Herzog
_Music:_ Ernst Reijseger
_Production Company:_ Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
_Location:_ Haarlem, The Netherlands
_Participants:_ Ernst Reijseger, Sean Bergin, Harmen Fraanje
_Premiere:_ September 2011, Telluride Film Festival
2011
**Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life**
Non-fiction, 107 minutes, HDCAM, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Erik Nelson
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Steve Osmon
_Music:_ Mark De Gli Antoni
_Production Companies:_ Creative Differences, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
_Location:_ Texas
_Participants:_ Michael Perry, Jason Burkett, Richard Lopez, Lisa Stotler-Balloun, Jared Talbert, Damon Hall
_Premiere:_ September 2011, Toronto Film Festival
2012–13
**On Death Row**
Non-fiction, 8 × 52 minutes, HDCAM, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ Erik Nelson
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger, Dave Roberson
_Editors:_ Joe Bini, Marco Capalbo
_Sound:_ Steve Osmon
_Music:_ Mark De Gli Antoni
_Production Companies:_ Creative Differences, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
_Locations:_ Texas, Florida
_Participants:_ James Barnes, Joseph Garcia, George Rivas, Hank Skinner, Linda Carty, Blaine Milam, Darlie Routier, Douglas Feldman, Robert Fratta
_Premiere:_ February 2012, Berlin Film Festival; August 2013, Locarno Film Festival
2013
**From One Second to the Next**
Non-fiction, 35 minutes, HDCAM, colour
_Director:_ Werner Herzog
_Producer:_ George Sholley
_Camera:_ Peter Zeitlinger
_Editor:_ Joe Bini
_Sound:_ Steve Osmon
_Music:_ Mark De Gli Antoni
_Production Companies:_ AT&T, Verizon Communications
_Locations:_ Wisconsin, Indiana, Vermont, Utah
_Participants:_ Xzavier Davis-Bilbo, Reggie Shaw, Debbie Drewniak, Chandler Gerber
_Premiere:_ August 2013, Locarno Film Festival
OPERA STAGINGS
1985 _Doktor Faust_ (Busoni), Teatro Comunale, Bologna
1987 _Lohengrin_ (Wagner), Richard-Wagner-Festspielhaus, Bayreuth
1989 _Giovanna d'Arco_ (Verdi), Teatro Comunale, Bologna
1991 _Die Zauberflöte_ (Mozart), Teatro Bellini, Catania
1992 _La donna del lago_ (Rossini), Teatro La Scala, Milan
1993 _Der fliegende Holländer_ (Wagner), Opera Bastille, Paris 1994 _Il Guarany_ (Gomes), Bonn Opera
1994 _Norma_ (Bellini), Arena di Verona
1996 _Il Guarany_ (Gomes), the Washington Opera
1997 _Chusingura_ (Saegusa), Opera Tokyo
1997 _Tannhäuser_ (Wagner), Teatro de la Maestranza, Sevilla
1997 _Tannhäuser_ (Wagner), Opera Royal de Wallonie, Liège
1998 _Tannhäuser_ (Wagner), Teatro di San Carlo, Naples
1998 _Tannhäuser_ (Wagner), Teatro Massimo, Palermo
1999 _Tannhäuser_ (Wagner), Teatro Real, Madrid
1999 _Die Zauberflöte_ (Mozart), Teatro Bellini, Catania
1999 _Tannhäuser_ (Wagner), Teatro Real, Madrid
1999 _Fidelio_ (Beethoven), Teatro La Scala, Milan
2000 _Tannhäuser_ (Wagner), Baltimore Opera Company
2001 _Giovanna d'Arco_ (Verdi), Teatro Carlo Felice, Genua
2001 _Tannhäuser_ (Wagner), Teatro Municipal, Rio de Janeiro
2001 _Tannhäuser_ (Wagner), Grand Opera, Houston
2001 _Die Zauberflöte_ (Mozart), Baltimore Opera Company
2002 _Der fliegende Holländer_ (Wagner), Domstufen Festspiele, Erfurt
2003 _Fidelio_ (Beethoven), Teatro La Scala, Milan
2008 _Parsifal_ (Wagner), Palau de les Arts, Valencia
2013 _I due Foscari_ (Verdi), Teatro dell'Opera, Rome
# Index
1. Abelard, Pierre, 1
2. Aborigines, Australian, 1, 2, 3, 4
3. Abu Sayyaf, 1
4. Achternbusch, Herbert, 1, 2, 3, 4
5. _Act of Killing, The_ (Oppenheimer), 1
6. Adair, Red, 1
7. Ades, Daniel, 1
8. Adorf, Mario, 1
9. Aeschylus, 1
10. Aguarunas, 1, 2
11. _Aguirre, the Wrath of God:_ budget, 1, 2, 3;
1. cameraman, 1, 2;
2. character of Aguirre, 1, 2, 3, 4;
3. distribution, 1;
4. editing, 1;
5. filming, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
6. final shot, 1;
7. genre, 1;
8. humour, 1;
9. hypnotised audience, 1;
10. Indian extras, 1;
11. influences, 1, 2;
12. Kinski in, 1, 2, 3, 4;
13. landscapes, 1;
14. language, 1;
15. making, 1, 2, 3, 4;
16. monkeys, 1;
17. mood, 1;
18. music, 1;
19. opening sequence, 1, 2, 3;
20. poster, 1;
21. preproduction, 1, 2, 3, 4;
22. rejected by Cannes, 1;
23. release, 1;
24. responses to, 1, 2n, 3, 4;
25. shipping of exposed negative, 1;
26. soundtrack, 1;
27. story, 1, 2;
28. surreal qualities, 1;
29. time in, 1;
30. voiceover, 1;
31. working with actors, 1
12. Ahola, Jouko, 1
13. Ainley, David, 1
14. Akhenaten, 1, 2
15. _Akzente: Zeitschrift für Literatur,_ 1
16. Alaska, 1, 2, 3, 4
17. Alexander, Peter, 1
18. Ali, Muhammad, 1, 2
19. _All the Pretty Horses_ (McCarthy), 1
20. Allen, Fred, 1
21. Altdorfer, Albrecht, 1, 2
22. Amahuacas, 1
23. _America, America_ (Kazan), 1
24. Amnesty International, 1
25. Amundsen, Roald, 1, 2
26. Andrade, Joaquim Pedro de, 1
27. Angelopoulos, Theo, 1
28. Angelyne, 1
29. Anger, Kenneth, 1
30. _Apocalypse Now_ (Coppola), 1
31. Archimedes, 1
32. Archivo General de Las Indias (Seville), 1
33. Arizona State University Origins Project, 1, 2
34. Astaire, Fred, 1, 2, 3
35. Astor, André, 1
36. AT&T, 1
37. _Atlantis_ space shuttle, 1
38. Ayak Brothers, 1
39. Aztecs, 1, 2, 3, 4
1. Baader-Meinhof Group/Red Army Faction, 1
2. _Bacchae, The_ (Euripides), 1
3. Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1, 2
4. _Bad Lieutenant_ (Ferrara), 1
5. _Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans:_ budget, 1;
1. Cage in, 1, 2, 3;
2. character, 1;
6. 1. editing, 1, 2;
2. final scene, 1;
3. humour, 1;
4. music, 1;
5. New Orleans setting, 1;
6. opening sequence, 1;
7. place in Herzog's career, 1, 2;
8. script, 1, 2;
9. title, 1
7. Badelt, Klaus, 1
8. Bailey, John, 1
9. Baker, J. A., 1
10. Bale, Christian, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
11. _Ballad of the Little Soldier_ , 1, 2
12. Barnes, James, 1, 2
13. Bart, Gary, 1, 2
14. _Battle of Alexander_ (Altdorfer), 1
15. _Battle of Algiers, The_ (Pontecorvo), 1, 2
16. Bavaria: dialect, 1, 2, 3, 4;
1. fighting, 1;
2. folklore, 1;
3. _Heart of Glass_ filming, 1;
4. Herzog's childhood, 1;
5. Herzog's feeling for, 1, 2, 3, 4;
6. landscapes, 1, 2, 3;
7. police, 1;
8. ski flying, 1;
9. traditional costumes, 1;
10. white supremacists, 1
17. Bayern Munich, 1, 2
18. Bayreuth Wagner Festival, 1, 2, 3, 4
19. BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 1, 2
20. Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1
21. Behan, Brendan, 1
22. Belaúnde, Fernando, 1, 2
23. _Bells from the Deep_ , 1, 2, 3
24. Ben Bella, Ahmed, 1
25. Benedict XVI, Pope, 1
26. Bergfelder, Ulrich, 1, 2
27. Bergman, Ingmar, 1
28. Berlin Film Festival, 1, 2, 3, 4
29. Bernhard, Thomas, 1
30. Berriff, Paul, 1
31. Bierbichler, Josef, 1
32. Bini, Joe, 1, 2, 3
33. _Birth of a Nation, The_ (Griffith), 1
34. Blank, Les: _Burden of Dreams_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
1. haircut, 1;
2. _Spend It All_ , 1;
3. _Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe_ , 1
35. Bogart, Humphrey, 1, 2, 3
36. _Bohème, La_ (Herzog's film), 1
37. _Bohème, La_ (Puccini), 1
38. Bokassa, Jean-Bédel, 1, 2, 3, 4
39. Bonavena, Oscar, 1
40. Borra, 1
41. Bosch, Hieronymus, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
42. Boumediene, Houari, 1
43. Bowie, David, 1
44. Bowser, Sam, 1
45. Brakhage, Stan, 1
46. Brando, Marlon, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
47. Brandt, Willy, 1
48. Brecht, Bertolt, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
49. Breer, Robert, 1n
50. Breitbart, Zishe, 1, 2, 3
51. Bresson, Robert, 1, 2
52. Brogle, Peter, 1, 2, 3
53. _Broken Blossoms_ (Griffith), 1
54. Bronson, Charles, 1
55. Brooks, Mel, 1
56. Browning, Tod, 1
57. Brueghel, Pieter, 1, 2
58. Brümmer, Henning, 1
59. Bruno S. (Bruno Schleinstein): background, 1, 2, 3, 4;
1. casting, 1;
2. character, 1, 2, 3, 4;
3. death, 1;
4. _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
5. name, 1, 2;
6. quality as an actor, 1, 2;
7. relationship with Herzog, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
8. _Stroszek_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
60. _Bruno the Black_ (Eisholz), 1
61. _Brutalisation of Franz Blum, The_ (Driest), 1
62. _Brutus_ , 1
63. Buba and Buka, 1
64. Bubb, Les, 1
65. Büchner, Georg, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
66. Bulgakov, Mikhail, 1
67. _Bundesfilmpreis_ , 1, 2
68. Buñuel, Luis, 1, 2, 3
69. _Burden of Dreams_ (Blank), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
70. Burkett, Delbert, 1
71. Burkett, Jason, 1, 2, 3, 4
72. Burkett, Melyssa, 1, 2
73. Busoni, Ferruccio, 1
1. Cage, Nicolas, 1, 2, 3
2. California, 1, 2, 3, 4
3. 4. Cameron, James, 1
5. Cameroon, 1, 2, 3
6. Camus, Albert, 1
7. Cannes Film Festival, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
8. Caravaggio, 1
9. Cardinale, Claudia, 1, 2, 3, 4
10. Carissimi, Giacomo, 1
11. Carl Hanser Verlag, 1, 2
12. Carl Mayer Award, 1, 2
13. Carnac, 1, 2
14. Carney, Ray, 1
15. Caruso, Enrico, 1, 2, 3, 4
16. _Casablanca_ (Curtiz), 1
17. _Cave of Forgotten Dreams_ : access to cave, 1, 2;
1. crocodiles, 1;
2. filming in 1D, 2, 3;
3. landscape, 1;
4. music, 1;
5. paintings, 1, 2;
6. Palaeolithic hunting, 1;
7. smells, 1;
8. soundtrack, 1;
9. vision of prehistory, 1, 2;
10. voiceover, 1
18. Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 1
19. Central African Republic, 1, 2, 3, 4
20. Cerro Torre, 1, 2
21. Chandler, Raymond, 1
22. Chaplin, Charlie, 1
23. Charlemagne, 1
24. _charreadas_ , 1
25. Chatwin, Bruce: dying, 1;
1. on Aborigine singing, 1;
2. on Herzog, 1, 2n;
3. on travelling, 1;
4. relationship with Herzog, 1;
5. writings, 1, 2, 3, 4n
26. Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave, 1
27. _Cheers_ , 1
28. Chevalier, Maurice, 1
29. Chiarini, Claude, 1
30. Christianity: _Bells from the Deep_ , 1;
1. capital punishment, 1;
2. Creation story, 1;
3. early, 1;
4. Icelandic, 1;
5. iconography, 1;
6. Jesus Christ, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
7. _The Lord and the Laden_ , 1;
8. _Pilgrimage_ , 1, 2;
9. relics, 1;
10. televangelist, 1;
11. varieties of, 1, 2
31. _Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, The_ (Straub), 1
32. Chumack, Alan, 1
33. Churchill, Winston, 1
34. CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 1, 2, 3, 4
35. Ciconia, Johannes, 1
36. _Cine Nõvo_ , 1
37. _cinéma-vérité_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
38. Cinémathèque Française, 1, 2
39. Clemente, Jean, 1
40. _Close-up_ (Kiarostami), 1
41. Clottes, Jean, 1
42. Clovis, King, 1
43. _Cobra Verde_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
44. Codax, Martim, 1, 2
45. _Codex Florentino_ , 1, 2, 3
46. _Codex Regius_ , 1, 2
47. _Codex Telleriano-Remensis_ , 1
48. Cole, Joe, 1
49. _Collected Works of Billy the Kid, The_ (Ondaatje), 1
50. Commynes, Philippe de, 1
51. Conrad, Joseph, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
52. Cooper, Gary, 1, 2
53. Copernicus, 1
54. Coppola, Francis, 1
55. Corman, Roger, 1
56. _Coronation Mass_ (Mozart), 1
57. Cortés, Hernán, 1, 2, 3, 4
58. Couperin, François, 1
59. Crete, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
60. Cruise, Tom, 1, 2
61. Cuénod, Hugues, 1
1. da Silva, Francisco Manoel, 1, 2, 3
2. _Dahomey as It Is_ (Skertchly), 1
3. Dalai Lama, 1, 2
4. Danilov, Viktor, 1
5. Dante, 1, 2
6. _Dark Glow of the Mountains, The_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
7. Davies, Jeremy, 1
8. _Death for Five Voices_ , 1, 2
9. Delft, 1, 2
10. Dengler, Dieter, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
11. Deutsche Kinemathek Museum für Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), 1
12. _deuxième souffle, Le_ (Melville), 1
13. Dibble, Charles, 1, 2
14. DiCaprio, Leonardo, 1
15. Diehl, Roger, 1
16. Dinkelsbühl, 1n
17. _Dirty Harry_ (Siegel), 1
18. 19. _Dr Strangelove_ (Kubrick), 1
20. _Doktor Faust_ (Busoni), 1
21. Domingo, Plácido, 1, 2
22. Dorrington, Graham, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
23. dos Santos, Nelson Pereira, 1
24. Dourif, Brad, 1, 2
25. Dovzhenko, Alexander, 1
26. Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 1, 2
27. Driest, Burkhard, 1
28. Dürer, Albrecht, 1
29. Dylan, Bob, 1
1. _Earth_ (Dovzhenko), 1
2. Eastwood, Clint, 1
3. _Eccentric Private Theatre of the Maharaja of Udaipur, The,_ 1
4. _Echoes from a Sombre Empire_ , 1, 2
5. Eddas, 1, 2
6. Edols, Michael, 1
7. _Eika Katappa_ (Schroeter), 1, 2
8. Einstein, Albert, 1, 2, 3, 4
9. Eisenstein, Sergei, 1, 2
10. Eisholz, Lutz, 1
11. Eisner, Lotte, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
12. _Elephant Man, The_ (Lynch), 1
13. Emshwiller, Ed, 1
14. _Encounters at the End of the World_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
15. _Enfant sauvage, L'_ (Truffaut), 1
16. English National Opera, 1
17. _Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, The_ : Bruno S. in, 1, 2, 3, 4;
1. budget, 1;
2. cameraman, 1, 2;
3. character of Kaspar Hauser, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
4. chickens in, 1, 2;
5. death scene, 1, 2;
6. distribution, 1;
7. dream sequences, 1;
8. editing, 1;
9. elements of science fiction, 1;
10. extras, 1;
11. filming, 1, 2;
12. German Romantic tradition, 1;
13. music, 1, 2;
14. opening, 1, 2;
15. preproduction, 1;
16. release, 1;
17. story, 1, 2;
18. title, 1;
19. watching, 1, 2
18. _Eraserhead_ (Lynch), 1
19. _Escape from Laos_ (Dengler), 1, 2
20. Euripides, 1, 2, 3
21. _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ : animals in, 1;
1. cameraman, 1;
2. characters, 1, 2;
3. chickens, 1;
4. compared to _Freaks_ , 1;
5. dwarfs in, 1;
6. editing, 1;
7. filming, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
8. humour, 1, 2;
9. influence, 1, 2;
10. influences on, 1, 2;
11. landscape, 1;
12. music, 1;
13. nightmarish, 1;
14. politics, 1, 2;
15. responses to, 1;
16. screenplay, 1;
17. setting, 1;
18. sound, 1
1. Fabius Maximus, 1
2. _Faerie Queene, The_ (Spenser), 1
3. Fährer, Else, 1
4. Fallico, Dr Franc, 1
5. Fanck, Arnold, 1
6. Farouk, King of Egypt, 1
7. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 1, 2, 3, 4
8. _Fata Morgana_ : cameraman, 1, 2, 3, 4;
1. editing, 1;
2. elements of science fiction, 1, 2, 3, 4;
3. filming, 1, 2, 3, 4;
4. filming problems, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
5. influences on, 1, 2;
6. landscape, 1, 2, 3;
7. mirages, 1;
8. music, 1, 2, 3, 4;
9. opening sequence, 1;
10. people in, 1, 2, 3;
11. release, 1;
12. responses to, 1, 2, 3;
13. voiceover, 1
9. Faulkner, William, 1, 2
10. _Faust_ (Goethe), 1
11. Fellini, Federico, 1, 2
12. Ferrara, Abel, 1
13. _Film as a Subversive Art_ (Vogel), 1
14. _Film/Fernsehen Abkommen_ , 1
15. _Film Lessons_ , 1, 2, 3;
1. "Orientation in Film," 1
16. film magazines, 1
17. film schools, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
18. Filmverlag der Autoren, 1
19. films about filmmakers, 1
20. Finkelstein, William, 1, 2
21. _Finnegans Wake_ (Joyce), 1
22. Firdusi, 1
23. Fischer, Tony, 1
24. Fitzcarrald, Carlos Fermín, 1, 2
25. _Fitzcarraldo_ : bell-tower sequence, 1;
1. budget, 1, 2;
2. _Burden of Dreams_ , 1, 2;
3. _see also Burden of Dreams_ ;
4. casting, 1, 2, 3;
5. character of Fitzcarraldo, 1, 2, 3;
26. 1. controversies, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
2. filming, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
3. filming problems, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;
4. Herzog's journals, 1, 2, 3;
5. independent production, 1;
6. Indians in, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
7. Kinski in, 1, 2, 3, 4;
8. landscape, 1;
9. language, 1;
10. music, 1, 2;
11. opening, 1;
12. origins, 1;
13. pre-production, 1, 2, 3;
14. responses to, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
15. script, 1, 2, 3;
16. story, 1, 2;
17. travelling in, 1
27. Flatow, Ira, 1
28. Fleischmann, Peter, 1, 2, 3, 4
29. _Flying Doctors of East Africa, The_ , 1, 2, 3, 4
30. Ford, John, 1
31. Foreman, George, 1
32. _Fran_ ç _ais vus par_... _Les Gauloises, Les_ , 1, 2
33. Franklin family, 1, 2
34. _Freaks_ (Browning), 1
35. Freyse, Gunther, 1
36. Fricke, Florian (Popol Vuh): death, 1;
1. friendship with Herzog, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
2. music, 1;
3. Popol Vuh, 1, 2;
4. roles, 1, 2;
5. view of Herzog, 1
37. Friedrich, Caspar David, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
38. _From One Second to the Next_ , 1, 2, 3
1. Galileo, 1, 2
2. _Galileo_ space probe, 1, 2
3. Gallardo, Alberto, 1
4. _Game in the Sand_ , 1
5. García Márquez _,_ Gabriel, 1
6. _Gargantua and Pantagruel_ (Rabelais), 1
7. Gasherbrum, 1
8. _Gates of Heaven_ (Morris), 1
9. Gein, Ed, 1
10. Genghis Khan, 1
11. genius, concept of, 1, 2, 3
12. _Georgics_ (Virgil), 1, 2
13. German cinema, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;
1. _see also_ New German Cinema
14. German culture, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
15. German expressionism, 1
16. German language, 1, 2, 3, 4
17. German reunification, 1
18. Gert, Valeska, 1
19. _Geschichten vom Kübelkind_ (Reitz), 1
20. Gesualdo, Carlo, 1, 2, 3, 4
21. Getty, Paul, 1
22. Ghana, 1, 2, 3, 4
23. Gibson, Mel, 1
24. Gierke, Henning von, 1
25. _Giovanna d'Arco_ (Verdi), 1
26. Glowacz, Stefan, 1, 2
27. Godard, Jean-Luc, 1, 2
28. _God's Angry Man_ , 1
29. Goebbels, Joseph, 1
30. Goethe, Johann von, 1, 2
31. Golder, Herb: career, 1, 2n;
1. _Invincible_ , 1;
2. memories of Herzog, 1, 2, 3;
3. _My Son, My Son_ , 1;
4. on _Herzog on Herzog_ , 1;
5. relationship with Herzog, 1;
6. "Shooting on the Lam," 1, 2
32. Goldsmith, Michael, 1, 2, 3
33. Goldwyn, Sam, 1
34. _Gospel According to St Matthew, The_ (Pasolini), 1
35. Gounod, Charles, 1
36. Goya, Francisco, 1, 2, 3, 4
37. _Grand, The_ (Penn), 1
38. Grass, Günter, 1, 2
39. Graves, Robert, 1
40. Grayson, Jerry, 1
41. _Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, The_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
42. Greenberg, Alan, 1
43. _Grenzstationen_ (TV series), 1
44. Griffith, D. W., 1, 2, 3
45. _Grizzly Man_ : Amie Huguenard's role, 1;
1. audio recording of Treadwell's death, 1;
2. budget, 1;
3. character of Timothy Treadwell, 1, 2, 3, 4;
4. coroner's account, 1;
5. music, 1, 2;
6. production, 1;
7. responses to, 1;
8. story, 1;
9. Sundance Film Festival, 1;
10. Treadwell's footage, 1, 2;
11. 12. views of nature, 1, 2, 3;
13. voiceover, 1, 2, 3, 4
46. Gropius, Walter, 1
47. Groszer, Oliver, 1
48. Grünewald, Matthias, 1, 2
49. Grupe, Norbert, 1
50. Gryphius, Andreas, 1
51. Guadeloupe, 1, 2
52. _Guarany, Il_ (Gomes), 1
53. Guatemala, 1, 2
54. Guerra, Ruy, 1
55. _Guinness Book of World Records_ , 1
56. _Gummo_ (Korine), 1
57. Günther, Johann Christian, 1
58. Gutendorf, Rudi, 1
1. Hafez, 1
2. Hammett, Dashiell, 1
3. _Handicapped Future_ , 1, 2
4. Handke, Peter, 1, 2, 3
5. Hannibal, 1
6. Hanussen, Erik Jan, 1
7. _Happy People_ , 1
8. Hawks, Howard, 1
9. _Heart of Darkness_ (Conrad), 1
10. _Heart of Glass_ : bar-room brawl, 1;
1. casting, 1, 2;
2. character of Hias, 1, 2;
3. cinematography, 1, 2, 3, 4;
4. filming, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
5. final sequence, 1;
6. grading, 1, 2;
7. hypnosis of actors, 1, 2;
8. landscape, 1, 2;
9. music, 1;
10. publication of screenplay, 1;
11. responses to, 1, 2;
12. special effects, 1;
13. story, 1;
14. title, 1
11. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1
12. Heidegger, Martin, 1, 2
13. _Heimatfilm_ , 1
14. Heinemann, Gustav, 1
15. Heller, André, 1
16. Hemingway, Ernest, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
17. Hepburn, Katharine, 1
18. _Herakles_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
19. Herondas, 1
20. Herzog, Dietrich (father), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
21. Herzog, Elizabeth (mother): bringing up three sons, 1, 2;
1. death, 1;
2. divorce, 1;
3. education, 1;
4. life in Sachrang, 1, 2;
5. lodgings, 1;
6. music, 1;
7. name, 1;
8. political views, 1;
9. relationship with Fini, 1;
10. son Werner's career, 1, 2, 3;
11. son Werner's education, 1;
12. son Werner's illness, 1;
13. son Werner's language, 1;
14. son Werner's religion, 1;
15. struggle to feed children, 1, 2, 3;
16. wartime experiences, 1, 2
22. Herzog, Lena (wife), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
23. Herzog, Rudolph (grandfather), 1, 2, 3, 4
24. Herzog, Rudolph (son): birth, 1;
1. childhood, 1, 2, 3;
2. father's name, 1;
3. names, 1;
4. _The White_
5. _Diamond_ , 1
25. Herzog, Tilbert (brother): career, 1, 2;
1. character, 1;
2. childhood, 1, 2, 3, 4;
3. financial help from, 1;
4. football, 1
26. Herzog, Werner acting, 1, 2, 3, 4
1. "adequate imagery," 1, 2
2. aesthetics, 1, 2, 3
3. America, 1
4. animals, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
5. anthropology, 1, 2
6. art, 1
7. athletics, 1, 2
8. audiences: bored or captivated, 1;
1. film festivals, 1, 2;
2. German, 1, 2;
3. Herzog's respect for, 1;
4. Herzog's strategies, 1, 2, 3, 4;
5. hypnotised, 1;
6. importance to Herzog, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
7. international, 1, 2;
8. laughter, 1, 2, 3;
9. opera, 1, 2;
10. relationship with filmmakers, 1, 2;
11. response to silence, 1;
12. responses to _Aguirre_ , 1, 2;
13. responses to _Cave of Forgotten Dreams_ , 1;
14. responses to Encounters at the End of the _World_ , 1;
15. responses to _The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_ , 1, 2;
16. responses to _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ , 1;
17. responses to _Fata Morgana_ , 1, 2, 3;
18. responses to _Fitzcarraldo_ , 1, 2, 3, 4;
19. responses to _From One Second to the Next_ , 1;
20. 21. responses to Herzog's films, 1;
22. responses to hypnotised actors, 1;
23. responses to _Into the Abyss_ , 1;
24. responses to _Land of Silence and Darkness_ , 1;
25. responses to _Lessons of Darkness_ , 1;
26. responses to _Nosferatu_ , 1;
27. size, 1, 2;
28. theatre, 1;
29. views and interviews, 1
9. auto-didacticism, 1, 2, 3
10. ballet, 1
11. Bavarian dialect, 1, 2, 3, 4
12. boredom, 1, 2, 3
13. capital punishment, 1, 2
14. Catholicism, 1, 2, 3, 4
15. character motivation, 1
16. characters, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
17. childhood, 1, 2, 3, 4
18. _cinéma-vérité_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
19. collaborators, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
20. communication, 1, 2, 3
21. cooking, 1, 2, 3, 4
22. dance, 1, 2, 3, 4
23. deserts, 1, 2, 3
24. disappointment, 1, 2, 3
25. discipline, 1, 2, 3, 4
26. documentary cinema, 1, 2, 3
27. dreaming, 1, 2, 3, 4
28. drugs, 1
29. ecstasy/ecstatic: Bacchic, 1;
1. concept, 1;
2. Herzog's position, 1, 2;
3. filmmaking, 1;
4. landscapes, 1, 2, 3;
5. ski flyers, 1, 2;
6. truth, 1, 2;
7. Wodaabe tribesmen, 1, 2
30. editing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
31. environmental destruction, 1, 2
32. ethnography, 1
33. exploration, 1, 2, 3, 4
34. facial hair, 1, 2
35. family of characters, 1, 2, 3
36. fear, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
37. film crews, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
38. film festivals, 1
39. film-going, 1, 2, 3
40. film preservation, 1
41. film schools, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
42. films (as director), _see under individual_ titles
43. finance and money: _Aguirre_ budget, 1;
1. attitudes to film finance, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
2. awards, 1, 2, 3;
3. editing, 1;
4. expenses, 1, 2, 3;
5. film preservation, 1;
6. film production company, 1, 2;
7. financial crisis (2008), 1;
8. _Fitzcarraldo_ , 1;
9. lifestyle, 1;
10. _My Best Fiend_ funding, 1;
11. _My Son, My Son_ financing, 1;
12. paying extras, 1;
13. projects, 1;
14. publishing screenplays, 1;
15. raising money, 1, 2;
16. _Rescue Dawn_ financing, 1;
17. subsidy system, 1;
18. trade unions, 1;
19. Twentieth Century Fox, 1
44. foolishness of filmmakers, 1
45. football: assessing players, 1;
46. childhood interest, 1, 2;
1. favourite players, 1;
2. film director as football coach, 1;
3. goalkeeping, 1;
4. imaginary match, 1;
5. injuries, 1, 2;
6. playing for Munich team, 1, 2, 3;
7. playing in Peru, 1;
8. thinking about, 1;
9. understanding of, 1;
10. watching matches on television, 1
47. forgery, 1, 2, 3, 4
48. God, 1, 2, 3n, 4
49. gravity, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
50. gun-runner story, 1
51. happiness, 1, 2, 3, 4
52. health: altitude sickness, 1;
1. antibiotics, 1, 2;
2. broken leg, 1;
3. cacti spines, 1;
4. childhood illness, 1;
5. football injuries, 1, 2;
6. illness on the Nile, 1;
7. malaria and bilharzia, 1;
8. pain relief, 1, 2;
9. rodeo injuries, 1;
10. snowmobile injury, 1;
11. whiplash, 1
53. hobbies, 1
54. hotels, 1, 2, 3
55. house-breaking, 1
56. humour, 1, 2
57. 58. hypnotism, 1, 2, 3, 4
59. ideology, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
60. improvisation, 1
61. independent film, 1, 2
62. influences, 1, 2, 3, 4
63. interviewing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
64. irony, 1, 2
65. isolation, 1
66. jungles: _Aguirre_ filming, 1, 2, 3;
1. bird noises, 1;
2. _Fitzcarraldo_ filming, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
3. landscapes, 1;
4. _Little Dieter_ filming, 1;
5. _My Best Fiend_ filming, 1;
6. preparations for filming, 1, 2;
7. _Rescue Dawn_ filming, 1;
8. view of, 1n;
9. _The White Diamond_ filming, 1, 2;
10. _Wings of Hope_ , 1
67. landscapes: Aborigine songs, 1;
1. African, 1;
2. _Aguirre_ , 1, 2;
3. Alaska, 1, 2;
4. Antarctic, 1, 2;
5. Chauvet, 1;
6. desert, 1, 2, 3;
7. directing, 1;
8. ecstatic, 1, 2, 3;
9. embarrassed, 1, 2;
10. "Fantastic Landscapes" discussion, 1;
11. _Fata Morgana_ , 1, 2, 3;
12. grandfather's influence, 1;
13. _Heart of Glass_ , 1, 2;
14. inner, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
15. jungle, 1;
16. _Lessons of Darkness_ , 1, 2;
17. _Nosferatu_ , 1;
18. Segers's work, 1;
19. starting point of films, 1, 2;
20. travelling through, 1, 2
68. languages: Bavarian dialect, 1, 2, 3, 4;
1. English, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
2. French, 1;
3. Greek, 1, 2, 3, 4;
4. Latin, 1, 2;
5. Nahuatl, 1, 2;
6. Spanish, 1, 2, 3
69. legitimacy, 1, 2
70. livestock auctioneers, 1
71. locations, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
72. lock picking, 1, 2, 3
73. Middle Ages, 1, 2
74. Minnesota Declaration, 1, 2, 3
75. money, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
76. museums, 1
77. music, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
78. New German Cinema, 1
79. nomadism, 1, 2, 3
80. opera: Bayreuth Wagner Festival, 1, 2;
1. _La Bohème_ , 1;
2. _Doktor Faust_ , 1;
3. _Fitzcarraldo_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
4. _The Flying Dutchman_ , 1;
5. individual performances, 1;
6. _Lohengrin_ , 1, 2, 3;
7. other people's productions, 1;
8. productions, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
9. reading music, 1;
10. response to Wagner, 1;
11. silence in, 1;
12. _Tannhäuser_ , 1;
13. working with opera singers, 1
81. overcrowding of the planet, 1
82. pain, 1
83. photography, 1
84. Photoshop, 1, 2
85. poetry, 1, 2
86. producing, 1, 2, 3
87. production company, 1, 2, 3, 4
88. propaganda, 1, 2
89. pseudo-reality, 1
90. psychology, 1
91. publishing company, 1
92. reading reviews, 1
93. rehearsing, 1, 2
94. religion, 1, 2, 3, 4
95. restaurants, 1
96. revenge, 1
97. risk-taking, 1, 2, 3, 4
98. Rogue Film School, _see_ Rogue Film School
99. Romanticism, 1
100. school, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
101. screenwriting, 1, 2
102. self-promotion, 1
103. self-reliance, 1, 2, 3, 4
104. shoe eating, 1
105. singing, 1
106. ski flying, 1
107. slateboard, 1
108. solitude, 1, 2, 3
109. sound in film, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
110. spatial awareness, 1, 2, 3
111. story, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
112. 113. storyboarding, 1
114. strongmen, 1, 2, 3
115. sublime, 1
116. tattoo, 1
117. telephones, 1, 2, 3, 4
118. television, 1, 2, 3
119. theatre, 1, 2
120. themes in films, 1, 2
121. Third Reich, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
122. trade unions, 1
123. travel, 1, 2;
1. Africa, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
2. Amazon, 1, 2, 3, 4;
3. Antarctica, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
4. Congo, 1, 2;
5. Crete, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
6. Egypt, 1;
7. England, 1, 2, 3;
8. Greece, 1, 2;
9. Mexico, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
10. Peru, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;
11. Sudan, 1, 2;
12. Thailand, 1, 2, 3, 4;
13. United States, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
124. university, 1, 2, 3, 4
125. Vienna, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
126. voyeurism, 1
127. walking, 1, 2, 3, 4
128. West Germany, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
129. Wrestlemania, 1, 2
130. writings (as author or translator):
1. _Collected Works of Billy the Kid_ ,
2. _The_ (Ondaatje), 1;
3. _Conquest of the Useless_ , 1, 2, 3, 4;
4. novel (unfinished), 1;
5. _Of Walking in Ice_ , 1, 2, 3;
6. "On the Absolute, the Sublime and Ecstatic Truth," 1;
7. poetry, 1
131. yoga, 1, 2, 3
132. zoos, 1, 2, 3
27. Hessischer Rundfunk, 1
28. Higgins, Dick, 1n
29. Hilton, Conrad, 1
30. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1, 2, 3
31. Hitchens, Christopher, 1
32. Hitler, Adolf: attitudes to, 1, 2, 3, 4;
1. death, 1n;
2. Eisner's career, 1;
3. film culture after, 1, 2;
4. invasion of Russia, 1;
5. legacy, 1;
6. rise to power, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
7. Wagner connection, 1
33. Hölderlin, Friedrich, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
34. Hombrecito, 1, 2
35. Houphouët-Boigny, Félix, 1
36. _How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck,_ 1
37. Huguenard, Amie, 1, 2, 3, 4
38. _Huie's Sermon_ , 1
39. _Hunting Scenes in Bavaria_ (Fleischmann), 1, 2
40. Hurricane Gustav, 1
41. Hurricane Katrina, 1
42. Hussein, Saddam, 1
43. Huston, John, 1
1. Iceland, 1, 2, 3, 4
2. _In Patagonia_ (Chatwin), 1
3. _Incident at Loch Ness_ (Penn), 1, 2, 3
4. _Institut für Filmgestaltung_ , 1
5. _Into the Abyss_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
6. _Invincible_ : casting, 1, 2;
1. character of Hanussen, 1;
2. character of Zishe, 1, 2;
3. crabs in, 1, 2;
4. editing, 1;
5. filming, 1;
6. Golder's role, 1n;
7. green-screen shot, 1;
8. hypnosis in, 1, 2;
9. influences on, 1;
10. music, 1;
11. return scene, 1;
12. story, 1, 2
7. _Iphigenia_ (Goethe), 1
8. Ireland, 1, 2, 3, 4
9. _Ivan the Terrible_ (Eisenstein), 1
1. _Jack Reacher_ (McQuarrie), 1, 2
2. Jacob, Ken, 1
3. Jagger, Mick, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
4. Jesus Christ, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
5. Johnson Space Center, 1, 2
6. Josse, Claude, 1
7. Joyce, James, 1
8. _julien donkey-boy_ (Korine), 1, 2
1. Kael, Pauline, 1
2. Kafka, Franz, 1, 2, 3
3. Kagel, Mauricio, 1
4. Kailash, Mount, 1
5. Kaiser, Henry, 1, 2, 3, 4
6. Kammerlander, Hans, 1, 2, 3
7. Kapuściński, Ryszard, 1
8. _Katzelmacher_ (Fassbinder), 1
9. Käutner, Helmut, 1
10. Kazan, Elia, 1
11. Keaton, Buster, 1, 2
12. Keller, Helen, 1
13. Kempis, Thomas à, 1
14. Khayyám, Omar, 1
15. Khmer Rouge, 1
16. Khun Sa, 1
17. Kiarostami, Abbas, 1, 2
18. _Kinder, Mütter und ein General_ (Benedek), 1
19. Kinski, Klaus: _Aguirre_ casting, 1, 2;
1. _Aguirre_ filming, 1, 2;
2. Aguirre performance, 1, 2, 3;
3. attitude to money, 1, 2, 3;
4. autobiography, 1;
5. behaviour while filming _Aguirre_ , 1, 2;
6. behaviour while filming _Cobra Verde_ , 1, 2, 3, 4;
7. behaviour while filming _Fitzcarraldo_ , 1, 2, 3;
8. behaviour while filming _Nosferatu_ , 1;
9. _Burden of Dreams_ , 1;
10. character, 1, 2, 3, 4;
11. childhood, 1;
12. _Cobra Verde_ casting, 1;
13. death, 1, 2;
14. film direction, 1;
15. _Fitzcarraldo_ casting, 1, 2;
16. _Fitzcarraldo_ filming, 1, 2, 3;
17. _Jesus Christus Erlöser_ tour, 1;
18. Kuhlman project, 1;
19. _My Best Fiend_ , 1, 2, 3, 4;
20. _Nosferatu_ filming, 1;
21. _Nosferatu_ role, 1, 2;
22. posters, 1, 2;
23. qualities as an actor, 1, 2;
24. relationship with daughter Pola, 1;
25. relationship with Herzog, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
26. relationship with Indians, 1;
27. reputation, 1, 2;
28. staying in hotels, 1, 2;
29. vampire performance, 1, 2;
30. voice dubbed, 1;
31. wives, 1, 2;
32. work with Herzog, 1, 2, 3;
33. _Woyzeck_ casting, 1;
34. Woyzeck performance, 1, 2, 3
20. Kinski, Pola, 1
21. _Kinski/Paganini_ (Kinski), 1
22. Kitezh, Lost City of, 1, 2
23. Klausmann, Rainer, 1
24. Kleist, Heinrich von, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
25. Kluge, Alexander, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
26. Kodak company, 1
27. Koechlin, José, 1
28. Koepcke, Juliane, 1, 2
29. Kokol, Vladimir, 1, 2
30. Kolingba, André-Dieudonné, 1
31. Konzelmann, Manfred, 1
32. Korea, 1
33. Korine, Harmony, 1, 2, 3, 4
34. Kos, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
35. Krauss, Lawrence, 1
36. Kruk, Reiko, 1
37. Kubrick, Stanley, 1
38. Kuhlmann, Quirinus, 1, 2, 3
39. _Kuratorium junger deutscher Film_ , 1
40. Kurosawa, Akira, 1, 2, 3
41. Kuwait, 1, 2, 3, 4
1. La Tour, Georges de, 1
2. Lachman, Ed, 1, 2, 3, 4
3. _Lalai Dreamtime_ (Edols), 1
4. _Land of Silence and Darkness_ : budget, 1;
1. cameraman, 1, 2, 3, 4;
2. character of Fini, 1, 2, 3;
3. character of Kokol, 1;
4. editing, 1, 2;
5. fiction and documentary, 1;
6. filming, 1;
7. final sequence, 1, 2;
8. Fini's death, 1;
9. importance to Herzog, 1, 2;
10. origins of project, 1;
11. responses to, 1;
12. size of team, 1
5. Landini, Francesco, 1
6. Lane, Anthony, 1
7. Lang, Fritz, 1
8. Langlois, Henri, 1, 2
9. Lanzarote, 1, 2, 3
10. Las Vegas, 1
11. Lasso, Orlando di, 1, 2
12. _Last Words_ , 1
13. Laurentian Library (Florence), 1
14. Lean, David, 1
15. _Leçons de ténèbres_ (Couperin), 1
16. _Lenz_ (Büchner), 1, 2, 3
17. Leonardo da Vinci, 1
18. Leone, Sergio, 1
19. _Lessons of Darkness_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
20. Levine, James, 1
21. _Little Dieter Needs to Fly_ : cameraman, 1;
1. character of Dieter, 1;
2. concept of documentary, 1;
3. Dieter's autobiography, 1;
4. Dieter's death, 1, 2;
5. filming, 1, 2, 3;
6. final sequence, 1;
7. Golder's role, 1n;
8. importance to Herzog, 1;
9. length, 1;
10. music, 1;
11. _Rescue Dawn_ , 1;
12. responses to, 1, 2;
13. story, 1, 2, 3;
14. stylisation, 1;
15. versions, 1
22. Livy, 1
23. _Lohengrin_ (Wagner), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
24. Lopez, Richard, 1
25. _Lord and the Laden, The_ , 1
26. _Lost Western, A_ , 1, 2, 3
27. Lotito, Michael (Monsieur Mangetout), 1
28. Löwen, Die, 1, 2
29. _Lucia_ (Solás), 1
30. Luddy, Tom, 1, 2, 3, 4
31. Lumière Brothers, 1, 2, 3
32. Luther, Martin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
33. Lynch, David, 1, 2
1. MacAyeal, Doug, 1
2. McCarthy, Cormac, 1
3. McCulley, Michael, 1
4. Machu Picchu, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
5. McMurdo Station (Antarctica), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
6. _Macunaíma_ (Andrade), 1
7. _Mad Max_ (Miller), 1
8. Madonna, 1
9. Maestri, Cesare, 1, 2
10. Maimonides, Moses, 1, 2
11. Mainka-Jellinghaus, Beate, 1, 2
12. _Maîtres fous, Les_ (Rouch), 1, 2
13. Mallick, Bablu, 1
14. Mamet, David, 1, 2
15. Mangetout, Monsieur, 1
16. Mannheim Film Festival, 1
17. Marshall Plan, 1
18. Martel, Charles, 1
19. Martin, John, 1
20. _Master and Margarita, The_ (Bulgakov), 1
21. Mattes, Eva, 1, 2, 3, 4
22. Mauch, Thomas: _Aguirre_ filming, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
1. _Even Dwarfs Started Small_ , 1;
2. _Fata Morgana_ filming, 1;
3. _Fitzcarraldo_ filming, 1, 2, 3, 4;
4. _Heart of Glass_ filming, 1;
5. meeting Herzog, 1;
6. qualities as cameraman, 1;
7. replaced on _Cobra Verde_ , 1;
8. _Signs of Life_ , 1, 2;
9. _Stroszek_ filming, 1, 2
23. Maximón, 1
24. Maysles, Al, 1
25. Mekas, Jonas, 1n
26. Méliès, Georges, 1, 2, 3, 4
27. Melville, Jean-Pierre, 1, 2
28. Mendes, Eva, 1, 2
29. Messner, Reinhold, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
30. Meyer, Russ, 1
31. Mezzogiorno, Vittorio, 1, 2
32. _Michael Kohlhaas_ (Kleist), 1
33. Michelangelo, 1, 2, 3
34. Milam, Blaine, 1, 2, 3
35. Milva, 1
36. Minnesota Declaration, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
37. Miskito Indians, 1, 2, 3
38. _Mister Lonely_ (Korine), 1
39. Mizoguchi, Kenji, 1
40. _Mönch am Meer, Der_ (Friedrich), 1
41. Monney, Julien, 1
42. Montaigne, Michel de, 1
43. Monteverdi, Claudio, 1
44. Monument Valley, 1
45. Monumentum pro Gesualdo (Stravinsky), 1
46. Morris, Errol, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
47. Mosemeier, Sepp, 1
48. _Moses und Aron_ (Schoenberg), 1
49. 'mountain films', 1
50. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1, 2, 3
51. Müller, Heiner, 1
52. Munich: airport, 1;
1. community facility for handicapped people, 1;
2. cultural centre, 1;
3. film laboratories, 1;
4. football, 1, 2, 3, 4;
5. Herzog's childhood, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
6. Kammerspiele theatre, 1;
7. present-day, 1;
8. production office, 1, 2, 3;
9. racetrack, 1;
10. school for problem children, 1;
11. University, 1, 2
53. Munich Film School, 1
54. Murnau, F. W., 1, 2, 3, 4
55. _Music Room, The_ (Ray), 1, 2
56. _My Best Fiend_ : filming, 1, 2, 3;
1. _Fitzcarraldo_ material, 1, 2;
2. Golder's role, 1, 2, 3n;
3. material and stories, 1, 2, 3;
4. opening, 1;
5. relationship between Herzog and Kinski, 1;
6. responses to, 1
57. _My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5n
1. _Nain et géant_ (Méliès), 1
2. Nana Agyefi Kwame II, 1
3. Nanga Parbat, 1, 2
4. NASA, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
5. _National Enquirer_ , 1
6. _Nazarin_ (Buñuel), 1
7. Nazism: _Aguirre_ question, 1;
1. attitudes to, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
2. capital punishment, 1;
3. Eisner's career, 1, 2;
4. German cinema, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
5. Jewish survivors, 1;
6. _Nosferatu_ rats, 1;
7. occupation of Greece, 1;
8. origins, 1;
9. rise, 1, 2;
10. threat, 1, 2
8. New German Cinema, 1, 2
9. New York Film Festival, 1, 2, 3
10. Newton, Isaac, 1, 2
11. Nicaragua, 1, 2, 3, 4
12. Nicholson, Jack, 1
13. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 2
14. _Nigger of the Narcissus_ , _The_ (Conrad), 1
15. _No One Will Play with Me_ , 1
16. _Nosferatu_ : cameraman, 1;
1. casting, 1;
2. character of Nosferatu, 1;
3. filming, 1, 2;
4. image of Renfield, 1;
5. importance to Herzog, 1;
6. Kinski in, 1, 2;
7. landscapes, 1, 2;
8. language, 1;
9. light and darkness in, 1;
10. material in _Aguirre_ , 1;
11. mummies in, 1;
12. Murnau's film, 1, 2, 3;
13. music, 1, 2;
14. place in Herzog's career, 1, 2;
15. rats in, 1, 2;
16. rejected by Cannes, 1;
17. Renfield role, 1;
18. responses to, 1, 2;
19. script, 1, 2;
20. Twentieth Century Fox, 1, 2, 3, 4;
21. vampire myth, 1
1. Oberhausen Film Festival, 1, 2, 3, 4
2. Oberhausen Manifesto, 1, 2n, 3, 4
3. O'Connor, Flannery, 1
4. _Ode to the Dawn of Man_ , 1
5. _Of Walking in Ice_ , 1, 2
6. Okello, John, 1
7. _On the Black Hill_ (Chatwin), 1
8. _On Death Row_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
9. Ondaatje, Michael, 1
10. Ophüls, Marcel, 1
11. Oppenheimer, Joshua, 1
12. _Oresteia_ (Aeschylus), 1, 2
13. Orwell, George, 1
14. _Out of Africa_ (Pollack), 1
15. _Oxford English Dictionary_ , 1, 2
1. Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 1
2. Pacheco, David, 1
3. Pachelbel, 1
4. Pacific Film Archive, 1, 2
5. _Padre Padrone_ (Taviani brothers), 1, 2
6. Paganini, Niccolò, 1, 2
7. Palovak, Jewel, 1
8. _Parsifal_ (Wagner), 1, 2
9. Pascal, Blaise, 1
10. Pashov, Stefan, 1
11. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 1, 2
12. _Passion of the Christ_ (Gibson), 1
13. _Passion of Joan of Arc, The_ (Dreyer), 1, 2
14. Penn, Zak, 1, 2
15. Pepin the Short, 1
16. _Peregrine, The_ (Baker), 1
17. Perry, Michael, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
18. Perth Film Festival, 1
19. Peters, Jon, 1
20. Petit, Philippe, 1
21. Petrarch, 1
22. _Physics of Star Trek, The_ (Krauss), 1, 2n
23. Picasso, Pablo, 1, 2
24. _Pilgrimage_ , 1, 2
25. Pinochet, Augusto, 1
26. Pitt, Brad, 1
27. Pittsburgh, 1, 2, 3
28. Plage, Dieter, 1
29. Plainfield, Wisconsin, 1
30. _Planète sauvage, La_ (Laloux), 1
31. Plateau, Joseph, 1
32. _Poetic Edda_ , 1, 2
33. Pohle, Rolf, 1
34. _Popol Vuh_ , 1
35. Popol Vuh (band), 1, 2
36. Prawer, S. S., 1
37. _Precautions against Fanatics_ , 1
38. Presley, Elvis, 1
39. Presser, Beat, 1, 2, 3
40. _Psycho_ (Hitchcock), 1
41. Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 1
1. Quin, Douglas, 1
1. Radenković, Petar, 1
2. RAF ( _Rote Armee Fraktion_ ), 1
3. _Rashomon_ (Kurosawa), 1
4. Ratzka, Adolph, 1
5. Ray, Satyajit, 1, 2, 3
6. Reichle, Denis, 1
7. Reijseger, Ernst, 1, 2, 3
8. Reitz, Edgar, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
9. Rembrandt, 1, 2, 3
10. Rentschler, Erich, 1
11. _Rescue Dawn_ : cameraman, 1;
1. casting, 1, 2;
2. Christian Bale in, 1;
3. crash sequence, 1;
4. crew, 1;
5. editing, 1;
6. filming, 1, 2;
7. green-screen sequence, 1;
8. Jeremy Davies in, 1;
9. production, 1;
10. screenplay, 1, 2;
11. story, 1, 2;
12. violence in, 1
12. Riefenstahl, Leni, 1
13. Rieth, Klara, 1
14. Rivas, George, 1
15. Robards, Jason, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
16. Robinson, Edward G., 1
17. Rocha, Glauber, 1
18. Rogers, Huie, 1, 2
19. Rogue Film School: advice to participants, 1;
1. concept, 1, 2;
2. guest speaker, 1;
3. Herzog's role, 1, 2, 3, 4;
4. participants, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
5. reading list, 1, 2;
6. studies, 1;
7. three-day seminars, 1, 2, 3
20. Rosenheim, 1
21. Rosetta Stone, 1
22. Ross Ice Shelf (Antarctica), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
23. Roth, Tim, 1
24. Rouch, Jean, 1, 2
25. Rubens, Peter Paul, 1
26. Růžička, Viktor, 1
1. Sachrang, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
2. Sacks, Oliver, 1
3. _Saga of Grettir the Strong, The_ , 1
4. Sahagún, Bernardino de, 1
5. Saiful Islam, Kamal, 1
6. Saint Laurent, Yves, 1
7. San Quentin prison, 1
8. Sandinista National Liberation Front, 1, 2, 3
9. Sauer, Hans Dieter, 1
10. Saxer, Walter, 1, 2, 3, 4
11. Schamoni, Peter, 1
12. Scheitz, Clemens, 1, 2
13. Schell, Maximilian, 1, 2
14. Schifferle, Hans, 1
15. Schleinstein, Bruno: _see_ Bruno S.
16. Schleyer, Hanns-Martin, 1
17. Schliemann, Heinrich, 1
18. Schlöndorff, Volker, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
19. Schmidt-Reitwein, Jörg: _Bells From the Deep_ , 1;
1. _Fata Morgana_ filming, 1, 2, 3;
2. _Heart_ _of Glass_ filming, 1, 2, 3;
3. imprisonment, 1;
4. _Kaspar_ _Hauser_ casting, 1, 2;
5. _Land_ _of Silence and Darkness_ filming, 1, 2, 3;
6. _Nosferatu_ filming, 1;
7. relationship with Herzog, 1, 2;
8. _La Soufrière_ filming, 1;
9. _Where the Green_ _Ants Dream_ work, 1
20. Schroeter, Werner, 1, 2, 3
21. Schütz, Heinrich, 1, 2
22. Scorsese, Martin, 1
23. Scott, Gene, 1, 2
24. Scott, Robert, 1, 2
25. _Scream of Stone_ , 1, 2, 3
26. Segers, Hercules, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
27. Segler, Willi, 1
28. Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 1
29. _Sentimental Journey_ (Sterne), 1
30. Shackleton, Ernest, 1
31. Shakespeare, William, 1, 2, 3, 4
32. Shannon, Michael, 1, 2
33. Shawn, Wallace, 1
34. Sheridan, Jeff, 1
35. "Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The" (Hemingway), 1
36. Siegel, Cornelius, 1, 2
37. Siegel Hans, 1
38. _Signs of Life_ : awards, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
1. cameraman, 1, 2;
2. carved owl in, 1;
3. cast, 1, 2, 3;
4. character of Stroszek, 1, 2, 3, 4;
5. chickens in, 1;
6. 7. editing, 1;
8. filming, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
9. fireworks in, 1, 2, 3, 4;
10. fortress, 1, 2, 3;
11. first Herzog feature, 1, 2;
12. landscape, 1;
13. music, 1;
14. origins, 1, 2, 3, 4;
15. political stance, 1;
16. pre-production, 1;
17. responses to, 1, 2, 3;
18. screenplay, 1, 2, 3, 4;
19. soundtrack, 1;
20. story, 1, 2, 3;
21. windmills in, 1, 2, 3, 4
39. Silesius, Angelus, 1
40. Silver Bear, 1
41. Simon, John, 1
42. Sistine Chapel, 1
43. Sitney, P. Adams, 1
44. _Sixth Book of Madrigals_ (Gesualdo), 1, 2
45. Skellig Michael, 1
46. Skellig (publishing house), 1
47. Skertchly, J. A., 1
48. Skinner, Hank, 1, 2
49. Sloan Foundation, 1
50. Smith, Anna Nicole, 1
51. Solás, Humberto, 1
52. Solyda, Chorn, 1
53. Somoza, Anastasio, 1, 2
54. Sontag, Susan, 1
55. Sophocles, 1, 2
56. _Sorrow and the Pity, The_ (Ophüls), 1
57. _Soufrière, La_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
58. _Specialitäten_ , 1
59. Spee, Friedrich, 1
60. _Spend It All_ (Luddy), 1
61. Spielberg, Steven, 1
62. Stade Toulousain rugby team, 1
63. _Starsky and Hutch_ , 1
64. Staudte, Wolfgang, 1
65. Stefanelli, Benito, 1
66. Steiner, Walter: career, 1, 2;
1. cast in _Kaspar Hauser_ , 1, 2;
2. figure of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
3. relationship with raven, 1;
4. ski flying, 1, 2, 3;
5. talking on camera, 1, 2
67. _Stern, Der_ , 1
68. Sterne, Laurence, 1
69. Stipetić, Lucki (brother): _Aguirre_ filming, 1, 2;
1. brother Werner's name, 1;
2. collection of brother Werner's work, 1;
3. filming used
4. in _Kaspar Hauser_ , 1;
5. musical talent, 1;
6. travels, 1, 2;
7. working with brother Werner, 1, 2, 3, 4
70. Stoker, Bram, 1
71. _Storm Over Asia_ (Pudovkin), 1
72. Stotler-Balloun, Lisa, 1, 2
73. Strasberg, Lee, 1
74. Straubinger, Fini: communicating with, 1, 2;
1. death, 1;
2. figure of, 1, 2, 3;
3. filming, 1, 2, 3;
4. first meeting with Herzog, 1;
5. importance to Herzog, 1, 2;
6. life experiences, 1, 2;
7. mind, 1;
8. relationship with Herzog family, 1
75. Strauss, F. J., 1
76. Stravinsky, Igor, 1
77. Stroessner, Alfredo, 1
78. Strohschneider-Kohrs, Ingrid, 1
79. _Stroszek_ : Bruno S. in, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
1. casting, 1;
2. dancing chicken, 1, 2;
3. editing, 1, 2, 3;
4. ending, 1, 2, 3;
5. Errol Morris's role, 1;
6. filming, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
7. images, 1;
8. locations, 1, 2, 3;
9. name of character, 1, 2;
10. premature baby in, 1, 2;
11. script, 1;
12. union difficulties, 1
80. _Stunde des Todes, Die_ (Achternbusch), 1
81. Sturges, Preston, 1
82. Sturm Sepp, 1, 2
83. Sweetser, Ted, 1
84. _Swing Time_ (Stevens), 1
85. Sylla, Mola, 1
86. Szlapinski, Clayton, 1
1. Tahimik, Kidlat, 1
2. Talbert, Jared, 1, 2
3. Tarkovsky, Andrei, 1
4. Tarzan, 1, 2, 3
5. Tavener, John, 1
6. Taviani brothers, 1, 2
7. Teatro Amazonas, 1
8. Telluride Film Festival, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
9. _Ten Minutes Older_ (compilation project), 1
10. _Ten Thousand Years Older_ , 1
11. Terry, Sonny, 1
12. Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 1
13. 14. _Them!_ (Douglas), 1
15. _Thin Blue Line, The_ (Morris), 1
16. Thompson, Richard, 1, 2, 3
17. _Three Graces, The_ (Rubens), 1
18. Thucydides, 1
19. _Time_ magazine, 1
20. _Tin Drum, The_ (Grass), 1
21. Topor, Roland, 1
22. Toronto Film Festival, 1n
23. _Torquato Tasso_ (Goethe), 1
24. Tragic Diary of Zero the Fool, The (Markson), 1
25. Transformation of the World into _Music, The_ , 1, 2
26. Travolta, John, 1
27. Treadwell, Timothy: audio recording of death, 1;
1. autopsy of body, 1, 2;
2. figure of, 1, 2, 3;
3. footage shot by, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
4. Herzog's approach to, 1, 2, 3, 4;
5. portrayal of nature, 1, 2;
6. relationship with Amy Huguenard, 1;
7. story, 1
28. _Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The_ (Huston), 1
29. Trenker, Luis, 1
30. _Tristram Shandy, The Life and Opinions of_ (Sterne), 1
31. Truffaut, François, 1, 2, 3
32. Twentieth Century Fox, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
33. _Typhoon_ (Conrad), 1
34. Tyson, Mike, 1
1. _Ugetsu Monogatari_ (Mizoguchi), 1
2. _Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz, The_ , 1, 2
1. Vajont dam, 1
2. van Eyck, Jan, 1
3. Varda, Agnès, 1
4. Vasyukov, Dmitry, 1
5. Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 1
6. Ventris, Michael, 1
7. Ventura, Jesse, 1, 2
8. _Venus of Willendorf_ , 1
9. Verdi, Giuseppe, 1
10. _Viceroy of Ouidah, The_ (Chatwin), 1, 2
11. Vienna Film Festival, 1
12. Vietnam War, 1, 2, 3
13. Vignati, Jorge, 1
14. Virgil, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
15. Vissarion (Sergey Anatolyevitch Torop), 1
16. Vitiello, Guido, 1
17. _Viva Zapata!_ (Kazan), 1
18. _Vlad Dracul_ , 1
19. Vogel, Amos: career, 1;
1. conversation with Herzog, 1;
2. influence of work, 1, 2, 3;
3. on Holy Fool, 1;
4. relationship with Herzog, 1;
5. view of Herzog, 1, 2;
6. work on _Fata Morgana_ , 1
20. _Volkssturm_ , 1
21. von Arnim, Achim, 1
22. _Voyages to Hell_ (TV series), 1
1. Wagner, Richard: dwarfs in his work, 1;
1. Herzog's response to his work, 1, 2;
2. landscapes, 1;
3. manuscripts and essays, 1, 2;
4. on creative process, 1;
5. operas staged by Herzog, 1, 2, 3, 4;
6. relationship with Ludwig of Bavaria, 1
2. Wagner, Wolfgang, 1
3. Wajda, Andrzej, 1
4. Walser, Robert, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
5. _Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, Der_ (Friedrich), 1
6. Warhol, Andy, 1
7. _Warren Commission Report_ , 1
8. Wassermann, Jakob, 1
9. _Waterloo_ (Bondarchuk), 1
10. Waters, John, 1
11. Wayne, John, 1
12. Weimar films, 1, 2
13. Wein, Jacob, 1
14. Welles, Orson, 1, 2
15. Wenders, Wim, 1
16. _Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe_ (Blank), 1
17. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1, 2
18. Werry, Simon, 1
19. West, Mae, 1, 2
20. _Wheel of Time_ , 1, 2, 3
21. _Where the Green Ants Dream_ : Aborigines, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
1. ending, 1;
2. filming, 1;
3. green ants, 1;
4. Herzog's view of, 1;
5. origins, 1;
6. screenplay, 1;
7. work on, 1, 2
22. _Where Is the Friend's Home?_ (Kiarostami), 1
23. _White Diamond, The_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9n
24. 25. Whitman, Walt, 1
26. Widmark, Richard, 1
27. _Wild Blue Yonder, The_ : casting, 1;
1. ending, 1;
2. filming, 1, 2;
3. financing, 1, 2;
4. Golder's role, 1n;
5. influences on, 1;
6. NASA footage, 1, 2, 3;
7. origins, 1;
8. relationship with astronauts, 1;
9. soundtrack, 1, 2;
10. story, 1, 2;
11. underwater footage, 1, 2, 3, 4
28. _Wings of Hope_ , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6n
29. _Winnie the Pooh_ (Milne), 1
30. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1
31. _Wodaabe – Herdsmen of the Sun_ , 1, 2
32. Woody Woodpecker, 1
33. Woolagoodja, Sam, 1, 2
34. _Woyzeck_ (Büchner's play), 1, 2
35. _Woyzeck_ (Herzog's film): casting, 1;
1. character of Woyzeck, 1, 2;
2. filming, 1;
3. Kinski in, 1, 2;
4. origins, 1;
5. responses to, 1;
6. Twentieth Century Fox, 1
36. _Wozzeck_ (Berg), 1
37. WrestleMania, 1, 2
38. Wyborny, Klaus, 1
1. Yavorsky, Mark, 1
2. Yeats, W. B., 1
3. Yhap, Marc Anthony, 1, 2, 3
4. _Young Törless_ (Schlöndorff), 1, 2
5. Yurieff, Yuri Yurevitch, 1
1. Zahn, Steve, 1, 2, 3
2. Zeitlinger, Peter: _Bad Lieutenant_ , 1;
1. _Cave of Forgotten Dreams_ , 1;
2. _Encounters_ , 1, 2, 3;
3. hypnotised, 1;
4. _Invincible_ , 1;
5. _Little Dieter_ , 1;
6. _My Best Fiend_ , 1;
7. _Rescue Dawn_ , 1, 2;
8. view of Herzog, 1;
9. working with Herzog, 1, 2
3. Zimmer, Hans, 1
4. Zorro, 1, 2
5. Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), 1, 2
With mother Elizabeth and brothers, Lucki (far left) and Tilbert _Signs of Life_
_Signs of Life_
_Signs of Life._ With Athina Zacharopoulou and Peter Brogle
_Even Dwarfs Started Small_
_Even Dwarfs Started Small_
_Fata Morgana_
_Aguirre, the Wrath of God_
_The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner._ With Walter Steiner
_The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser_. With Lotte Eisner
_Heart of Glass_
_Heart of Glass_
_No One Will Play with Me
Stroszek_
_Stroszek_. With Thomas Mauch
_Stroszek_
_Stroszek_. With Bruno Schleinstein
_La Soufrière_. With Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
_Nosferatu_
_Nosferatu_. With Klaus Kinski
_Nosferatu
Woyzeck_
With Volker Schlöndorff and Rudolf Herzog
With Arnold Schwarzenegger
Lincoln Centre, New York, 1982
_Fitzcarraldo_
_Fitzcarraldo_
_Fitzcarraldo_. With Klaus Kinski
_Ballad of the Little Soldier_
_The Dark Glow of the Mountains_. With Reinhold Messner (left)
_Cobra Verde_
_Cobra Verde_
_Cobra Verde_. With Klaus Kinski
With Amos Vogel
_Scream of Stone_
_Lessons of Darkness_
_Bells from the Deep_. With Yuri Yurevitch Yurieff
_Death for Five Voices_
_The Transformation of the World into Music_. With Wolfgang Wagner
_My Best Fiend_
_Little Dieter Needs to Fly_. With Dieter Dengler
_Wings of Hope_. With Juliane Koepcke
_Wheel of Time_. With Peter Zeitlinger
_Grizzly Man_
_The White Diamond_
_Rescue Dawn_. With Christian Bale and Steve Zahn
_Bad Lieutenant_. With Nicolas Cage
_Cave of Forgotten Dreams_
_Into the Abyss_
Telluride Film Festival, 2013
# Acknowledgements
Truman Anderson for his perceptive comments; Ian Bahrami for his patience and diligence; Ramin Bahrani; John Bailey; Jeremy Belinfante; Joe Bini; Ryan Bojanovic; Michael Chaiken, for being such a discerning sceptic; Michel Ciment; Jem Cohen; the Cronins of NW5 and N19; Victoria Dailey; Roger Diehl; Sam Di Iorio for those nuances; Walter Donohue at Faber and Faber for his unstinting faith; Graham Dorrington for opening up that one particular story; Sarah Ereira; Snorre Fredlund for his Nordic sensibility; Todd Gitlin; Herb Golder for helping me reach a deeper understanding; Alan Greenberg; Ulli Gruber for her enthusiasm; Marie-Antoinette Guillochon and Remi Guillochon for translation assistance; Simon Hacker; Lena Herzog for her hospitality and images; Rudolph Herzog for those arcane details; Paul Holdengräber for being so good at doing it in public; Gus Holwerda; Neil Hornick; the late David Horrocks; Christoph Huber; Ricky Jay; Harmony Korine for those addled evenings spent at his grandma's house in Queens; Daniel Kothenschulte; Lawrence Krauss; Bruce "Pacho" Lane; David LaRocca for his insights; Martina Lauster for her graciousness and excellence as a translator; Tom Luddy; Grazia Paganelli; Presley Parks for always being around; Zak Penn; Doris Perlman for her sharp eye and knowledge of opera; Rory Pfotenhauer; Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen for their unrelenting spirit; Alexandra Proulx; Denis Reichle for his sense of history; Blanche and Bruce Rubin for their long-standing Northridge hospitality; Volker Schlöndorff; John Sorensen for his way of seeing; Lucki Stipetić for being such a benevolent custodian; Ted Sweetser; Gabrielle Tenzer for allowing all those stacks of books; Justin Van Voorhis; Chris Wahl; Damon Wise; and – at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin – Julia Pattis, Julia Reidel, Sandra Schieke and Werner Sudendorf.
Thanks to those interviewers who don't sell their work as being "in depth," who never describe a published piece as being "edited and condensed," and are steadfast about conducting Q&As rather than "masterclasses." Also to a number of Roguistas whose names I have long forgotten and with whom over the years I discussed – often saturated with alcohol, sitting in a hotel bar, into the early hours – the preceding day's events. If even a single one of them decides to break out, to wander the desert with a handful of carefully chosen books, to bask in the solitude, as they smile at the infinite delight and mystery of it all, everything will have been worthwhile. Sometimes it's best not to live quite so relentlessly in the real world. Wrote Emerson: "A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages."
# About the Author
Werner Herzog has directed more than sixty films, notably _Aguirre, the Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, Fitzcarraldo, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzly Man_ and _Cave of Forgotten Dreams._ He is the author of several books, including _Conquest of the Useless,_ and has staged more than a dozen operas around the world.
Paul Cronin is the editor of Alexander Mackendrick's _On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director_ and _Lessons with Kiarostami._ He has made films about Amos Vogel, Peter Whitehead and Haskell Wexler's _Medium Cool._ His website is www.herzogperplexed.com.
# _By the Same Author_
WOODY ALLEN ON WOODY ALLEN edited by Stig Björkman
ALMODÓVAR ON ALMODÓVAR edited by Frédéric Strauss
ALTMAN ON ALTMAN edited by David Thompson
DANNY BOYLE in conversation with Amy Raphael
NICK BROOMFIELD by Jason Wood
BURTON ON BURTON edited by Mark Salisbury
CASSAVETES ON CASSAVETES edited by Ray Carney
ALAN CLARKE by Richard T. Kelly
CRONENBERG ON CRONENBERG edited by Chris Rodley
DE TOTH ON DE TOTH edited by Anthony Slide
FELLINI ON FELLINI edited by Costanzo Costantini
GILLIAM ON GILLIAM edited by Ian Christie
HITCHCOCK ON HITCHCOCK edited by Sidney Gottlieb
KIEŚLOWSKI ON KIEŚLOWSKI edited by Danusia Stok
SPIKE LEE: THAT'S MY STORY AND I'M STICKING TO IT by Kaleem Aftab
MIKE LEIGH ON MIKE LEIGH edited by Amy Raphael
LEVINSON ON LEVINSON edited by David Thompson
LOACH ON LOACH edited by Graham Fuller
LYNCH ON LYNCH edited by Chris Rodley
MALLE ON MALLE edited by Philip French
MINGHELLA ON MINGHELLA edited by Timothy Bricknell
POTTER ON POTTER edited by Graham Fuller
SAYLES ON SAYLES edited by Gavin Smith
SCHRADER ON SCHRADER edited by Kevin Jackson
SCORSESE ON SCORSESE edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie
SIRK ON SIRK conversations with Jon Halliday
TRIER ON VON TRIER edited by Stig Björkman
# Copyright
First published as _Herzog on Herzog_ in 2002
This substantially revised and updated edition first published in 2014
by Faber & Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Werner Herzog, 2014
Commentary and "Visionary Vehemence" © Paul Cronin, 2014
Foreword © Harmony Korine, 2014
"Shooting on the Lam" © Herbert Golder, 2014
Afterword © Lawrence Krauss, 2014
All photos © Werner Herzog Filmproduktion courtesy of the Deutsche Kinemathek, except: page 8 (bottom image) © Alan Greenberg; page 15 © Helaine Messer; page 21 © Estate of Amos Vogel; pages 28, 29, top of 30 and 32 © Lena Herzog
Cover image © Lena Herzog
The rights of Werner Herzog and Paul Cronin to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–25978–6
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook"
}
| 8,048
|
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:introduction}
Symmetric monoidal bicategories are important in many contexts.
However, the definition of even a monoidal bicategory
(see~\cite{gps:tricats,nick:tricats}), let alone a symmetric monoidal
one
(see~\cite{kv:2cat-zam,kv:bm2cat,bn:hda-i,ds:monbi-hopfagbd,crans:centers,mccrudden:bal-coalgb,gurski:brmonbicat}),
is quite imposing, and time-consuming to verify in any example. In
this paper we describe a method for constructing symmetric monoidal
bicategories which is hardly more difficult than constructing a pair
of ordinary symmetric monoidal categories. While not universally
applicable, this method applies in many cases of interest. This idea
has often been implicitly used in particular cases, such as
bicategories of enriched profunctors, but to my knowledge the first
general statement was claimed in~\cite[Appendix B]{shulman:frbi}. Our
purpose here is to work out the details, independently
of~\cite{shulman:frbi}.
\begin{rmk}
Another approach to working out the details of this statement, from
a different perspective, can be found
in~\cite[\S5]{gg:ldstr-tricat}. The two approaches contain
basically the same content and results, although the authors
of~\cite{gg:ldstr-tricat} work with ``locally-double bicategories''
rather than monoidal double categories or 2x1-categories (see
below). They also don't treat the symmetric case, but as we will
see, that is a fairly easy extension once the theory is in place.
Thus, this note really presents nothing very new, only a
self-contained and (hopefully) convenient treatment of the
particular case of interest.
\end{rmk}
The method relies on the fact that in many bicategories, the 1-cells
are not the most fundamental notion of `morphism' between the objects.
For instance, in the bicategory \cMod\ of rings, bimodules, and
bimodule maps, the more fundamental notion of morphism between objects
is a ring homomorphism. The addition of these extra morphisms promotes
a bicategory to a \emph{double category}, or a category internal to
\cCat. The extra morphisms are usually stricter than the 1-cells in
the bicategory and easier to deal with for coherence questions; in
many cases it is quite easy to show that we have a \emph{symmetric
monoidal double category}. The central observation is that in most
cases (when the double category is `fibrant') we can then `lift' this
symmetric monoidal structure to the original bicategory. That is, we
prove the following theorem:
\begin{thm}\label{thm:mondbl-monbi-intro}
If \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is a fibrant monoidal double category, then its underlying
bicategory $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ is a monoidal bicategory. If \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is braided
or symmetric, so is $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$.
\end{thm}
There is a good case to be made, however (see~\cite{shulman:frbi})
that often the extra morphisms should \emph{not} be discarded. From
this point of view, in many cases symmetric monoidal bicategories are
a red herring, and really we should be studying symmetric monoidal
double categories. This is also true in higher dimensions; for
instance, Chris Douglas~\cite{douglas:tfttalk} has suggested that
instead of tricategories we are usually interested in bicategories
internal to \cCat\ or categories internal to \cTwocat. In most such
cases arising in practice, we can again `lift' the coherence to give a
tricategory after discarding the additional structure.
We propose the generic term \textbf{$(n\times k)$-category}
(pronounced ``$n$-by-$k$-category'') for an $n$-category internal to
$k$-categories, a structure which has $(n+1)(k+1)$ different types of
cells or morphisms arranged in an $(n+1)$ by $(k+1)$ grid. Thus
double categories may be called \textbf{1x1-categories}, while in
place of tricategories we may consider 2x1-categories and
1x2-categories. Any $(n\times k)$-category which satisfies a suitable
lifting property should have an underlying $(n+k)$-category, but
clearly as $n$ and $k$ grow an increasing amount of structure is
discarded in this process.
However, even for those of the opinion that $(n\times k)$-categories
are fundamental (such as the author), sometimes it really is the
underlying $(n+k)$-category that one cares about. This is
particularly the case in the study of topological field theory, since
the Baez-Dolan cobordism hypothesis asserts a universal property of
the $(n+1)$-category of cobordisms which is not shared by the
$(n\times 1)$-category from which it is naturally constructed
(see~\cite{lurie:tft}). Thus, regardless of one's philosophical bent,
results such as \autoref{thm:mondbl-monbi-intro} are of interest.
Proceeding to the contents of this paper, in
\S\ref{sec:symm-mono-double} we review the definition of symmetric
monoidal double categories, and in \S\ref{sec:comp-conj} we recall the
notions of `companion' and `conjoint' whose presence supplies the
necessary lifting property, which we call being \emph{fibrant}. Then
in \S\ref{sec:1x1-to-bicat} we describe a functor from fibrant double
categories to bicategories, and in \S\ref{sec:constr-symm-mono} we
show that it preserves monoidal, braided, and symmetric structures.
I would like to thank Peter May, Tom Fiore, Stephan Stolz, Chris
Douglas, and Nick Gurski for helpful discussions and comments.
\section{Symmetric monoidal double categories}
\label{sec:symm-mono-double}
In this section, we introduce basic notions of double categories.
Double categories go back originally to Ehresmann
in~\cite{ehresmann:cat-str}; a brief introduction can be found
in~\cite{ks:r2cats}. Other references
include~\cite{multi_funct_i,gp:double-limits,gp:double-adjoints}.
\begin{defn}
A \textbf{(pseudo) double category} \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ consists of a `category of
objects' $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$ and a `category of arrows' $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1$, with structure
functors
\begin{align*}
U&\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0\to \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1\\
S,T&\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1\rightrightarrows \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0\\
\odot&\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1\times_{\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0}\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1\to \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1
\end{align*}
(where the pullback is over
$\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1\too[T]\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0\overset{S}{\longleftarrow} \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1$) such that
\begin{align*}
S(U_A) &= A\\
T(U_A) &= A\\
S(M\odot N) &= SN\\
T(M\odot N) &= TM
\end{align*}
equipped with natural isomorphisms
\begin{align*}
\ensuremath{\mathfrak{a}} &: (M\odot N) \odot P \too[\iso] M \odot (N \odot P)\\
\ensuremath{\mathfrak{l}} &: U_B \odot M \too[\iso] M\\
\ensuremath{\mathfrak{r}} &: M \odot U_A \too[\iso] M
\end{align*}
such that $S(\ensuremath{\mathfrak{a}})$, $T(\ensuremath{\mathfrak{a}})$, $S(\ensuremath{\mathfrak{l}})$, $T(\ensuremath{\mathfrak{l}})$, $S(\ensuremath{\mathfrak{r}})$, and
$T(\ensuremath{\mathfrak{r}})$ are all identities, and such that the standard coherence
axioms for a monoidal category or bicategory (such as Mac Lane's
pentagon; see~\cite{maclane}) are satisfied.
\end{defn}
Just as a bicategory can be thought of as a category weakly
\emph{enriched} over \cCat, a pseudo double category can be thought of
as a category weakly \emph{internal} to \cCat. Since these are the
kind of double category of most interest to us, we will usually drop
the adjective ``pseudo.''
We call the objects of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$ \textbf{objects} or \textbf{0-cells},
and we call the morphisms of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$ \textbf{(vertical) 1-morphisms}
and write them as $f\maps A\to B$. We call the objects of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1$
\textbf{(horizontal) 1-cells}; if $M$ is a 1-cell with $S(M)=A$ and
$T(M)=B$, we write $M\maps A\hto B$. We call a morphism $\alpha\maps
M\to N$ of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1$ with $S(\alpha)=f$ and $T(\alpha)=g$ a
\textbf{2-morphism} and draw it as follows:
\begin{equation}\label{eq:square}
\xymatrix@-.5pc{
A \ar[r]|{|}^{M} \ar[d]_f \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow\alpha}&
B\ar[d]^g\\
C \ar[r]|{|}_N & D
}.
\end{equation}
Note that we distinguish between \emph{1-morphisms}, which we draw
vertically, and \emph{1-cells}, which we draw horizontally. In
traditional double-category terminology these are both referred to
with the same word (be it ``cell'' or ``morphism'' or ``arrow''), the
distinction being made only by the adjectives ``vertical'' and
``horizontal.'' Our terminology is more concise, and allows for
flexibility in the drawing of pictures without a corresponding change
in names (some authors prefer to draw their double categories
transposed from ours).
We write the composition of vertical 1-morphisms $A\too[f] B\too[g] C$
and the vertical composition of 2-morphisms $M\too[\alpha]
N\too[\beta] P$ as $g\circ f$ and $\beta\circ\alpha$, or sometimes
just $gf$ and $\beta\alpha$. We write the horizontal composition of
1-cells $A\xhto{M} B \xhto{N} C$ as $A\xhto{N\odot M} C$ and that of
2-morphisms
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix{ \ar[r]|-@{|}^-{} \ar[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow\alpha} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{} \ar[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow\beta} &\ar[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{} & \ar[r]|-@{|}_-{} & }}\]
as
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@C=4pc{ \ar[r]|-@{|}^-{} \ar[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow\;\be\odot\al} & \ar[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{} & }}\]
The two different compositions of 2-morphisms obey an interchange law,
by the functoriality of $\odot$:
\[(M_1\odot M_2) \circ (N_1\odot N_2) = (M_1\circ N_1)\odot (M_2\circ N_2).
\]
Every object $A$ has a vertical identity $1_A$ and a horizontal unit
$U_A$, every 1-cell $M$ has an identity 2-morphism $1_M$, every
vertical 1-morphism $f$ has a horizontal unit 2-morphism $U_f$, and we
have $1_{U_A} = U_{1_A}$ (by the functoriality of $U$).
Note that the vertical composition $\circ$ is strictly associative and
unital, while the horizontal one $\odot$ is only weakly so. This is
the case in most of the examples we have in mind. It is possible to
define double categories that are weak in both directions (see, for
instance,~\cite{verity:base-change}), but this introduces much more
complication and is usually unnecessary.
\begin{rmk}\label{rmk:monglob}
In general, an $(n\times 1)$-category consists of 1-categories
$\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_i$ for $0\le i\le n$, together with source, target, unit, and
composition functors and coherence isomorphisms. We refer to the
objects of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_i$ as \textbf{$i$-cells} and to the morphisms of
$\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_i$ as \textbf{morphisms of $i$-cells} or \textbf{(vertical)
$(i+1)$-morphisms}. A formal definition can be found
in~\cite{batanin:monglob} under the name \emph{monoidal $n$-globular
category}.
\end{rmk}
A 2-morphism~\eqref{eq:square} where $f$ and $g$ are identities (such
as the constraint isomorphisms $\ensuremath{\mathfrak{a}},\ensuremath{\mathfrak{l}},\ensuremath{\mathfrak{r}}$) is called
\textbf{globular}. Every double category \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ has a
\textbf{horizontal bicategory} $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ consisting of the objects,
1-cells, and globular 2-morphisms. Conversely, many naturally
occurring bicategories are actually the horizontal bicategory of some
naturally ocurring double category. Here are just a few examples.
\begin{eg}
The double category \lMod\ has as objects rings, as 1-morphisms ring
homomorphisms, as 1-cells bimodules, and as 2-morphisms equivariant
bimodule maps. Its horizontal bicategory $\cMod = \ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\lMod)$ is
the usual bicategory of rings and bimodules.
\end{eg}
\begin{eg}
The double category \lnCob\ has as objects closed $n$-manifolds, as
1-morphisms diffeomorphisms, as 1-cells cobordisms, and as
2-morphisms diffeomorphisms between cobordisms. Again $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\lnCob)$
is the usual bicategory of cobordisms.
\end{eg}
\begin{eg}
The double category \lProf\ has as objects categories, as
1-morphisms functors, as 1-cells \emph{profunctors} (a profunctor
$A\hto B$ is a functor $B^{\mathit{op}}\times A\to \mathbf{Set}$), and as
2-morphisms natural transformations. Bicategories such as
$\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\lProf)$ are commonly encountered in category theory,
especially the enriched versions.
\end{eg}
As opposed to bicategories, which naturally form a tricategory, double
categories naturally form a \emph{2-category}, a much simpler object.
\begin{defn}
Let \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ and \ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}\ be double categories. A \textbf{(pseudo double)
functor} $F\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\to \ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}$ consists of the following.
\begin{itemize}
\item Functors $F_0\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0 \to \ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}_0$ and $F_1\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1 \to
\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}_1$ such that $S\circ F_1 = F_0\circ S$ and $T\circ F_1 =
F_0\circ T$.
\item Natural transformations $F_\odot\maps F_1M \odot F_1N \to
F_1(M\odot N)$ and $F_U\maps U_{F_0 A} \to F_1(U_A)$, whose
components are globular isomorphisms, and which satisfy the usual
coherence axioms for a monoidal functor or pseudofunctor
(see~\cite[\S{}XI.2]{maclane}).
\end{itemize}
\end{defn}
\begin{defn}\label{thm:dbl-transf}
A \textbf{(vertical) transformation} between two functors $\alpha:
F\to G:\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\to\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}$ consists of natural transformations $\alpha_0\maps
F_0\to G_0$ and $\alpha_1\maps F_1\to G_1$ (both usually written as
$\alpha$), such that $S(\alpha_{M}) = \alpha_{SM}$ and
$T(\alpha_{M}) = \alpha_{TM}$, and such that
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
FA \ar@{=}[d] \ar[r]|{|}^{FM}
\ar@{}[drr]|{\Downarrow F_\odot} &
FB \ar[r]|{|}^{FN} &
FC \ar@{=}[d]\\
FA \ar[rr]|{F(N\odot M)} \ar[d]_{\alpha_A}
\ar@{}[drr]|{\Downarrow \alpha_{N\odot M}} &&
FC \ar[d]^{\alpha_C}\\
GA \ar[rr]|{|}_{G(N\odot M)} && GC
}} =
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
FA \ar[d]_{\alpha_A} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow \alpha_M} \ar[r]|{|}^{FM} &
FB \ar[d]|{\alpha_B} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow \alpha_N} \ar[r]|{|}^{FN} &
FC \ar[d]^{\alpha_C}\\
GA \ar@{=}[d] \ar[r]|{|}_{GM} \ar@{}[drr]|{\Downarrow G_\odot} &
GB \ar[r]|{|}_{GN} &
GC \ar@{=}[d]\\
GA \ar[rr]|{|}_{G(N\odot M)} && GC
}}\]
for all 1-cells $M\colon A\hto B$ and $N\colon B\hto C$, and
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
FA \ar[rr]|{|}^{U_{FA}} \ar@{=}[d]
\ar@{}[drr]|{\Downarrow F_0} &&
FA \ar@{=}[d]\\
FA \ar[rr]|{F(U_A)} \ar[d]_{\alpha_A}
\ar@{}[drr]|{\Downarrow \alpha_{U_A}} &&
FA \ar[d]^{\alpha_A}\\
GA \ar[rr]|{|}_{G(U_A)} && GA
}} =
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
FA \ar[rr]|{|}^{U_{FA}} \ar[d]_{\alpha_A}
\ar@{}[drr]|{\Downarrow U_{\alpha_A}} &&
FA \ar[d]^{\alpha_A}\\
GA \ar[rr]|{U_{GA}} \ar@{=}[d]
\ar@{}[drr]|{\Downarrow F_0} &&
GA \ar@{=}[d]\\
GA \ar[rr]|{|}_{G(U_A)} && GA.
}}\]
for all objects $A$.
\end{defn}
We write \cDbl\ for the 2-category of double categories, functors, and
transformations, and $\mathbf{Dbl}$ for its underlying 1-category.
Note that a 2-cell $\al$ in \cDbl\ is an isomorphism just when each
$\al_A$, \emph{and} each $\al_M$, is invertible.
The 2-category \cDbl\ gives us an easy way to define what we mean by a
\emph{symmetric monoidal double category}. In any 2-category with
finite products there is a notion of a \emph{pseudomonoid}, which
generalizes the notion of monoidal category in \cCat. Specializing
this to \cDbl, we obtain the following.
\begin{defn}
A \textbf{monoidal double category} is a double category equipped
with functors $\ten\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\times\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\to\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}$ and $I\maps * \to\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}$,
and invertible transformations
\begin{align*}
\mathord{\otimes} \circ (\Id\times \mathord{\otimes})
&\iso \mathord{\otimes} \circ (\mathord{\otimes} \times \Id)\\
\mathord{\otimes} \circ (\Id\times I) &\iso \Id\\
\mathord{\otimes} \circ (I\times \Id) &\iso \Id
\end{align*}
satisfying the usual axioms. If it additionally has a braiding
isomorphism
\begin{align*}
\mathord{\otimes} &\iso \mathord{\otimes} \circ \tau
\end{align*}
(where $\tau\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\times\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\iso \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\times\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}$ is the twist)
satisfying the usual axioms, then it is \textbf{braided} or
\textbf{symmetric}, according to whether or not the braiding is
self-inverse.
\end{defn}
Unpacking this definition more explicitly, we see that a monoidal
double category is a double category together with the following
structure.
\begin{enumerate}
\item $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$ and $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1$ are both monoidal categories.
\item If $I$ is the monoidal unit of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$, then $U_I$ is the
monoidal unit of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1$.\footnote{Actually, all the above
definition requires is that $U_I$ is coherently \emph{isomorphic
to} the monoidal unit of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1$, but we can always choose them
to be equal without changing the rest of the structure.}
\item The functors $S$ and $T$ are strict monoidal, i.e.\ $S(M\ten N)
= SM\ten SN$ and $T(M\ten N)=TM\ten TN$ and $S$ and $T$ also
preserve the associativity and unit constraints.
\item We have globular isomorphisms
\[\ensuremath{\mathfrak{x}}\maps (M_1\ten N_1)\odot (M_2\ten N_2)\too[\iso] (M_1\odot M_2)\ten (N_1\odot N_2)\]
and
\[\ensuremath{\mathfrak{u}}\maps U_{A\ten B} \too[\iso] (U_A \ten U_B)\]
such that the following diagrams commute:
\[\xymatrix{
((M_1\ten N_1)\odot (M_2\ten N_2)) \odot (M_3\ten N_3) \ar[r]\ar[d]
& ((M_1\odot M_2)\ten (N_1\odot N_2)) \odot (M_3\ten N_3) \ar[d]\\
(M_1\ten N_1)\odot ((M_2\ten N_2) \odot (M_3\ten N_3)) \ar[d] &
((M_1\odot M_2)\odot M_3) \ten ((N_1\odot N_2)\odot N_3) \ar[d]\\
(M_1\ten N_1) \odot ((M_2\odot M_3) \ten (N_2\odot N_3))\ar[r] &
(M_1\odot (M_2\odot M_3)) \ten (N_1\odot (N_2\odot N_3))}\]
\[\xymatrix{(M\ten N) \odot U_{C\ten D} \ar[r]\ar[d] &
(M\ten N)\odot (U_C\ten U_D) \ar[d]\\
M\ten N\ar@{<-}[r] & (M\odot U_C) \ten (N\odot U_D)}\]
\[\xymatrix{U_{A\ten B}\odot (M\ten N) \ar[r]\ar[d] &
(U_A\ten U_B)\odot (M\ten N) \ar[d]\\
M\ten N\ar@{<-}[r] & (U_A \odot M) \ten (U_B\odot N)}\]
(these arise from the constraint data for the pseudo double functor
$\ten$).
\item The following diagrams commute, expressing that the
associativity isomorphism for $\ten$ is a transformation of double
categories.
\[\xymatrix{
((M_1\ten N_1)\ten P_1) \odot ((M_2\ten N_2)\ten P_2) \ar[r]\ar[d] &
(M_1\ten (N_1\ten P_1)) \odot (M_2\ten (N_2\ten P_2)) \ar[d]\\
((M_1\ten N_1) \odot (M_2\ten N_2)) \ten (P_1\odot P_2) \ar[d] &
(M_1\odot M_2) \ten ((N_1\ten P_1)\odot (N_2\ten P_2))\ar[d] \\
((M_1\odot M_2) \ten(N_1\odot N_2)) \ten (P_1\odot P_2) \ar[r] &
(M_1\odot M_2) \ten ((N_1\odot N_2)\ten (P_1\odot P_2))}\]
\[\xymatrix{
U_{(A\ten B)\ten C} \ar[r] \ar[d] & U_{A\ten (B\ten C)} \ar[d]\\
U_{A\ten B} \ten U_C \ar[d] & U_A\ten U_{B\ten C}\ar[d]\\
(U_A\ten U_B)\ten U_C \ar[r] & U_A\ten (U_B\ten U_C) }\]
\item The following diagrams commute, expressing that the unit
isomorphisms for $\ten$ are transformations of double categories.
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix{
(M\ten U_I)\odot (N\ten U_I)\ar[r]\ar[d] &
(M\odot N)\ten (U_I \odot U_I) \ar[d]\\
M\odot N \ar@{<-}[r] &
(M\odot N)\ten U_I }}\]
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix{U_{A\ten I} \ar[r]\ar[dr] & U_A\ten U_I \ar[d]\\
& U_A}}\]
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix{
(U_I\ten M)\odot (U_I\ten N)\ar[r]\ar[d] &
(U_I \odot U_I) \ten (M\odot N) \ar[d]\\
M\odot N \ar@{<-}[r] &
U_I\ten (M\odot N) }}\]
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix{U_{I\ten A} \ar[r]\ar[dr] & U_I\ten U_A \ar[d]\\
& U_A}}\]
\newcounter{mondbl}
\setcounter{mondbl}{\value{enumi}}
\end{enumerate}
Similarly, a braided monoidal double category is a monoidal double
category with the following additional structure.
\begin{enumerate}\setcounter{enumi}{\value{mondbl}}
\item $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$ and $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1$ are braided monoidal categories.
\item The functors $S$ and $T$ are strict braided monoidal (i.e.\ they
preserve the braidings).
\item The following diagrams commute, expressing that the braiding is
a transformation of double categories.
\[\xymatrix{(M_1\odot M_2)\ten (N_1\odot N_2) \ar[r]^\ensuremath{\mathfrak{s}}\ar[d]_\ensuremath{\mathfrak{x}} &
(N_1\odot N_2)\ten (M_1 \odot M_2)\ar[d]^\ensuremath{\mathfrak{x}}\\
(M_1\ten N_1)\odot (M_2\ten N_2) \ar[r]_{\ensuremath{\mathfrak{s}}\odot \ensuremath{\mathfrak{s}}} &
(N_1\ten M_1) \odot (N_2 \ten M_2)}
\]
\[\xymatrix{U_A \ten U_B \ar[r]^(0.55)\ensuremath{\mathfrak{u}} \ar[d]_\ensuremath{\mathfrak{s}} &
U_{A\ten B} \ar[d]^{U_\ensuremath{\mathfrak{s}}}\\
U_B\ten U_A \ar[r]_(0.55)\ensuremath{\mathfrak{u}} &
U_{B\ten A}}.
\]
\setcounter{mondbl}{\value{enumi}}
\end{enumerate}
Finally, a symmetric monoidal double category is a braided one such that
\begin{enumerate}\setcounter{enumi}{\value{mondbl}}
\item $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$ and $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1$ are in fact symmetric monoidal.
\end{enumerate}
While there are a fair number of coherence diagrams to verify, most of
them are fairly small, and in any given case most or all of them are
fairly obvious. Thus, verifying that a given double category is
(braided or symmetric) monoidal is not a great deal of work.
\begin{eg}
The examples \lMod, \lnCob, and \lProf\ are all easily seen to be
symmetric monoidal under the tensor product of rings, disjoint union
of manifolds, and cartesian product of categories, respectively.
\end{eg}
\begin{rmk}
In a 2-category with finite products there is additionally the
notion of a \emph{cartesian object}: one such that the diagonal
$D\to D\times D$ and projection $D\to 1$ have right adjoints. Any
cartesian object is a symmetric pseudomonoid in a canonical way,
just as any category with finite products is a monoidal category
with its cartesian product. Many of the ``cartesian bicategories''
considered in~\cite{cw:cart-bicats-i,ckww:cartbicats-ii} are in
fact the horizontal bicategory of some cartesian object in \cDbl,
and inherit their monoidal structure in this way.
\end{rmk}
Two further general methods for constructing symmetric monoidal double
categories can be found in~\cite{shulman:frbi}.
\begin{rmk}
The general yoga of internalization says that an $X$ internal to
$Y$s internal to $Z$s is equivalent to a $Y$ internal to $X$s
internal to $Z$s, but this is only strictly true when the
internalizations are all strict. We have defined a symmetric
monoidal double category to be a (pseudo) symmetric monoid internal
to (pseudo) categories internal to categories, but one could also
consider a (pseudo) category internal to (pseudo) symmetric monoids
internal to categories, i.e.\ a pseudo internal category in the
2-category
$\mathcal{S}\mathit{ym}\mathcal{M}\mathit{on}\mathcal{C}\mathit{at}$
of symmetric monoidal categories and strong symmetric monoidal
functors. This would give \emph{almost} the same definition, except
that $S$ and $T$ would only be strong monoidal (preserving $\ten$ up
to isomorphism) rather than strict monoidal. We prefer our
definition, since $S$ and $T$ are strict monoidal in almost all
examples, and keeping track of their constraints would be tedious.
\end{rmk}
Just as every bicategory is equivalent to a strict 2-category, it is
proven in~\cite{gp:double-limits} that every pseudo double category is
equivalent to a strict double category (one in which the associativity
and unit constraints for $\odot$ are identities). Thus, from now on
we will usually omit to write these constraint isomorphisms (or
equivalently, implicitly strictify our double categories). We
\emph{will} continue to write the constraint isomorphisms for the
monoidal structure $\ten$, since these are where the whole question
lies.
\section{Companions and conjoints}
\label{sec:comp-conj}
Suppose that \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is a symmetric monoidal double category; when does
$\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ become a symmetric monoidal bicategory? It clearly has a
unit object $I$, and the pseudo double functor $\ten\maps
\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\times\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\to\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}$ clearly induces a functor $\ten\maps
\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})\times\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})\to\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$. However, the problem is that the
constraint isomorphisms such as $A\ten (B\ten C)\iso (A\ten B)\ten C$
are \emph{vertical} 1-morphisms, which get discarded when we pass to
$\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$. Thus, in order for $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ to inherit a symmetric
monoidal structure, we must have a way to make vertical 1-morphisms
into horizontal 1-cells. Thus is the purpose of the following
definition.
\begin{defn}\label{def:companion}
Let \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ be a double category and $f\maps A\to B$ a vertical
1-morphism. A \textbf{companion} of $f$ is a horizontal 1-cell
$\ensuremath{\hat{f}}\maps A\hto B$ together with 2-morphisms
\begin{equation*}
\begin{array}{c}
\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar[d]_f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow
& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} & }
\end{array}\quad\text{and}\quad
\begin{array}{c}
\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow
& \ar[d]^f\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} & }
\end{array}
\end{equation*}
such that the following equations hold.
\begin{align}\label{eq:compeqn}
\begin{array}{c}
\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow
& \ar[d]^f\\
\ar[r]|-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar[d]_f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow
& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} & }
\end{array} &=
\begin{array}{c}
\xymatrix@-.5pc{ \ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar[d]_f
\ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow U_f} & \ar[d]^f\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} & }
\end{array}
&
\begin{array}{c}
\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar[d]_f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow
& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} &}
\end{array} &=
\begin{array}{c}
\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow 1_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}}
& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} & }
\end{array}
\end{align}
A \textbf{conjoint} of $f$, denoted $\fchk\maps B\hto A$, is a
companion of $f$ in the double category $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}^{h\cdot\mathrm{op}}$
obtained by reversing the horizontal 1-cells, but not the vertical
1-morphisms, of \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}.
\end{defn}
\begin{rmk}
We momentarily suspend our convention of pretending that our double
categories are strict to mention that the second
equation in~\eqref{eq:compeqn} actually requires an insertion of unit
isomorphisms to make sense.
\end{rmk}
The form of this definition is due
to~\cite{gp:double-adjoints,dpp:spans}, but the ideas date back
to~\cite{bs:dblgpd-xedmod}; see
also~\cite{bm:dbl-thin-conn,fiore:pscat}. In the terminology of these
references, a \emph{connection} on a double category is equivalent to
a strictly functorial choice of a companion for each vertical arrow.
\begin{defn}
We say that a double category is \textbf{fibrant} if every vertical
1-morphism has both a companion and a conjoint.
\end{defn}
\begin{rmk}
In~\cite{shulman:frbi} fibrant double categories were called
\emph{framed bicategories}. However, the present terminology seems
to generalize better to $(n\times k)$-categories, as well as
avoiding a conflict with the \emph{framed bordisms} in topological
field theory.
\end{rmk}
\begin{egs}
\lMod, \lnCob, and \lProf\ are all fibrant. In \lMod, the companion
of a ring homomorphism $f\maps A\to B$ is $B$ regarded as an
$A$-$B$-bimodule via $f$ on the left, and dually for its conjoint.
In \lnCob, companions and conjoints are obtained by regarding a
diffeomorphism as a cobordism. And in \lProf, companions and
conjoints are obtained by regarding a functor $f\maps A\to B$ as a
`representable' profunctor $B(f-,-)$ or $B(-,f-)$.
\end{egs}
\begin{rmk}
For an $(n\times 1)$-category (recall \autoref{rmk:monglob}), the
lifting condition we should require is simply that each double
category $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_{i+1} \toto \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_i$, for $0\le i < n$, is fibrant.
\end{rmk}
The existence of companions and conjoints gives us a way to `lift'
vertical 1-morphisms to horizontal 1-cells. What is even more crucial
for our applications, however, is that these liftings are unique up to
isomorphism, and that these isomorphisms are canonical and coherent.
This is the content of the following lemmas. We state most of them
only for companions, but all have dual versions for conjoints.
\begin{lem}\label{thm:theta}
Let $\ensuremath{\hat{f}}\maps A\hto B$ and $\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'\maps A\hto B$ be companions of
$f$ (that is, each comes \emph{equipped with} 2-morphisms as in
\autoref{def:companion}). Then there is a unique globular isomorphism
$\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'}\maps \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\too[\iso]\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'$ such that
\begin{equation}\label{eq:comp-iso}
\vcenter{\xymatrix@R=1.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow & \ar[d]^f\\
\ar[r]|-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow \theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'}} & \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} \ar[d]_f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow & \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} & }} \quad = \quad
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{ \ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar[d]_f
\ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow U_f} & \ar[d]^f\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} & .}}
\end{equation}
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
Composing~\eqref{eq:comp-iso} on the left with
$\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{ \ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d]
\ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow & \ar[d]^f\\ \ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} & }}$
and on the right with $\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar[d]_f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar@{=}[d]\\ \ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} & }}$, and using the second
equation~\eqref{eq:compeqn}, we see that if~\eqref{eq:comp-iso} is
satisfied then $\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'}$ must be the composite
\begin{equation}
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar[d]|f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow
& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} &}}\label{eq:theta}
\end{equation}
Two applications of the first equation~\eqref{eq:compeqn} shows that
this indeed satisfies~\eqref{eq:comp-iso}. As for its being an
isomorphism, we have the dual composite $\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}',\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'}$:
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} \ar[d]_f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow
& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} &}}\]
which we verify is an inverse using~\eqref{eq:compeqn}:
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_A}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{=} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_A}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}\ar[d]|f \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|{U_A}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'}\ar[d]|f \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|{U_B}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{=} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_B} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_B} &
}} \;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar[d]_f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow
& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} &}} \;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow 1_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}}
& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} & }}\]
(and dually).
\end{proof}
\begin{lem}\label{thm:theta-id}
For any companion \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ of $f$ we have $\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}=1_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}$.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
This is the second equation~\eqref{eq:compeqn}.
\end{proof}
\begin{lem}\label{thm:theta-compose-vert}
Suppose that $f$ has three companions $\ensuremath{\hat{f}}$, $\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'$, and
$\ensuremath{\hat{f}}''$. Then $\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}''} = \theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}',\ensuremath{\hat{f}}''}
\circ\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'}$.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
By definition, we have
\[\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}',\ensuremath{\hat{f}}''} \circ\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} =\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_A}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{=} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_A}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}\ar[d]|f \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|{U_A}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'}\ar[d]|f \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|{U_B}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{=} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}''} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_B} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_B} &
}} \;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar[d]_f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow
& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}''} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} &}} \;=
\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}''}\]
as desired.
\end{proof}
\begin{lem}\label{thm:comp-unit}
$U_A\maps A\hto A$ is always a companion of $1_A\maps A\to A$ in a
canonical way.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
We take both defining 2-morphisms to be
$1_{U_A}$; the truth of~\eqref{eq:compeqn} is evident.
\end{proof}
\begin{lem}\label{thm:comp-compose}
Suppose that $f\maps A\to B$ has a companion \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ and $g\maps B\to
C$ has a companion \ensuremath{\hat{g}}. Then $\ensuremath{\hat{g}}\odot\ensuremath{\hat{f}}$ is a companion of
$gf$.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
We take the defining 2-morphisms to be the composites
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar[d]_f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{1_{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}}} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-{U_B} \ar[d]_g \ar@{}[dr]|{U_g} &
\ar[r]|-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}} \ar[d]|g \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_C} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_C} &
}}\quad\text{and}\quad
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar[d]|f \ar@{}[dr]|{U_f} &
\ar[d]^f\\
\ar[r]|-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{1_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}} &
\ar[r]|-{U_B} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[d]^g\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}} &
}}
\]
It is easy to verify that these satisfy~\eqref{eq:compeqn}, using
the interchange law for $\odot$ and $\circ$ in a double category.
\end{proof}
\begin{lem}\label{thm:theta-compose-horiz}
Suppose that $f\maps A\to B$ has companions $\ensuremath{\hat{f}}$ and $\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'$,
and that $g\maps B\to C$ has companions $\ensuremath{\hat{g}}$ and $\ensuremath{\hat{g}}'$. Then
$\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{g}},\ensuremath{\hat{g}}'}\odot \theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} =
\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}\odot\ensuremath{\hat{f}}, \ensuremath{\hat{g}}'\odot\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'}$.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
Using the interchange law for $\odot$ and $\circ$, we have:
\begin{align}
\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}\odot\ensuremath{\hat{f}}, \ensuremath{\hat{g}}'\odot\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} &=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar[d]|f \ar@{}[dr]|{U_f} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar[d]|f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{1_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{1_{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}}} &
\ar[r]|-{U_B} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-{U_B} \ar[d]|g \ar@{}[dr]|{U_g} &
\ar[r]|-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}} \ar[d]|g \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}'} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_C} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_C} &
}}
\;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar[d]|f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{1_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{1_{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}}} &
\ar[r]|-{U_B} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}} \ar[d]|g \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}'} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_C} &
}}\\
&=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar[d]|f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_B} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{1_{U_B}} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{1_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{1_{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}}} &
\ar[r]|-{U_B} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{1_{U_B}} &
\ar[r]|-{U_B} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}} \ar[d]|g \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}'} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_C} &
}}\;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar[d]|f \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_B} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}} \ar[d]|g \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_B} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{g}}'} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_C} &
}}\\
&=\;
\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{g}},\ensuremath{\hat{g}}'}\odot \theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'}
\end{align}
as desired.
\end{proof}
\begin{lem}\label{thm:theta-unit}
If $f\maps A\to B$ has a companion \ensuremath{\hat{f}}, then
$\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}\odot U_A}$ and $\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},U_B\odot \ensuremath{\hat{f}}}$
are equal to the unit constraints $\ensuremath{\hat{f}} \iso \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\odot U_A$ and
$\ensuremath{\hat{f}}\iso U_B\odot \ensuremath{\hat{f}}$.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
By definition, we have
\[\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}\odot U_A} =\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow 1_{U_A}} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{1_{U_A}} &
\ar@{=}[d] \ar[rr]|-@{|}^-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} \ar@{}[ddrr]|\Downarrow && \ar@{=}[dd]\\
\ar[r]|-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{1_{U_A}} &
\ar[r]|-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\Downarrow &
\ar[d]^f\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_A} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} & \ar[rr]|-@{|}^-{U_B} &&
}}\;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix{ \ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_A} \ar@{=}[d]
\ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow 1_{U_A}} & \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_A} & }}
\]
which, bearing in mind our suppression of unit and associativity
constraints, means that in actuality it is the unit constraint
$\ensuremath{\hat{f}} \iso \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\odot U_A$. The other case is dual.
\end{proof}
\begin{lem}\label{thm:comp-func}
Let $F\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\to\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}$ be a functor between double categories and
let $f\maps A\to B$ have a companion \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ in \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}. Then $F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}})$
is a companion of $F(f)$ in \ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
We take the defining 2-morphisms to be
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@R=1.5pc@C=3pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}})} \ar[d]_{F(f)}
\ar@{}[dr]|{F(\Downarrow)} & \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-{F(U_B)} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\iso & \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_{F(B)}} & }}
\quad\text{and}\quad
\vcenter{\xymatrix@R=1.5pc@C=3pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_{FA}} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\iso & \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-{F(U_{A})} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{F(\Downarrow)} &
\ar[d]^{F(f)}\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}})} & .}}\]
The axioms~\eqref{eq:compeqn} follow directly from those for \ensuremath{\hat{f}}.
\end{proof}
\begin{lem}\label{thm:comp-ten}
Suppose that \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is a monoidal double category and that $f\maps
A\to B$ and $g\maps C\to D$ have companions \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ and \ensuremath{\hat{g}}\
respectively. Then $\ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ten\ensuremath{\hat{g}}$ is a companion of $f\ten g$.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
This follows from \autoref{thm:comp-func}, since $\ten\maps
\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\times\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\to\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}$ is a functor, and a companion in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\times\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}$
is simply a pair of companions in \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}.
\end{proof}
\begin{lem}\label{thm:theta-func}
Suppose that $f\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\to\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}$ is a functor and that $f\maps A\to
B$ has companions \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ and $\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'$ in \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}. Then
$\theta_{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}}),F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}}')} = F(\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'})$.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
Using the axioms of a pseudo double functor and the definition of
the 2-morphisms in \autoref{thm:comp-func}, we have
\begin{equation}
F(\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'})
=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@C=4.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}})}
\ar[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{F(\Downarrow\odot\Downarrow)} & \ar[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}}')} &}}
\;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@C=2pc{
\ar[rr]|-@{|}^-{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}})}
\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[drr]|\iso && \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{F(U_{A})} \ar@{=}[d]
\ar@{}[dr]|{F(\Downarrow)} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}})} \ar[d]|{F(f)}
\ar@{}[dr]|{F(\Downarrow)}
& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}}')} \ar@{}[drr]|\iso\ar@{=}[d] &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_{F(B)}} & \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[rr]|-@{|}_-{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}}')} && }}
\;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@R=1.5pc@C=2.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{U_{F(A)}} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|\iso &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^-{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}})} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|=
& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-{F(U_{A})} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{F(\Downarrow)} &
\ar[r]|-{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}})} \ar[d]|{F(f)} \ar@{}[dr]|{F(\Downarrow)}
& \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}}')} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|= &
\ar[r]|-{F(U_{B})} \ar@{}[dr]|\iso \ar@{=}[d] & \ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}}')} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{U_{F(B)}} &}}
\;=
\theta_{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}}),\,F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}}')}
\end{equation}
as desired.
\end{proof}
\begin{lem}\label{thm:theta-ten}
Suppose that \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is a monoidal double category, that $f\maps A\to
B$ has companions \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ and $\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'$, and that $g\maps C\to D$ has
companions \ensuremath{\hat{g}}\ and $\ensuremath{\hat{g}}'$. Then $\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'} \ten
\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{g}},\ensuremath{\hat{g}}'} = \theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ten \ensuremath{\hat{g}}, \ensuremath{\hat{f}}'\ten\ensuremath{\hat{g}}'}.$
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
This follows from \autoref{thm:theta-func} in the same way that
\autoref{thm:comp-ten} follows from \autoref{thm:comp-func}.
\end{proof}
\begin{lem}\label{thm:comp-iso}
If $f\maps A\to B$ is a vertical isomorphism with a companion \ensuremath{\hat{f}},
then \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ is a conjoint of its inverse $f^{-1}$.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
The composites
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}\ar[d]_f \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|{U_B}\ar[d]_{f^{-1}} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow U_{f^{-1}}} &
\ar[d]^{f^{-1}}\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_A} &
}}\quad\text{and}\quad
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_B}\ar[d]_{f^{-1}} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow U_{f^{-1}}} &
\ar[d]^{f^{-1}}\\
\ar[r]|{U_A}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[d]^f\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} &
}}
\]
exhibit \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ as a conjoint of $f^{-1}$.
\end{proof}
\begin{lem}\label{thm:compconj-adj}
If $f\maps A\to B$ has both a companion \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ and a conjoint \fchk,
then we have an adjunction $\ensuremath{\hat{f}}\adj\fchk$ in $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}$. If $f$ is
an isomorphism, then this is an adjoint equivalence.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
The unit and counit of the adjunction $\ensuremath{\hat{f}}\adj\fchk$ are the
composites
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_A}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_A}\ar[d]|{f} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\fchk} &
}}\quad\text{and}\quad
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{\fchk}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}\ar[d]|{f} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_B} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_B} &
}}
\]
The triangle identities follow from~\eqref{eq:compeqn}. If $f$ is
an isomorphism, then by the dual of \autoref{thm:comp-iso}, \fchk\
is a companion of $f^{-1}$. But then by \autoref{thm:comp-compose}
$\fchk\odot \ensuremath{\hat{f}}$ is a companion of $1_A=f^{-1} \circ f$ and
$\ensuremath{\hat{f}}\odot\fchk$ is a companion of $1_B = f\circ f^{-1}$, and hence
\ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ and \fchk\ are equivalences. We can then check that in this
case the above unit and counit actually are the isomorphisms
$\theta$, or appeal to the general fact that any adjunction
involving an equivalence is an adjoint equivalence.
\end{proof}
\begin{rmk}
Our intended applications actually only require our double
categories to have companions and conjoints for vertical
\emph{isomorphisms}; we may call a double category with this
property \textbf{isofibrant}. Note that by \autoref{thm:comp-iso},
having companions for all isomorphisms implies having conjoints for
all isomorphisms. However, most examples we are interested in have
all companions and conjoints, and these are useful for other
purposes as well; see~\cite{shulman:frbi}. Moreover, if we are
given a double category in which only vertical isomorphisms have
companions, we can still apply our theorems to it as written, simply
by first discarding all noninvertible vertical 1-morphisms.
\end{rmk}
\section{From double categories to bicategories}
\label{sec:1x1-to-bicat}
We are now equipped to lift structures on fibrant double categories to
their horizontal bicategories. In this section we show that passage
from fibrant double categories to bicategories is functorial; in the
next section we show that it preserves monoidal structure.
As a point of notation, we write $\odot$ for the composition of
1-cells in a bicategory, since our bicategories are generally of the
form $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$. As advocated by Max Kelly, we say \textbf{functor}
to mean a morphism between bicategories that preserves composition up
to isomorphism; equivalent terms include \emph{weak 2-functor},
\emph{pseudofunctor}, and \emph{homomorphism}.
\begin{thm}
If \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is a double category, then $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ is a bicategory, and
any functor $F\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\to\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}$ induces a functor $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(F)\maps
\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})\to\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}})$. In this way $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}$ defines a functor of
1-categories $\mathbf{Dbl}\to \mathbf{Bicat}$.
\end{thm}
\begin{proof}
The constraints of $F$ are all globular, hence give constraints for
$\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(F)$. Functoriality is evident.
\end{proof}
The action of \ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}\ on transformations, however, is less obvious, and
requires the presence of companions or conjoints. Recall that if
$F,G\maps \ensuremath{\mathcal{A}}\to\ensuremath{\mathcal{B}}$ are functors between bicategories, then an
\textbf{oplax transformation} $\al\maps F\to G$ consists of 1-cells
$\al_A\maps FA\to GA$ and 2-cells
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix{ \ar[r]^{Ff}\ar[d]_{\al_A} \drtwocell\omit{\al_f} & \ar[d]^{\al_B}\\
\ar[r]_{Gf} & }}\]
such that for any 2-cell $\xymatrix{A \rtwocell^f_g{x} & B}$ in \ensuremath{\mathcal{A}},
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:laxtransf-nat}
\vcenter{\xymatrix@R=1pc@C=3pc{
\rtwocell^{Ff}_{Fg}{Fx}\ar[dd]_{\al_A}
& \ar[dd]^{\al_B}\\
\drtwocell\omit{\al_g} & \\
\ar[r]_{Gg} & }}\;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@R=1pc@C=3pc{
\ar[r]^{Ff}\ar[dd]_{\al_A} \drtwocell\omit{\al_f} &
\ar[dd]^{\al_B}\\ & \\
\rtwocell^{Gf}_{Gg}{Gx} & }}
\end{equation}
and moreover for any $A$ and any $f,g$ in \ensuremath{\mathcal{A}},
\begin{equation}
\vcenter{\xymatrix@R=5pc{
\rtwocell^{1_{FA}}_{F(1_A)}{\iso} \ar[d]_{\al_A} \drtwocell\omit{\al_{1_A}} & \ar[d]^{\al_A}\\
\rtwocell^{G(1_A)}_{1_{GA}}{\iso} & }} \;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix{ \ar[r]^{1_{FA}}\ar[d]_{\al_A} \drtwocell\omit{\iso}& \ar[d]^{\al_A}\\
\ar[r]_{1_{GA}} &
}}
\quad\text{and}\quad
\vcenter{\xymatrix{
\ar[r]|{Ff}\ar[d]_{\al_A} \drtwocell\omit{\al_f}
\rruppertwocell^{F(gf)}{\iso}
&
\ar[r]|{Fg}\ar[d]|{\al_B} \drtwocell\omit{\al_g} &
\ar[d]^{\al_C}\\
\ar[r]|{Gf} \rrlowertwocell_{G(gf)}{\iso} & \ar[r]|{Gg} & }}
\;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix{ \ar[r]^{F(gf)}\ar[d]_{\al_A} \drtwocell\omit{\al_{gf}} & \ar[d]^{\al_C}\\
\ar[r]_{G(gf)} & }}\label{eq:laxtransf-ax}
\end{equation}
It is a \textbf{lax transformation} if the 2-cells $\al_f$ go the
other direction, and a \textbf{pseudo transformation} if they are
isomorphisms.
By doctrinal adjunction~\cite{kelly:doc-adjn}, given collections of
1-cells $\al_A\maps FA\to GA$ and $\be_A\maps GA\to FA$ and
adjunctions $\al_A\adj \be_A$ in \ensuremath{\mathcal{B}}, there is a bijection between
\begin{inparaenum}
\item collections of 2-cells $\al_f$ making $\al$ an oplax
transformation and
\item collections of 2-cells $\be_f$ making $\be$ a lax
transformation.
\end{inparaenum}
Two such transformations correspond under this bijection if and only if
\begin{equation}
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{F(f) \ar[r]^-{\eta \odot F(f)}
\ar[d]_{F(f)\odot \eta} &
\be_B\odot \al_B \odot F(f) \ar[d]^{\be_B \odot \al_f}\\
F(f) \odot \be_A\odot \al_A\ar[r]_-{\be_f \odot \al_A} &
\be_B\odot G(f) \odot \al_A}}
\quad\text{and}\quad
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{\al_B\odot F(f)\odot \be_A
\ar[r]^-{\al_B\odot \be_f}\ar[d]_{\al_f \odot \be_A}&
\al_B \odot \be_B \odot G(f)\ar[d]^{\ep \odot G(f)}\\
G(f)\odot \al_A\odot \be_A \ar[r]_-{G(f) \odot \ep} & G(f)}}\label{eq:conjtrans}
\end{equation}
commute. If we have a pointwise adjunction between an oplax and a lax
transformation, whose 2-cell structures correspond under this
bijection, we call it a \textbf{conjunctional transformation}
$(\al\conj \be)\maps F\to G$. (These are the conjoint pairs in a
double category whose horizontal arrows are lax transformations and
whose vertical arrows are oplax transformations.)
Of particular importance is the case when both $\al$ and \be\ are
pseudo natural and each adjunction $\al_A\adj \be_A$ is an adjoint
equivalence. In this case we call $\al\conj \be$ a \textbf{pseudo
natural adjoint equivalence}. A pseudo natural adjoint equivalence
can equivalently be defined as an internal equivalence in the
bicategory $\cBicat(\ensuremath{\mathcal{A}},\ensuremath{\mathcal{B}})$ of functors, pseudo natural
transformations, and modifications $\ensuremath{\mathcal{A}}\to\ensuremath{\mathcal{B}}$.
Recall also that if $\al,\al'\maps F\to G$ are oplax transformations,
a \textbf{modification} $\mu\maps \al\to\al'$ consists of 2-cells
$\mu_A\maps \al_A\to\al'_A$ such that
\begin{equation}
\vcenter{\xymatrix@C=1pc@R=2.5pc{ \ar[rr]^{Ff}\dtwocell_{\al'_A}^{\al_A}{\mu_A} &
\drtwocell\omit{\al_f} & \ar[d]^{\al_B}\\
\ar[rr]_{Gf} && }} \quad=\quad
\vcenter{\xymatrix@C=1pc@R=2.5pc{ \ar[rr]^{Ff}\ar[d]_{\al'_A} \drtwocell\omit{\al'_f} &&
\dtwocell^{\al_B}_{\al'_B}{\mu_B}\\
\ar[rr]_{Gf} && }}\label{eq:modif-ax}
\end{equation}
There is an evident notion of modification between lax transformations
as well. Finally, given conjunctional transformations $\al\conj\be$
and $\al'\conj \be'$, there is a bijection between modifications
$\al\to\al'$ and $\be'\to\be$, where $\mu\maps \al\to\al'$ corresponds
to $\bar{\mu}\maps \be'\to\be$ with components $\bar{\mu}_A$ defined
by:
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
&& FA \ar@{=}[drr] \ddtwocell<5>^{\al_A}_{\al'_A}{\mu_A}\\
GA \ar[urr]^{\be'_A} \ar@{=}[drr] & \Swarrow_\ep && \Swarrow_\eta & FA\\
&&GA\ar[urr]_{\be_A}
}}\]
The modifications $\bar{\mu}$ and \mu\ are called \textbf{mates}, and
are compatible with composition (see \cite{ks:r2cats}). Thus, given
$\ensuremath{\mathcal{A}},\ensuremath{\mathcal{B}}$ we can define a bicategory $\Conj(\ensuremath{\mathcal{A}},\ensuremath{\mathcal{B}})$, whose objects
are functors $\ensuremath{\mathcal{A}}\to\ensuremath{\mathcal{B}}$, whose 1-cells are conjunctional
transformations considered as pointing in the direction of their left
adjoints, and whose 2-cells are mate-pairs of modifications.
\begin{thm}\label{thm:h-locfr}
If \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is a double category and \ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}\ is a fibrant double category
with chosen companions and conjoints, we have a functor
\begin{align}
\cDbl(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}},\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}) &\too \Conj(\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}),\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}))\\
F &\mapsto \ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(F)\\
\al &\mapsto (\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}\conj\ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}).
\end{align}
Moreover, if \al\ is an isomorphism, then $\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}\conj\ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}$ is a
pseudo natural adjoint equivalence.
\end{thm}
Note that we are here regarding the 1-category $\cDbl(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}},\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}})$ as a
bicategory with only identity 2-cells.
\begin{proof}
We denote the chosen companion and conjoint of $f$ in \ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}\ by \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\
and \fchk, as usual. We define $\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}$ as follows: its 1-cell
components are $\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A = \widehat{\al_A}$, and its 2-cell
component $\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_f$ is the composite
\begin{equation}
\vcenter{\xymatrix@R=1.5pc@C=2.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FA}}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]^{Ff}\ar[d]|{\al_A} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow \al_f} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_B}\ar[d]|{\al_B} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A} &
\ar[r]_{Gf} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_{GB}} &
}}\label{eq:oplax-2cell}
\end{equation}
Equations~\eqref{eq:laxtransf-nat} and~\eqref{eq:laxtransf-ax}
follow directly from \autoref{thm:dbl-transf}. The construction of
$\ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}$ is dual, using conjoints, and \autoref{thm:compconj-adj}
shows that $\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A\adj \ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}_A$. For the first equation
in~\eqref{eq:conjtrans}, we have
\begin{equation}
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FA}}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{=} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{Ff}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{=} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FB}}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FB}}\ar[d]|{\al_B} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|{U_{FA}}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|{Ff}\ar[d]|{\al_A} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow\al_f} &
\ar[r]|{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_B}\ar[d]|{\al_B} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|{\ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}_B}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{=} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{Gf} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_{GB}} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}_B} &
}}\;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FA}}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{Ff}\ar[d]|{\al_A} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow \al_f} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FB}}\ar[d]|{\al_B} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{Gf} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}_B} &
}}\;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FA}}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FA}}\ar[d]|{\al_A} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{Ff}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{=} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FB}}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{=} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{=} &
\ar[r]|{\ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}_A}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|{Ff}\ar[d]|{\al_A} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow\al_f} &
\ar[r]|{U_{FB}}\ar[d]|{\al_B} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_{GA}} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{Gf} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}_B} &
}},
\end{equation}
and the second is dual. Thus $(\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}\conj\ensuremath{\check{\alpha}})$ is a
conjunctional transformation.
Now suppose given $\al\maps F\to G$ and $\be\maps G\to H$. Then by
\autoref{thm:comp-compose}, $\ensuremath{\hat{\beta}}_A\odot\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A$ is a companion
of $\be_A\circ \al_A$, so we have a canonical isomorphism
\[\theta_{\widehat{\be\al}_A, \,\ensuremath{\hat{\beta}}_A\odot\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A}\maps
\widehat{\be\al}_A \too[\iso] \ensuremath{\hat{\beta}}_A\odot\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A.
\]
Of course, we also have $\theta_{\widehat{1_A},U_A}\maps
\widehat{1_A} \too[\iso] U_A$ by \autoref{thm:comp-unit}. These
constraints are automatically natural, since $\cDbl(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}},\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}})$ has no
nonidentity 2-cells. The axiom for the composition constraint says
that two constructed isomorphisms
\[\widehat{\gm\be\al}_A \too[\iso] (\ensuremath{\hat{\gamma}}_A \odot \ensuremath{\hat{\beta}}_A)\odot \ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A\]
are equal. However, both $\widehat{\gm\be\al}_A$ and $(\ensuremath{\hat{\gamma}}_A
\odot \ensuremath{\hat{\beta}}_A)\odot \ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A$ are companions of $\gm_A\be_A\al_A$,
and both of these isomorphisms are constructed from composites (both
$\circ$-composites and $\odot$-composites) of $\theta$s; hence by
Lemmas \ref{thm:theta-compose-vert} and
\ref{thm:theta-compose-horiz} they are both equal to
\[\theta_{\widehat{\gm\be\al}_A,\, (\ensuremath{\hat{\gamma}}_A \odot \ensuremath{\hat{\beta}}_A)\odot
\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A}\] and thus equal to each other. The same argument
applies to the axioms for the unit constraint; thus we have a
functor of bicategories.
Finally, if $\al$ is an isomorphism, then in particular each $\al_A$
is an isomorphism, so by \autoref{thm:compconj-adj} each
$\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A\adj \ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}_A$ is an adjoint equivalence. But \al\ being
an isomorphism also implies that each 2-cell
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{ \ar[r]|-@{|}^-{Ff} \ar[d]_{\al_A} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow\al_f} & \ar[d]^{\al_B}\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_-{Gf} & }}\]
is an isomorphism. From its inverse we form the composite
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@R=1.5pc@C=3pc{
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]^{Gf}\ar[d]|{\al_A^{-1}} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow\al_f^{-1}} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{GB}}\ar[d]|{\al_B^{-1}} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_{FA}}&
\ar[r]_{Ff} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}_A} &
}}\]
which we can then verify to be an inverse of~\eqref{eq:oplax-2cell}.
Thus $\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}$, and dually $\ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}$, is pseudo natural, and hence
$\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}\conj\ensuremath{\check{\alpha}}$ is a pseudo natural adjoint equivalence.
\end{proof}
We can also promote \autoref{thm:theta} to a functorial uniqueness.
\begin{lem}\label{thm:h-locfr-uniq}
Let \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ be a double category and \ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}\ a fibrant double category
with two different sets of choices $\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\fchk$ and $\ensuremath{\hat{f}}',\fchk'$
of companions and conjoints for each vertical 1-morphism $f$, giving
rise to two different functors
\[\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}},\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}'\maps \cDbl(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}},\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}})\too \Conj(\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}),\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}})).\]
Then the isomorphisms $\theta$ from \autoref{thm:theta} fit together
into a pseudo natural adjoint equivalence $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}\eqv \ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}'$ which is the
identity on objects.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
We must first show that for a given transformation $\al\maps F\to
G\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\to\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}$ in \cDbl, the isomorphisms \th\ form an invertible
modification $\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}} \iso \ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}'$.
Substituting~\eqref{eq:oplax-2cell} and the definition of \th\
into~\eqref{eq:modif-ax}, this becomes the assertion that
\begin{equation}
\vcenter{\xymatrix@R=1.5pc@C=2pc{
&
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FA}}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]^{Ff}\ar[d]|{\al_A} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow \al_f} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_B}\ar[d]|{\al_B} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar@{=}[d]\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FA}} \ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]|{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A} \ar[d]|{\al_A} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow}&
\ar[r]_{Gf} \ar@{=}[d] &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_{GB}} & \\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A'} & \ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_{GB}}&&
}} \;=\;
\vcenter{\xymatrix@R=1.5pc@C=2pc{
&& \ar@{=}[d] \ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FA}} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[d]|{\al_B} \ar[r]|-@{|}^{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_B} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow}
&
\ar@{=}[d] &\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}^{U_{FA}}\ar@{=}[d] \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar[r]^{Ff}\ar[d]|{\al_A} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow \al_f} &
\ar[r]|{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_B'}\ar[d]|{\al_B} \ar@{}[dr]|{\Downarrow} &
\ar@{=}[d] \ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_{GB}}&\\
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A'} &
\ar[r]_{Gf} &
\ar[r]|-@{|}_{U_{GB}} & .
}}
\end{equation}
This follows from two applications of~\eqref{eq:compeqn}, one for
$\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A$ and one for $\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_B'$. (The mate of \th\ is, of
course, uniquely determined.) Now, to show that these form a pseudo
natural adjoint equivalence, it remains only to check that they do,
in fact, form a pseudo natural transformation which is the identity
on objects, i.e.\ that~\eqref{eq:laxtransf-nat}
and~\eqref{eq:laxtransf-ax} are satisfied.
But~\eqref{eq:laxtransf-nat} is vacuous since $\cDbl(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}},\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}})$ has
no nonidentity 2-cells, and~\eqref{eq:laxtransf-ax} follows from
Lemmas \ref{thm:theta-compose-vert} and
\ref{thm:theta-compose-horiz} since all the constraints involved are
also instances of \th.
\end{proof}
It seems that we should have a functor from fibrant double categories
to a tricategory of bicategories, functors, conjunctional
transformations, and modifications, but there is no tricategory
containing conjunctional transformations since the interchange law
only holds laxly. However, we can say the following. Let $\cDbl^f_g$
denote the sub-2-category of \cDbl\ containing the fibrant double
categories, all functors between them, and only the transformations
that are isomorphisms, and let \cBicat\ denote the tricategory of
bicategories, functors, pseudo natural transformations, and
modifications.
\begin{thm}\label{thm:h-functor}
There is a functor of tricategories $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}\maps \cDbl^f_g\to \cBicat$.
\end{thm}
\begin{proof}
The definition of functors between tricategories can be found
in~\cite{gps:tricats} or~\cite{nick:tricats}. In addition to
\autoref{thm:h-locfr}, we require pseudo natural (adjoint)
equivalences $\chi$ and $\iota$ relating composition and units in
$\cDbl^f_g$ and \cBicat, and modifications relating composites of
these, which satisfy various axioms. However, since composition of
1-cells in $\cDbl^f_g$ and \cBicat\ is strictly associative and
unital, \ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}\ strictly preserves this composition, and $\cDbl^f_g$
has no nonidentity 3-cells, this merely amounts to the following.
Firstly, for every pair of transformations
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix{\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}} \rtwocell^F_G{\al} & \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}} \rtwocell^H_K{\be}
& \ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}}}\]
between fibrant double categories, we require an invertible
modification $\chi\maps \ensuremath{\hat{\beta}} * \ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}} \iso \widehat{\be*\al}$ such
that
\begin{equation}
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{1 \ar[r] \ar[dr] & \hat{1}*\hat{1} \ar[d]^\chi\\
& \widehat{1*1} }} \quad\text{and}\quad
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{
\widehat{\gm\al}*\widehat{\de\be} \ar[r]\ar[d]_\chi &
(\ensuremath{\hat{\gamma}}*\ensuremath{\hat{\delta}})(\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}*\ensuremath{\hat{\beta}})\ar[d]^{\chi\chi}\\
\widehat{\gm\al*\de\be}\ar[r] &
(\widehat{\gm*\de})(\widehat{\al*\be})}}
\end{equation}
commute. (Here we are writing $*$ for the `Godement product' of
2-cells in $\cDbl$ and $\cBicat$.) These are the 2-cell
components of the composition constraint, its 1-cell components
being identities. Now by Lemmas \ref{thm:comp-compose} and
\ref{thm:comp-func}, $(\ensuremath{\hat{\beta}} *\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}})_A = \ensuremath{\hat{\beta}}_{GA} \circ
H(\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A)$ is a companion of $(\be*\al)_A = \be_{GA} \circ
H(\al_A)$. Therefore, we take the component $\chi_A$ to be
\[\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{\beta}}_{GA} \circ H(\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A),\, \widehat{\be*\al}_A}.\]
Equation~\eqref{eq:modif-ax}, saying that these form a modification,
becomes the equality of two large composites of 2-cells in \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}},
which as usual follows from~\eqref{eq:compeqn}.
Secondly, for every $F\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\to\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}$ we require an isomorphism
$\iota\maps \widehat{1_F} \iso 1_{\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(F)}$ satisfying a couple of
axioms which simply require it to be equal to the unit constraint of
the local functor \ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}\ from \autoref{thm:h-locfr}; these are the
2-cell components of the unit constraint. Finally, the required
modifications merely amount to the \emph{assertions} that
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{\ensuremath{\hat{\gamma}}*\ensuremath{\hat{\beta}}*\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}} \ar[r]^\chi\ar[d]_\chi &
\widehat{\gm*\be}*\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}} \ar[d]^\chi\\
\ensuremath{\hat{\gamma}}*\widehat{\be*\al}\ar[r]_\chi & \widehat{\gm*\be*\al}}},\qquad
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{ \ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}} \ar[r]^-\iota \ar@{=}[dr] &
\widehat{1_F}*\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}} \ar[d]^\chi \\ & \ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}} }}, \;\text{and}\qquad
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-.5pc{ \ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}} \ar[r]^-\iota \ar@{=}[dr] &
\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}*\widehat{1_F} \ar[d]^\chi \\ & \ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}} }}\]
commute; again this follows from \autoref{thm:theta-compose-vert}.
\end{proof}
We end this section with one final lemma.
\begin{lem}\label{thm:theta-nat}
Suppose $F,G\maps \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\to\ensuremath{\mathbb{E}}$ are functors, $\al\maps F\to G$ is a
transformation, and that $f\maps A\to B$ has a companion \ensuremath{\hat{f}}\ in
\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}. Then the oplax comparison 2-cell for \ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}:
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix{
\ar[r]^{F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}})}\ar[d]_{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A} \drtwocell\omit{\;\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}}& \ar[d]^{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_B}\\
\ar[r]_{G(\ensuremath{\hat{f}})} & }}\]
is equal to $\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_B\odot F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}}),\, G(\ensuremath{\hat{f}}) \odot
\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A}$ (and in particular is an isomorphism).
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
By definition $\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_A$ and $\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_B$ are companions of $\al_A$
and $\al_B$, respectively, and by \autoref{thm:comp-func} $F(\ensuremath{\hat{f}})$
and $G(\ensuremath{\hat{f}})$ are companions of $F(f)$ and $G(f)$, respectively.
Thus, by \autoref{thm:comp-compose} the domain and codomain of
$\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}$ are both companions of $G(f) \circ \al_A = \al_B
\circ F(f)$, so at least the asserted $\theta$ isomorphism exists.
Now, by taking the definition~\eqref{eq:oplax-2cell} of
$\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}$ and substituting it for $\theta$
in~\eqref{eq:comp-iso}, using the axioms for companions and the
naturality of $\al$ on 2-morphisms, we see that $\ensuremath{\hat{\alpha}}_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}}}$
satisfies~\eqref{eq:comp-iso} and hence must be equal to $\theta$.
\end{proof}
\section{Symmetric monoidal bicategories}
\label{sec:constr-symm-mono}
We are now ready to lift monoidal structures from double categories to
bicategories. If we had a theory of symmetric monoidal tricategories,
we could do this by improving \autoref{thm:h-functor} to say that
$\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}$ is a symmetric monoidal functor, and then conclude that it
preserves pseudomonoids. However, in the absence of such a theory, we
give a direct proof.
\begin{thm}\label{thm:mon11-monbi}
If \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is a fibrant monoidal double category, then $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ is a
monoidal bicategory. If \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is braided, so is $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$, and if
\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is symmetric, so is $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$.
\end{thm}
\begin{rmk}
For monoidal bicategories, there is a notion in between braided and
symmetric, called \emph{sylleptic}, in which the the braiding is
self-inverse up to an isomorphism (the \emph{syllepsis}) but this
isomorphism is not maximally coherent. Since in our approach the
syllepsis will be an isomorphism of the form
$\theta_{\ensuremath{\hat{f}},\ensuremath{\hat{f}}'}$, it is \emph{always} maximally coherent;
thus our method cannot produce sylleptic monoidal bicategories that
are not symmetric.
\end{rmk}
\begin{proof}[Proof of \autoref{thm:mon11-monbi}]
A monoidal bicategory is defined to be a tricategory with one
object. We use the definition of tricategory
from~\cite{nick:tricats}, which is the same as that
of~\cite{gps:tricats} except that the associativity and unit
constraints are pseudo natural adjoint equivalences, rather than
merely pseudo transformations whose components are equivalences.
The functor \ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}\ evidently preserves products, so $\ten\maps
\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\times\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\to\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}$ induces a functor $\ten\maps
\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})\times\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})\to \ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$, and of course $I$ is still the
unit. The associativity constraint of \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is a natural isomorphism
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@C=5pc{\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\times\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\times\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}} \rtwocell^{\ten
(\Id\times\ten)}_{\ten(\ten\times\Id)}{\ensuremath{\mathfrak{a}}\iso} &\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}} }}\]
so by \autoref{thm:h-locfr} it gives rise to a pseudo natural
adjoint equivalence
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@C=6pc{\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})\times\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})\times\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}) \rtwocell^{\ten
(\Id\times\ten)}_{\ten(\ten\times\Id)}{\fahat\eqv} &\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}) }}\]
Likewise, the unit constraints of \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ induce pseudo natural adjoint
equivalences.
The final four pieces of data for a monoidal bicategory are
invertible modifications relating various composites of the
associativity and unit transformations. The first is a
``pentagonator'' which relates the two ways to go around the Mac
Lane pentagon:
\[\xy
(-10,0)*{((A\ten B)\ten C)\ten D}="A";
(20,10)*{(A\ten (B\ten C))\ten D}="B";
(50,0)*{A\ten ((B\ten C)\ten D)}="C";
(0,-15)*{(A\ten B)\ten (C\ten D)}="D";
(40,-15)*{A\ten (B\ten (C\ten D))}="E";
(20,-5)*{\scriptstyle\pi\Downarrow\iso};
\ar "B";"A";^{\fahat\ten U_D}
\ar "C";"B";^{\fahat}
\ar "D";"A";_{\fahat}
\ar "E";"D";_{\fahat}
\ar "E";"C";^{U_A\ten \fahat}
\endxy
\]
Now by Lemmas \ref{thm:comp-compose} and \ref{thm:comp-ten}, both
sides of this pentagon in $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ are companions of the
corresponding sides of the pentagon in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$. Since the pentagon
in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$ commutes, we have an isomorphism $\theta$ between the two
sides of the pentagon in $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$, which we take to be $\pi$.
That \pi\ is in fact a modification follows from
\autoref{thm:h-locfr-uniq}. We construct the other invertible
modifications $\mu, \lambda, \rho$ in the same way.
Finally, we must show that three equations between pasting
composites of 2-cells hold, relating composites of
$\pi,\mu,\lambda,\rho$. However, in each of these equations, both
the domain and the codomain of the 2-cells involved are companions
of the same isomorphism in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$. For the 5-associahedron, this
isomorphism is the unique constraint
\[(((A\ten B)\ten C)\ten D)\ten E \too[\iso] A\ten (B\ten (C\ten
(D\ten E)));
\]
for the other two it is simply the associator $(A\ten B)\ten C
\too[\iso] A\ten (B\ten C)$. By Lemmas \ref{thm:theta-unit},
\ref{thm:theta-ten}, and \ref{thm:theta-nat},
every 2-cell in these diagrams is a $\theta$ isomorphism relating
two companions of the same vertical isomorphism. Therefore, Lemmas
\ref{thm:theta-compose-vert} and \ref{thm:theta-compose-horiz} imply
that each pasting diagram is also a $\theta$ isomorphism between its
domain and codomain. The uniqueness of $\theta$ then implies that
the three equations hold.
Now suppose that \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is braided; to show that $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ is braided
we seemingly must first have a definition of braided monoidal
bicategory. The interested reader may follow the tortuous path of
the definition of braided monoidal 2-categories and bicategories
through the literature, starting from~\cite{kv:2cat-zam,kv:bm2cat}
and continuing, with occasional corrections,
through~\cite{bn:hda-i,ds:monbi-hopfagbd,crans:centers,mccrudden:bal-coalgb},
and~\cite{gurski:brmonbicat}. However, the details of the
definition are essentially unimportant for us; since our constraints
and coherence are produced in a universal way, any reasonable data
can be produced and any reasonable axioms will be satisfied. For
concreteness, we use the definition of~\cite{mccrudden:bal-coalgb}.
The first piece of data we require to make $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ braided is a
pseudo natural adjoint equivalence $\mathord{\otimes} \too[\eqv]
\mathord{\otimes}\circ \tau$, where $\tau$ is the switch
isomorphism. This arises by \autoref{thm:h-locfr} from the braiding
of \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}. We also require two invertible modifications filling the
usual hexagons for a braiding:
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix@-1pc{
& \mathclap{(A\ten B)\ten C}\phantom{C_C} \ar[dl]\ar[dr] \\
(B\ten A)\ten C \ar[d] & \dtwocell\omit{\ze \iso} & A\ten (B\ten C)\ar[d]\\
B\ten (A\ten C) \ar[dr] && (B\ten C)\ten A \ar[dl]\\
& \mathclap{B\ten (C\ten A)}\phantom{C^C}
}}\quad\text{and}\quad
\vcenter{\xymatrix@-1pc{
& \mathclap{A\ten (B\ten C)}\phantom{C_C} \ar[dl]\ar@{<-}[dr]\\
A\ten (C\ten B)\ar[d] & \dtwocell\omit{\xi \iso}& (A\ten B)\ten C\ar[d]\\
(A\ten C)\ten B \ar[dr] && C\ten (A\ten B) \ar@{<-}[dl]\\
& \mathclap{(C\ten A)\ten B}\phantom{C^C}
}}
\]
As before, since the corresponding hexagons commute in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$, and
by Lemmas \ref{thm:comp-compose} and \ref{thm:comp-ten} each side of
each hexagon in $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ is a companion to the corresponding side
in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$, we have $\theta$ isomorphisms that we can take as $\ze$
and $\xi$. Finally, we must verify that the four 2-cell diagrams
in~\cite[p136--139]{mccrudden:bal-coalgb} involving \ze\ and \xi\
commute. As with the axioms for a monoidal bicategory, both sides
of these equalities are made up of $\theta$s relating companions of
a single morphism in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$, and thus by uniqueness they must be
equal.
Now suppose that \ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}\ is symmetric. To make $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ symmetric,
we require first a \emph{syllepsis}, i.e.\ an invertible
modification
\[\vcenter{\xymatrix{A\ten B \ar@{=}[rr] \ar[dr] &
\ar@{}[d]|-{\Downarrow \nu\iso}
& A\ten B \ar@{<-}[dl]\\ &
B\ten A }}\]
Since the braiding in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$ is self-inverse, the top and bottom of
this triangle are both companions of $1_{A\ten B}$; thus we have a
$\theta$ isomorphism between them which we take as $\nu$. For
$\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ to be sylleptic, the syllepsis must satisfy the two
axioms on~\cite[p144--145]{mccrudden:bal-coalgb}. As before, these
diagrams of 2-cells are made up entirely of $\theta$s relating
companions of a single morphism in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0$, so they commute by
uniqueness of $\theta$.
Finally, for $\ensuremath{\mathcal{H}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}})$ to be symmetric, the syllepsis must satisfy
one additional axiom, given on~\cite[p91]{mccrudden:bal-coalgb}.
This follows automatically for the same reasons as before.
\end{proof}
Combining the arguments of Theorems \ref{thm:h-functor} and
\ref{thm:mon11-monbi}, we could show that passage from fibrant
monoidal double categories to monoidal bicategories is a functor of
tricategories, given a suitable definition of a tricategory of
monoidal bicategories.
\begin{rmk}
Essentially the same proof as that of \autoref{thm:mon11-monbi}
shows that any fibrant 2x1-category has an underlying tricategory.
Note that unlike the construction of bicategories from
1x1-categories (i.e.\ double categories), this case requires
fibrancy even in the absence of monoidal structure, since the
associativity and unit constraints of a 2x1-category are not 1-cells
but rather morphisms of 0-cells. There are many naturally occurring
fibrant symmetric monoidal 2x1-categories, such as $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_0=$
commutative rings, $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_1=$ algebras, and $\ensuremath{\mathbb{D}}_2=$ modules, or the
symmetric monoidal 2x1-category of \emph{conformal nets} defined
in~\cite{bdh:confnets-i}. All of these have underlying
tricategories, which will be symmetric monoidal for any reasonable
definition of symmetric monoidal tricategory. More generally, as
stated in \S\ref{sec:introduction}, we expect any fibrant $(n\times
k)$-category to have an underlying $(n+k)$-category.
\end{rmk}
\bibliographystyle{alpha}
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Az 1972-es Eurovíziós Dalfesztivál volt a tizenhetedik Eurovíziós Dalfesztivál, melynek a skóciai Edinburgh adott otthont. A helyszín az edinburghi Usher Hall volt.
Az 1971-es Eurovíziós Dalfesztivál Monaco győzelmével zárult, ám egyedül nem tudták megrendezni a versenyt. Először a francia TV-t kérték fel a segítségre, akik szívesen megrendezték volna a versenyt, de csak úgy, ha Franciaországban tartják, és nem az eredetileg tervezett Monte-Carlói Operaházban. A monacói tévétársaság ezt nem fogadta el, és végül pénzügyi okokra hivatkozva lemondott a rendezésről, és ezután a BBC-t kérték fel. Így ismét az Egyesült Királyság rendezte meg a versenyt, bár most először nem londoni helyszínt választottak, hanem a skóciai Edinburgh fogadta a versenyzőket.
A résztvevők
A verseny mezőnye nem változott az egy évvel korábbihoz képest, így ismét tizennyolc dal vett részt.
A Luxemburgot képviselő görög énekesnő, Vicky Leandros az 1967-es Eurovíziós Dalfesztiválon is részt vett (akkor a 4. helyen végzett), ebben az évben azonban győzni tudott.
A svéd Family Four újból csatlakozott a mezőnyhöz, azután, hogy egy évvel korábban ők voltak a verseny történetének első résztvevői, akik hivatalosan együttesként vettek részt. Ugyancsak másodszor vett részt a portugál Carlos Mendes (1968 után), és a jugoszláv Tereza Kesovija is, viszont ő 1966-ban Monacót képviselte.
A verseny
Először, és eddig utoljára fordult elő, hogy Írország képviselője nem angolul, hanem ír nyelven énekelt.
Az előző évi győztes, Séverine is elutazott a skót fővárosba, hogy a hagyományoknak megfelelően átadhassa a díjat az új győztesnek.
A szavazás
A szavazás lebonyolítása az 1971-es Eurovíziós Dalfesztiválon bevezetett módon történt. Minden ország a helyszínre küldött két zsűritagot. Az egyik zsűritagnak 25 évnél fiatalabbnak, a másiknak 25 évnél idősebbnek kellett lennie. A műsorvezető háromszor kettes csoportokban szólította a zsűritagokat, akik 1 és 5 között pontozták az összes dalt. (Kivéve természetesen a sajátjukat.) Tehát a két zsűritag együtt minimum 2 és maximum 10 pontot adott a többi ország dalára. Így mindegyik dal összesen minimum 34 és maximum 170 pontot kaphatott.
A szavazás az előző évhez hasonlóan hat darab, háromszor kettes csoportban történt: a fellépési sorrendnek megfelelően három-három ország zsűritagjai mutatták be a műsorvezető segítségével, hogy hány pontot adtak az egyes daloknak. Az első csoportot a német, a francia és az ír zsűritagok alkották, akik a luxemburgi dalt helyezték az élre. Luxemburg ezt követően végig meg tudta őrizni előnyét. A győztes dal a brit és a jugoszláv zsűritől gyűjtötte be a maximális tíz pontot, míg a spanyol zsűritől a minimális két pontot kapta. A spanyol zsűri sorozatban másodszor adta a minimális pontot a győztes dalnak.
Luxemburg harmadszor diadalmaskodott. A dal szerzője, Yves Desca írta az előző évi győztes dalt is, így ő lett a második ember, aki kétszer nyerte meg a versenyt, az első ember, aki két különböző ország képviseletében győzött, és az első személy, aki két egymást követő évben diadalmaskodott.
Németország sorozatban harmadszor végzett a harmadik helyen, míg az Egyesült Királyságnak ez már a nyolcadik második helyezése volt.
Eredmények
1.A dal tartalmazott egy-egy kifejezést olasz, spanyol, német, illetve angol nyelven is.
Ponttáblázat
Visszatérő előadók
Térkép
Jegyzetek
További információk
YouTube videó: Az 1972-es Eurovíziós Dalfesztivál
1972
Eurovizio
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\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:introduction}
\reviewone{
Time Series Classification (TSC) is an important area of machine learning research that has been growing rapidly in the past few decades \citep{Keogh2003, UCRArchive2018, Bagnall2017, Fawaz2018, yang200610, esling2012time,silva2018speeding}.
Numerous problems require classification of large quantities of time series data. These include land cover classification from temporal satellite images \citep{pelletier2019temporal}, human activity recognition \citep{nweke2018deep,wang2018deep}, classification of medical data from Electrocardiograms (ECG) \citep{wang2013bag},
electric device identification from power consumption patterns \citep{Lines2015}, and many more \citep{rajkomar2018scalable,nwe2017convolutional, susto2018time}. The diversity of such applications are evident from the commonly used University of California Riverside (UCR) archive of TSC datasets \citep{Dau2018a, UCRArchive2015}.
A number of recent TSC algorithms \citep{Lucas2018, Schafer2017a, Schafer2016} have tackled the issue of ever increasing data volumes, achieving greater efficiency and scalability than typical TSC algorithms. However, none has been competitive in accuracy to the state-of-the-art HIVE-COTE (Hierarchical Vote Collective of Transformation-based Ensembles) \citep{Lines2018}.
Our novel method, TS-CHIEF\xspace (Time Series Combination of Heterogeneous and Integrated Embedding Forest), is a stochastic, tree-based ensemble that is specifically designed for speed and high accuracy. When building TS-CHIEF\xspace trees, at each
node we select from a random selection of TSC methods one that best classifies the data reaching the node. Some of these classification methods work with different representations of time series data \citep{Schafer2015, Bagnall2017}. Therefore, our technique combines decades of work in developing different classification methods for time series data \citep{Lucas2018, Lines2015, Schafer2015, Bagnall2016, Lines2018, Bagnall2017} and representations of time series data \citep{Bagnall2012, Bagnall2016, Schafer2015}, into a hetereogenous tree-based ensemble, that is able to capture a wide variety of discriminatory information from the dataset.
}
\reviewone{TS-CHIEF\xspace achieves scalability without sacrificing accuracy.}
It is orders of magnitude faster than HIVE-COTE \reviewone{(and its predecessor, FLAT-COTE)} while attaining \reviewone{a rank on accuracy} on the benchmark UCR archive \reviewone{that is almost indistinguishable}, as illustrated in Figure~\ref{fig:cd-us-vs-tsc} (on page \pageref{fig:cd-us-vs-tsc}).
In addition, Figure~\ref{fig:scale-sat-time} (on page \pageref{fig:scale-sat-time}) shows an experiment that demonstrates the scalability of TS-CHIEF\xspace using the Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) dataset \citep{Tan2017}. It is 900x faster than HIVE-COTE for 1,500 time series (13~min \textit{versus} 8 days).
Moreover, the relative speedup grows with data quantity: at 132k instances TS-CHIEF\xspace is 46,000x faster. For a training size that took TS-CHIEF\xspace 2 days, we estimated 234 years for HIVE-COTE.
\reviewtwo{Overall, the following strategies are the key to attaining this exceptional efficiency without compromising accuracy: (1) using stochastic decisions during ensemble construction, (2) using stochastic selection instead of cross-validation for parameter selection, (3) using a tree-based approach to speed up training and testing, and (4) including improved variants of HIVE-COTE components Elastic Ensemble (EE) \citep{Bagnall2016}, Bag-of-SFA-Symbols (BOSS) \citep{Schafer2015} and Random Interval Spectral Ensemble (RISE) \citep{Lines2018}, but excluding its computationally expensive component Shapelet Transform (ST) \citep{Rakthanmanon2013b} (see Section~\ref{subsec:shapelets}).
}
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section~\ref{sec:relatedwork} discusses related work. Section~\ref{sec:method} presents our algorithm TS-CHIEF\xspace, \reviewone{and its time and space complexity}. In Section~\ref{sec:experiments}, we compare \reviewone{the accuracy of} TS-CHIEF\xspace against state-of-the-art TSC classifiers and investigate its scalability. \reviewone{In Section~\ref{sec:experiments}, we also study the variance of the ensemble, and the relative contributions of the ensemble's components.} Finally, in Section~\ref{sec:conclusion} we draw conclusions.
\section{Related Work}
\label{sec:relatedwork}
Time Series Classification (TSC) aims to predict a discrete label $y \in \{ 1, \cdots ,c \}$ for an unlabeled time series, where $c$ is the number of classes in the TSC task.
Although our work could be extended to time series with varying lengths and multi-variate time series, we focus here on univariate time series of fixed lengths.
A univariate time series $T$ of length $\ell$ is an ordered sequence of $\ell$ observations of a variable over time, where $T = \langle x_1, \cdots, x_\ell\rangle$, with $x_i \in \mathbb{R}$.
We use $D$ to represent a training time series dataset and $n$ to represent the number of time series in $D$.
\reviewtwo{We now present the main techniques used in TSC research. We also include a summary of training and test complexities of the methods present in this Section in Table~\ref{tab:complexities} (on page \pageref{tab:complexities}).}
\subsection{Similarity-based techniques}
\label{sec:wholeseries}
\sloppy These algorithms usually use 1-Nearest Neighbour (1-NN) with \textit{elastic} similarity measures. Elastic measures are designed to compensate for local distortions, miss-alignments or warpings in time series that might be due to stretched or shrunken
subsections within the time series.
The classic benchmark for TSC has been 1-NN using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), with cross validated warping window size \citep{Ding2008}. The warping window is a parameter that controls the \textit{elasticity} of the similarity measure. A~zero window size is equivalent to the Euclidean distance, while a larger warping window size allows points from one series to match points from the other series over longer time frames.
Commonly used similarity measures include variations of DTW such as Derivative DTW (DDTW) \citep{Keogh2001a, Gorecki2013}, Weighted DTW (WDTW) \citep{Jeong2011}, Weighted DDTW (WDDTW) \citep{Jeong2011}, and measures based on edit distance such as Longest Common Subsequence (LCSS) \citep{Hirschberg1977}, Move-Split-Merge (MSM) \citep{Stefan2013}, Edit Distance with Real Penalty (ERP)\citep{Chen2004} and Time Warp Edit distance TWE \citep{Marteau2009}. Most of these measures have additional parameters that can be tuned. Details of these measures can be found in \citep{Lines2015, Bagnall2017}.
Ensembles formed using multiple 1-NN classifiers with a diversity of similarity measures have proved to be significantly more accurate than 1-NN with any single measure \citep{Lines2015}. Such ensembles help to reduce the variance of the model and thus help to improve the overall classification accuracy. \reviewone{For example, Elastic Ensemble (EE) combines 11 1-NN algorithms, each using one of the 11 elastic measures \citep{Lines2015}.} For each measure, the parameters are optimized with respect to accuracy using cross-validation \citep{Lines2015, Bagnall2017}. Though EE is a relatively accurate classifier \citep{Bagnall2017}, it is slow to train due to high computational cost of the leave-one-out cross-validation used to tune its parameters -- \reviewone{$O(n^2 \cdot \ell^2)$}. Furthermore, since EE is an ensemble of 1-NN models, the classification time for each time series is also high -- $O(n \cdot \ell ^2)$.
Our recent contribution, Proximity Forest (PF), is more scalable and accurate than EE \citep{Lucas2018}. It builds an ensemble of classification trees, where data at each node are split based on similarity to a representative time series from each class. This contrasts with the standard attribute-value splitting methods used in decision trees.
Degree of similarity is computed by selecting at random one measure among the 11 used in EE. The parameters of the measures are also selected at random.
Proximity Forest is highly scalable owing to the use of a divide and conquer strategy, and stochastic parameter selection in place of computationally expensive parameter tuning.
\subsection{Interval-based techniques}
These algorithms select a set of intervals from the whole series and apply transformations to these intervals to generate a new feature vector. The new feature vector is then used to train a traditional machine learning algorithm, \reviewone{usually a forest of Random Trees, similar to Random Trees used in Random Forest (but without bagging)}. For instance, Time Series Forest (TSF) \citep{Deng2013} applies three time domain transformations --~mean, standard deviation and slope~-- to each of a set of randomly chosen intervals, and then trains a decision tree using this new data representation. The operation is repeated to learn an ensemble of decision trees, similar to \reviewone{Random Trees}, on different randomly chosen intervals. Other notable interval-based algorithms are Time Series Bag of Features (TSBF) \citep{Baydogan2013}, Learned Pattern Similarity (LPS) \citep{Baydogan2016}, and the recently introduced Random Interval Spectral Ensemble (RISE) \citep{Lines2018}.
RISE computes four different transformations for each random interval selected: Autocorrelation Function (ACF), Partial Autocorrelation Function (PACF), and Autoregressive model (AR) which extracts features in time domain, and Power Spectrum (PS) which extracts features in the frequency domain \citep{Lines2018, Bagnall2016}. Coefficients of these functions are used to form a new transformed feature vector. \reviewone{After these transformations have been computed for each interval, a Random Tree is trained on each of the transformed intervals. The training complexity of RISE is $O(k \cdot n \cdot \ell^2)$ \citep{Lines2018}, and the test complexity is $O(k \cdot log(n) \cdot \ell^2)$.}
The algorithm presented in this paper has components inspired by RISE, therefore, further details are presented later (see Section ~\ref{subsec:interval}).
\subsection{Shapelet-based techniques}
\label{subsec:shapelets}
Rather than extracting intervals, where the location of sub-sequences are important, shapelet-based algorithms seek to identify sub-sequences that allow discrimination between classes irrespective of where they occur in a sequence \citep{Ye2009}. Ideally, a good shapelet candidate should be a sub-sequence similar to time series from the same class, and dissimilar to time series from other classes. Similarity is usually computed using the minimum Euclidean distance of a shapelet to all sub-sequences of the same length from another series.
The original version of the shapelet algorithm \citep{Ye2009, Mueen2011}, enumerates all possible sub-sequences among the training set to find the ``best'' possible shapelets. It uses Information Gain criteria to asses how well a given shapelet candidate can split the data. The ``best'' shapelet candidate and a distance threshold is used as a decision criterion at the node of a binary decision tree. The search for the ``best'' shapelet is then recursively repeated until obtaining pure leaves. Despite some optimizations proposed in the paper, it is still a very slow algorithm with training complexity of $O(n^2 \cdot \ell^4)$.
Much of the research about shapelets has focused on ways of speeding up the shapelet discovery phase. Instead of enumerating all possible shapelet candidates, researchers have tried to come up with ways of quickly identifying possible ``good'' shapelets. These include Fast Shapelets (FS) \citep{Rakthanmanon2013a} and Learned Shapelets (LS) \citep{Grabocka2014}. Fast Shapelet proposed to use an approximation technique called Symbolic Aggregate Approximation (SAX) \citep{Lin2007} to shorten the time series during the shapelet discovery process in order to speed up by reducing the number of shapelet candidates. Learned Shapelets (LS) attempted to ``learn'' the shapelets rather than enumerate all possible candidates. Fast Shapelets algorithm is faster than LS, but it is less accurate \citep{Bagnall2017}.
Another notable shapelet algorithm is Shapelet Transform (ST) \citep{Hills2014}. In~ST, the `best' $k$ shapelets are first extracted based on their ability to separate classes using a quality measure such as Information Gain, and then the distance of each of the ``best'' $k$ shapelets to each of the samples in the training set is computed \citep{Hills2014, Bostrom2015, Large2017}.
The distance from $k$ shapelets to each time series forms a matrix of distances which defines a new transformation of the dataset. \reviewone{This transformed dataset is finally used to train an ensemble of eight traditional classification algorithms including 1-Nearest Neighbour with Euclidean distance and DTW, C45 Decision Trees, BayesNet, NaiveBayes, SVM, Rotation Forest and Random Forest. Although very accurate, ST also has a high training-time complexity of $O(n^2 \cdot \ell^4)$ \citep{Hills2014, Lines2018}.}
One algorithm that speeds up the shapelet-based techniques is Generalized Random Shapelet Forest (GRSF) \citep{Karlsson2016}. GRSF selects a set of random shapelets at each node of a decision tree and performs the shapelet transformation at the node level of the decision tree. GRSF is fast because it is tree-based and uses random selection of shapelets instead of enumerating all shapelets. GRSF experiments were carried out on a subset of the 85 UCR datasets where the values of the hyperparameters --~the number of randomly selected shapelets as well as the lower and upper shapelet lengths~-- are optimized by using a grid search.
\subsection{Dictionary-based techniques}
Dictionary-based algorithms transform time series data into bag of words \citep{Senin2013, Schafer2015, Large2018}. Dictionary based algorithms are good at handling noisy data and finding discriminatory information in data with recurring patterns \citep{Schafer2015}. Usually, an approximation method is first applied to reduce the length of the series \citep{Keogh2001b, Lin2007, Schafer2012}, and then a quantization method is used to discretize the values, and thus to form words \citep{Schafer2015, Large2018}. Each time series is then represented by a histogram that counts the word frequencies. 1-NN with a similarity measure, that compares the similarity between histograms, can then be used to train a classification model. Notable dictionary based algorithms are Bag of Patterns (BoP) \citep{Lin2012}, Symbolic Aggregate Approximation-Vector Space Model (SAX-VSM) \citep{Senin2013}, Bag-of-SFA-Symbols (BOSS) \citep{Schafer2015}, BOSS in Vector Space (BOSS-VS) \citep{Schafer2016} and Word eXtrAction for time SEries cLassification (WEASEL) \citep{Schafer2017a}.
To compute an approximation of a series, BOP and SAX-VSM use a method called Symbolic Aggregate Approximation (SAX) \citep{Lin2007}. SAX uses Piecewise Aggregate Approximation (PAA) \citep{Keogh2001b} which concatenates the means of consecutive segments of the series and uses quantiles of the normal distribution as breakpoints to discretize or quantize the series to form a word representation. By contrast, BOSS, BOSS-VS, and WEASEL use a method called Symbolic Fourier Approximation (SFA) \citep{Schafer2012} to compute the approximated series. SFA applies Discrete Fourier Transformation (DFT) on the series and uses the coefficients of DFT to form a short approximation, representing the frequencies in the series. This approximation is then discretized using a data-adaptive quantization method called Multiple Coefficient Binning (MCB) \citep{Schafer2012, Schafer2015}.
\reviewone{The most commonly used algorithm in this category is Bag-of-SFA-Symbols (BOSS), which is an ensemble of dictionary-based 1-NN models \citep{Schafer2015}. BOSS is a component of HIVE-COTE and our algorithm also has a component inspired by BOSS.}
Further details of the BOSS algorithm will be presented in Section~\ref{sec:method}. BOSS has a training time complexity of $O(n^2 \cdot \ell^2)$ \reviewone{and a testing time complexity of $O(n \cdot \ell)$} \citep{Schafer2015}. \reviewone{A~variant of BOSS called BOSS-VS \citep{Schafer2016} has a much faster train and test time while being less accurate. The more recent variant WEASEL \citep{Schafer2017a} is more accurate but has a slower training time than BOSS and BOSS-VS, in addition to high space complexity \citep{Schafer2017a,Lucas2018, middlehurst2019scalable}.}
\subsection{Combinations of Transformations}
Two leading algorithms that combine multiple transformations are Flat Collective of Transformation-Based Ensembles (FLAT-COTE) \citep{Bagnall2016} and the more recent variant Hierarchical Vote COTE (HIVE-COTE) \citep{Lines2018}. FLAT-COTE is a meta-ensemble of 35 different classifiers that use different time series classification methods such as similarity-based, shapelet-based, and interval-based techniques. In particular, it includes other ensembles such as EE and ST. The label of a time series is determined by applying weighted majority voting, where the weighting of each constituent depends on the training leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO CV) accuracy. HIVE-COTE works similarly, but it includes new algorithms, BOSS and RISE, and changes the weighted majority voting to make it balance between each type of constituent module. These modifications result in a major gain in accuracy, and it is currently considered as the state of the art in TSC for accuracy. However, both variants of COTE have high training complexity, lower bounded by the slow cross-validation used by EE -- \reviewone{$O(n^2 \cdot \ell^2)$}
-- and exhaustive shapelet enumeration used by ST -- $O(n^2\cdot \ell^4)$.
\subsection{Deep Learning}
Deep learning is interesting for time series both because of the structuring dimension offered by time (deep learning has been particularly good for images and videos) and for its linear scalability with training size. Most related research has focused on developing specific architectures based mainly on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) \citep{Wang2017, Fawaz2018},
coupled with data augmentation, which is required to make it possible for them to reach high accuracy on the relatively small training set sizes present in the UCR archive \citep{le2016data, Fawaz2018}. While these approaches are computationally efficient, the two leading algorithms, Fully Connected Network (FCN) \citep{Wang2017} and Residual Neural Network (ResNet) \citep{Wang2017}, are still less accurate than FLAT-COTE and HIVE-COTE \citep{Fawaz2018}.
\section{TS-CHIEF\xspace}
\label{sec:method}
This section introduces our novel algorithm TS-CHIEF\xspace, which stands for \textbf{T}ime \textbf{S}eries \textbf{C}ombination of \textbf{H}eterogeneous and \textbf{I}ntegrated \textbf{E}mbeddings \textbf{F}orest.
TS-CHIEF\xspace is an ensemble algorithm that makes the most of the scalability of tree classifiers coupled with the accuracy brought by decades of research into specialized techniques for time series classification. Traditional attribute-value decision trees form a tree by recursively splitting the data \reviewtwo{with respect to} the value of a selected attribute. These techniques (and ensembles thereof) do not in general perform well when applied directly to time series data \citep{Bagnall2017}. As they treat the value at each time step as a distinct attribute, they are unable to exploit the information in the series order. In contrast, TS-CHIEF\xspace utilizes splitting criteria that are specifically developed for time series classification.
Our starting point for TS-CHIEF\xspace is the Proximity Forest (PF) algorithm \citep{Lucas2018}, which builds an ensemble of classification trees with `splits' using the proximity of a given time series $T$ to a set of reference time series: if $T$ is closer to the first reference time series, then it goes to the first branch, if it is closer to the second reference time series, then it goes to the second branch, and so on. Proximity Forest integrates 11 time series measures for evaluating similarity.
At each node a set of reference series is selected, one per class, together with a similarity measure and its parameterization. These selections are made stochastically.
Proximity Forest attains accuracies that are comparable to BOSS and ST (see Figure~\ref{fig:cd-us-vs-tsc}).
TS-CHIEF\xspace complements Proximity Forest's splitters with dictionary-based and interval-based splitters, which we describe below. Our algorithmic contributions are three-fold:
\begin{enumerate}
\item We take the ideas that underlie the best dictionary-based method, BOSS, and develop a tree splitter based thereon.
\item We take the ideas behind the best interval-based method, RISE, and develop a tree splitter based thereon.
\item We develop techniques to integrate these two novel splitters together with those introduced by Proximity Forest, such that any of the 3 types might be used at any node of the tree.
\end{enumerate}
TS-CHIEF\xspace is an ensemble method: we thus paid particular attention to maximizing the diversity between the learners in its design.
We~do this by creating a very large space of possible splitting criteria. This diversity for diversity sake would be unreasonable if the objective was to create a single standalone classifier. By contrast, by ensembling, this diversity can be expected to reduce the covariance term of ensemble theory \citep{Ueda1996}. If ensemble member classifiers are too similar to one another, their collective decision will differ little from that of a single member.
\subsection{General Principles}
During the training phase, TS-CHIEF\xspace builds a forest of $k$ trees.
The general principles of decision trees remain: tree construction starts from the root node and recursively builds the sub-trees, and at each node, the data is split into branches using a splitting function.
Where TS-CHIEF\xspace differs is in the use of time-series-specific splitting functions.
The details of these splitting functions will be discussed in Section~\ref{sec:splitfunctions}. In short, we use different types of splitters either using time series similarity measures, dictionary-based or interval-based representations. At each node, we generate a set of \emph{candidate} splits and select the best one using the weighted Gini index, \ie{}the split that maximizes the purity of the created branches (similar to a classic decision tree).
We describe the top-level algorithm in Algorithm~\ref{alg:build-tree}; note that this algorithm is very typical of decision trees and that all the time-series-specific features are in the way we generate candidate splits, as shown in Algorithms~\ref{alg:gen-similarity-split}, \ref{alg:gen-dictionary-split}
and \ref{alg:select-interval-split}.
\begin{algorithm}
\caption{$\mathrm{build\_tree}(D,C_e,C_b,C_r$)}
\label{alg:build-tree}
\DontPrintSemicolon
\KwIn{$D$: a time series dataset}
\KwIn{$C_e$: no.~of similarity-based candidates}
\KwIn{$C_b$: no.~of dictionary-based candidates}
\KwIn{$C_r$: no.~of interval-based candidates}
\KwOut{$T$: a TS-CHIEF\xspace Tree}
\vspace*{5pt}
\uIf{$\mathrm{is\_pure}(D)$}{\Return $\mathrm{create\_leaf}(D)$\;}
$T \leftarrow \mathrm{create\_node}()$ \hspace{0.5cm} \tcp*{Create tree represented by its root node}
$\mathcal{S} \leftarrow \emptyset$ \hspace{1cm}\tcp*{set of candidate splitters}
\vspace*{5pt}
$\mathcal{S}_e \leftarrow \mathrm{generate\_similarity\_splitters}(D, C_e)$\;
Add all similarity-based splitters in $\mathcal{S}_e$ to $\mathcal{S}$\;
\vspace*{5pt}
$\mathcal{S}_b \leftarrow \mathrm{generate\_dictionary\_splitters}(D, C_b)$\;
Add all dictionary-based splitters in $\mathcal{S}_b$ to $\mathcal{S}$\;
\vspace*{5pt}
$\mathcal{S}_r \leftarrow \mathrm{generate\_interval\_splitters}(D, C_r)$\;
Add all interval-based splitters in $\mathcal{S}_r$ to $\mathcal{S}$\;
\vspace*{5pt}
$\delta^\star\leftarrow \argmax\limits_{\delta\in \mathcal{S}} \mathrm{Gini}\left(\delta\right)$ \tcp*{select the best splitter using Gini}\;
$T_\delta \leftarrow \delta^\star$ \hspace{1cm} \tcp*{store the best splitter in the new node $T$}
$T_B\leftarrow \emptyset$ \hspace{1cm} \tcp*{store the set of branch nodes in $T$}
\tcp{Partition the data using $\delta^\star$ and recurse}
\uIf{$\delta^\star$ \emph{is similarity-based}}{
\ForEach{$e \in \delta^\star_E$}{
\tcp{$\delta^\star_M$ is the distance measure of the best similarity-based splitter $\delta^\star$ selected by Gini}
$D^{+}\leftarrow\{d\in D\mid \delta^\star_M(d,e)=\min_{x\in \delta^\star_E}(\delta^\star_M(d,x))$\;
$t_e\leftarrow\mathrm{build\_tree}(D^{+},C_e,C_b,C_r)$\;
Add new branch $t_e$ to $T_B$\;
}
}
\uElseIf{$\delta^\star$ \emph{is dictionary-based}}{
\ForEach{$e \in \delta^\star_E$}{
\tcp{For definition of \text{BOSS\_dist}, see \cite[Definition 4]{Schafer2015}}
\tcp{$\delta^\star_{\mathcal{T}}(d)$ is the BOSS transformation of $d$ using the BOSS transform function $\delta^\star_{\mathcal{T}}$ of the best dictionary-based splitter $\delta^\star$ selected by Gini}
$D^{+}\leftarrow\{d\in D\mid \text{BOSS\_dist}(\delta^\star_{\mathcal{T}}(d),e)=\min_{x\in \delta^\star_E}(\text{BOSS\_dist}(\delta^\star_{\mathcal{T}}(d),x))$\;
$t_e\leftarrow\mathrm{build\_tree}(D^{+},C_e,C_b,C_r)$\;
Add new branch $t_e$ to $T_B$\;
}
}
\uElseIf{$\delta^\star$ \emph{is interval-based}}{
\tcp{($\delta^\star_a$,$\delta^\star_v$) is the best attribute-threshold tuple to split on when $\delta^\star_\lambda$ function is applied to the interval}
$D^\leq\leftarrow\{d\in D\mid \mathrm{get\_att\_val}\big(\delta^\star_\lambda(\langle d_{\delta^\star_s}, \cdots, d_{\delta^\star_s+\delta^\star_m-1} \rangle),\delta^\star_a\big)\leq \delta^\star_v \}$\;
$t_{\mathrm{left}}\leftarrow \mathrm{build\_tree}(D^{\leq},C_e,C_b,C_r)$\;
Add branch $t_{\mathrm{left}}$ to $T_B$\;
$D^>\leftarrow\{d\in D\mid \mathrm{get\_att\_val}\big(\delta^\star_\lambda(\langle d_{\delta^\star_s}, \cdots, d_{\delta^\star_s+\delta^\star_m-1} \rangle),\delta^\star_a\big)> \delta^\star_v \}$\;
$t_{\mathrm{right}}\leftarrow \mathrm{build\_tree}(D^{>},C_e,C_b,C_r)$\;
Add branch $t_{\mathrm{right}}$ to $T_B$
}
\Return $T$
\end{algorithm}
\begin{algorithm}
\caption{$\mathrm{generate\_similarity\_splitters}(D, C_e)$}
\label{alg:gen-similarity-split}
\DontPrintSemicolon
\KwIn{$D$: a time series dataset.}
\KwIn{$C_e$: no. of similarity-based candidates}
\KwOut{$\mathcal{S}_e$: a set of similarity-based splitting functions}
\vspace*{5pt}
\tcp{Note that this algorithm is reproduced from \cite[Algorithm~2]{Lucas2018}}\;
$\mathcal{S}_e \leftarrow$ $\emptyset$ \tcp*{set of candidate similarity splitters}
\For {$i=1$ \KwTo $C_e$}{
\tcp{sample a parameterized measure $M$ uniformly at random from $\Delta$}
$M \xleftarrow[]{\sim}\Delta$ \tcp*{$\Delta$ is the set of 11 similarity measures used in \citep{Lucas2018}}\;
\vspace*{5pt}
\tcp{Select one exemplar per class to constitute the set $E$}
$E \leftarrow$ $\emptyset$\;
\ForEach{\emph{class} $c$ \emph{present in} $D$}{
$D_c \leftarrow \left\{d\in D \mid class(d) = c\right\}$ \tcp*{$D_c$ is the data for class $c$}
$e \xleftarrow[]{\sim}D_c$ \tcp*{sample an exemplar $e$ uniformly at random from $D_c$}
Add $e$ to $E$
}
\tcp{Store measure $M$ and exemplars $E$ in the new splitter $\delta$}
$(\delta_{M},\delta_{E}) \leftarrow (M,E)$\;
Add splitter $\delta$ to $\mathcal{S}_e$\;
}
\Return $\mathcal{S}_e$\;
\end{algorithm}
\begin{algorithm}
\caption{$\mathrm{generate\_dictionary\_splitters}(D, C_b)$}
\label{alg:gen-dictionary-split}
\DontPrintSemicolon
\KwIn{$D$: a time series dataset}
\KwIn{$C_b$: no. of dictionary-based candidates}
\KwOut{$\mathcal{S}_b$: a set of dictionary-based splitting functions}
\vspace*{5pt}
$\mathcal{S}_b \leftarrow$ $\emptyset$ \tcp*{set of candidate dictionary splitters}
\For {$i=1$ \KwTo $C_b$}{
\tcp{See Section~\ref{subsec:dictionary} for details of BOSS parameters}
$\mathcal{T} \leftarrow$ select\_random\_BOSS\_transformation()
\vspace*{5pt}
\tcp{Select one BOSS histogram per class to constitute the set $E$}
$E \leftarrow$ $\emptyset$\;
\ForEach{\emph{class} $c$ \emph{present in} $D$}{
$D_c \leftarrow \left\{d\in D \mid class(d) = c\right\}$\ \tcp*{$D_c$ is the data for class $c$}
$e \xleftarrow[]{\sim}D_c$\ \tcp*{sample an exemplar $e$ uniformly at random from $D_c$}
\tcp{Recall that we precomputed $\mathcal{T}(D)$ during initialization}
Add $\mathcal{T}(e)$ to $E$ \tcp*{$\mathcal{T}(e)$ is the BOSS histogram of $e$}
}
\tcp{Store BOSS transform $\mathcal{T}$ and exemplar histograms $E$ in the new splitter $\delta$}
$(\delta_{\mathcal{T}},\delta_{E}) \leftarrow (\mathcal{T},E)$\;
Add splitter $\delta$ to $\mathcal{S}_b$\;
}
\Return $\mathcal{S}_b$\;
\end{algorithm}
\begin{algorithm}
\caption{$\mathrm{generate\_interval\_splitters}(D, C_r)$}
\label{alg:select-interval-split}
\DontPrintSemicolon
\KwIn{$D$: a time series dataset}
\KwIn{$C_r$: no. of interval-based candidates}
\KwOut{$\mathcal{S}_r$: a set of interval-based splitting functions}
\vspace*{5pt}
$\mathcal{S}_r \leftarrow$ $\emptyset$ \tcp*{set of candidate interval splitters}
$m_{\mathrm{min}} \leftarrow 16$ \tcp*{minimum length of random intervals}
$C^*_r \leftarrow \lfloor C_r/4 \rfloor $ \tcp*{no. of attributes per transform}
$R \leftarrow \lceil C^*_r / m_{\mathrm{min}} \rceil $ \tcp*{no. of random intervals to compute}
\vspace*{5pt}
\For {$i=1$ \KwTo $R$}{
\tcp{Get random interval - length $m$ ($m\in[m_{\mathrm{min}},\ell]$), starting at index $s$}
$(\delta_{s},\delta_{m}) \leftarrow $ get\_random\_interval($m_{\mathrm{min}}, \ell$)\;
\tcp{Add splitters for each transformation}
\ForEach {${\delta_{\lambda}}$ \text{in} \{ACF,PACF,AR,PS \}}{
\tcp{Apply ${\lambda}$ to each time series}
$D_T \leftarrow\emptyset$\;
\ForEach {$d$ in $D$}{
\tcp{Create $d_T$, a vector of $m$ attribute-values obtained by applying $\delta_{\lambda}$ to the interval}
$d_T \leftarrow \delta_{\lambda}( \langle d_{\delta_{s}}, \cdots d_{\delta_{s+m-1}} \rangle)$\;
Add $d_T$ to $D_T$\;
}
\tcp{Calculate no.~of attributes to select from $i$th random interval and transform function $\delta_{\lambda}$}
$A \leftarrow \lfloor C^*_r / R \rfloor $\;
\tcp{Select at random $A$ attributes in $D_T$}
$\tilde{P} \leftarrow $ get\_random\_attributes($D_T$, A)\;
\ForEach {\emph{attribute} $\delta_{a}$ \emph{in} $\tilde{P}$}{
$\delta_{v} \leftarrow$ find\_best\_threshold($\delta_{a}$)\;
Add $\big( (\delta_{s},\delta_{m}), \delta_{\lambda}, (\delta_{a},\delta_{v}) \big)$ to $\mathcal{S}_r$\;
}
}
}
\Return $\mathcal{S}_r$\;
\end{algorithm}
\subsection{Splitting Functions}
\label{sec:splitfunctions}
As mentioned earlier, we choose splitting functions based on similarity measures, dictionary representations and interval-based transformations. This is motivated by the components of HIVE-COTE, namely EE (similarity-based), BOSS (dictionary-based) and RISE (interval-based). \reviewone{The number of \emph{candidate} splits generated per node for each type of splitter type is denoted by $C$ with a subscript as follows: $C_e$ for the number of similarity-based splitters, $C_b$ for the number of dictionary-based splitters and $C_r$ for the number of interval-based splitters.} We do not include ST (shapelets) because of its high \reviewone{training time} computational complexity. \reviewone{We also omit TSF because its accuracy is ranked lower than EE, ST and BOSS \citep{Bagnall2017}.} We next describe how we generate each of these types of splitting function.
\subsubsection{Similarity-based}
\label{subsec:similarity}
This splitting function uses the method of Proximity Forest \citep{Lucas2018}, which splits the data based on the similarity of each time series to a set of reference time series \reviewtwo{(Lines 16~to~22 in Algorithm~\ref{alg:build-tree})}. At training time, for each candidate splitter, a random measure $\delta_M$, that is randomly parameterized, is selected, as well as a set $\delta_E$ of random reference time series, one from each class (Algorithm~\ref{alg:gen-similarity-split}). \reviewone{We use the same 11 similarity measures used in Proximity Forest \citep{Lucas2018}, and the parameters for these measures are also selected randomly from the same distributions used in Proximity Forest \citep{Lucas2018}.}
If TS-CHIEF\xspace is trained with only the similarity-based splitter enabled (i.e. $C_b=C_r=0$), then it is exactly Proximity Forest.
\reviewone{When designing our earlier work Proximity Forest \citep{Lucas2018} we chose to select a single random reference per class instead of an aggregate representation because it is very fast and it introduces diversity to the ensemble. We found that using a single random reference per class was working very well in Proximity Forest, and so we used it in the equivalent similarity-based splitter, and also in the dictionary-based splitter presented in Section~\ref{subsec:dictionary}.}
When splitting the data at training time and at classification time, the similarity of a query instance $Q$ to each reference time series \reviewtwo{$e$} in $\delta_E$ is evaluated using the selected measure $\delta_M$. $Q$ is passed down the branch corresponding to the \reviewtwo{$e$} to which $Q$ is closest.
\subsubsection{Dictionary-based}
\label{subsec:dictionary}
This type of split functions also uses a similarity-based splitting mechanism, except that it works on a set of time series that have been transformed using the BOSS transformation \cite[Algorithm~1]{Schafer2015}, and that it uses a variant of the Euclidean distance \cite[Definition~4]{Schafer2015} to measure similarity between transformed time series.
The BOSS transformation is used to convert the time series dataset into a bag-of-word model. We start by describing the BOSS transformation. To compute a BOSS transformation of a single time series, first, a window of fixed length $w$ is slid over the time series, while converting each window to a Symbolic Fourier Approximation (SFA) word of length $f$ \citep{Schafer2012, Schafer2015}. SFA is a two-step procedure: 1) it applies a low pass filter --~using only the low frequency coefficients of the Discrete Fourier Transformation (DFT)~--, 2) it converts each window (subseries) into a word using a data adaptive quantization method called Multiple Coefficient Binning (MCB). MCB defines a matrix of discretization levels for an alphabet size $\alpha$ (default is $\alpha=4$) and a word length $f$. This leads to $\alpha^f$ possible words.
\reviewone{There is also a parameter called \emph{norm}. If it is equal to true, the first Fourier coefficient of the window is removed, which is equal to mean-centering the time series (i.e., subtracting the mean).}
SFA words are then counted to form a word frequency histogram that is used to compare two time series. BOSS uses a bespoke Euclidean distance, namely $\text{BOSS\_dist}$, \reviewone{which measures the distance between sparse vectors (which here represent histograms) in a non-symmetric way, such that the distance is computed only on elements present in the first vector \citep{Schafer2015}.}
We now turn to explaining how we use BOSS transformations to build our forest. Since BOSS has four different hyperparameters, many possible BOSS transformations of a time series can be generated. Before we start training the trees, $t$ BOSS transformations (histograms for all time series) of the dataset are pre-computed based on $t$ randomly selected sets of BOSS parameters. Similar to the values used in BOSS, the four parameters are selected uniformly at random from the following ranges: the window length $w \in \{10 \cdots \ell\}$, SFA word length $f \in \{6,8,10,12,14,16\}$, the normalization parameter $norm \in \{true, false\}$, and $\alpha=4$.
At training time (Algorithm~\ref{alg:gen-dictionary-split}), for each candidate splitter $\delta$, a random BOSS transformation $\delta_\mathcal{T}$\reviewone{, with replacement,} is chosen, as well as a set $\delta_E$ of random reference time series from each class for which the transformation $\delta_\mathcal{T}$ has been applied. Each training time series is then passed down the branch of the reference series for which the BOSS distance between histogram of the series and the reference time series is lowest. We then generate several such splitters and choose the best one according to the Gini index.
At classification time, when a query time series $Q$ arrives at a node with a dictionary-based splitter, we start by calculating its transformation into a word histogram (the transformation $\delta_\mathcal{T}$ selected at training). We then compare this histogram to each reference time series in $\delta_E$, and $Q$ is passed down the branch corresponding to the reference time series to which $Q$ is closest.
\subsubsection{Interval-based}
\label{subsec:interval}
This type of splitting function is designed to work in a similar fashion to the RISE component used in the HIVE-COTE. Recall that RISE is an interval-based algorithm that uses four transformations (ACF, PACF, AR - in time domain and PS - in frequency domain) to convert a set of random intervals to a feature vector. Once the feature vectors have been generated, RISE uses a classic attribute-value splitting mechanism to train a forest of binary decision trees (similar to Random Forest\reviewone{ -- but without bagging}).
\reviewone{A notable difference between RISE, and our interval-based splitter is that the random} intervals are selected per tree in \reviewone{RISE}, whereas \reviewone{our interval-based splitter} selects random intervals per candidate split at the node level.
\reviewone{This choice is for two main reasons. Firstly, choosing intervals per candidate split at node level helps to explore a larger number of random intervals. Secondly, this also separates the hyperparameter $k$ (number of trees) from the number of random intervals used by the interval-based splitters which depends on the hyperparameter $C_r$ (number of interval-based splits per node). Separating these hyperparameters helps to change the effects of interval-based splitter on the overall ensemble, without changing the size of the whole ensemble.
Consequently, this design decision also helps to increase the diversity of the ensemble.}
\reviewone{Algorithm~\ref{alg:select-interval-split} describes the process of generating features using random intervals and the four transform functions to generate $C_r$ interval-based candidates splits.}
Each candidate splitter $\delta$ is defined by a pair $(\delta_s,\delta_m)$ that represent the interval start and its length respectively, a function $\delta_\lambda$ (one of ACF, PACF, AR or PS) which is applied to the interval and a pair $(\delta_a,\delta_v)$ that indicates the attribute $\delta_a$ and threshold value $\delta_v$ on which to split. The values of $(\delta_s,\delta_m)$ are \reviewone{randomly selected to get a random interval of length between minimum length $m_{\mathrm{min}}=16$ and $\ell$ the length of the time series. We set $m_{\mathrm{min}}$, and other parameters required by the four transform functions to be exactly same as it was in RISE.} The values of the pair $(\delta_a,\delta_v)$ are optimized such that the Gini index is maximized when the data are split on the attribute $\delta_a$ for a threshold value $\delta_v$.
When splitting the data at training time and at classification time, $\delta_{\lambda}$ is applied to the interval of query instance $Q$ defined by $\delta_s$ and $\delta_m$, obtaining the attribute vector $Q_\lambda$. If
$\mathrm{get\_att\_val} (Q_{\lambda},\delta_a)\leq\delta_v$ (the value of attribute ${\delta_a}$ of ${Q_{\lambda}}$ is less than the threshold value), $Q$ is passed down the left branch. Otherwise it is passed down the right.
\reviewone{Contrary to the similarity- and dictionary-based splitting functions, which used a distance based mechanism to partition the data (to produce a variable number of branches depending on the number of classes present at the node), the ``attribute-value'' based splitting mechanism used by the interval-based splitting functions produce binary splits \reviewtwo{(Lines 32~to~38} in Algorithm~\ref{alg:build-tree}).}
\subsection{Classification}
For each tree, a query time series $Q$ is passed down the hierarchy from the root to the leaves. The branch taken at each node depends on the splitting function selected at the node. Once $Q$ reaches the leaf, it is labelled with the class with which the training instances that reached that leaf were classified. Recall that the tree is repeatedly split until pure, so all training instances that reach a leaf will have the same class. This process is presented in the Algorithm~\ref{alg:classification}. Finally, a majority vote by the $k$ trees is used to label $Q$.
\begin{algorithm}
\caption{classification$\left(Q, T\right)$}
\label{alg:classification}
\DontPrintSemicolon
\KwIn{$Q$: Query Time Series}
\KwIn{$T$: TS-CHIEF\xspace Tree}
\KwOut{a class label $c$}
\uIf{$\mathrm{is\_leaf}(T)$}{\Return majority class of $T$}
\uIf{$T_\delta$ \emph{is similarity-based}}{
$(e, T^\star) \leftarrow \argmin\limits_{(e',T')\in T_B} \delta_M(Q,e')$\;
}
\uElseIf{$T_\delta$ \emph{is dictionary-based}}{
$(e, T^\star) \leftarrow \argmin\limits_{(e',T')\in T_B} \text{BOSS\_dist}(\delta_\mathcal{T}(Q),e')$\;
}
\uElseIf{$T_\delta$ \emph{is interval-based}}{
$Q_\lambda \leftarrow \delta_\lambda(\langle Q_{\delta_s}, \cdots, Q_{\delta_s+\delta_m-1} \rangle)$\;
\tcp{compare the $\delta_a^{th}$ attribute value from $Q_\lambda$ to the split value}
\uIf{$\mathrm{get\_att\_val}(Q_{\lambda},\delta_a) \le \delta_v$}{
$T^* \leftarrow T_{left}$
}
\uElse{
$T^* \leftarrow T_{right}$
}
}
\tcp{recursive call on subtree $T^\star$}
\Return classification$\left(Q, T^\star\right)$\; \end{algorithm}
\subsection{Complexity}
\label{subsec:complexity}
\paragraph{Training time complexity}
Proximity Forest, on which TS-CHIEF builds, has average training time complexity that is quasi-linear with the quantity of training data, $O(k \cdot n\log(n) \cdot C_e \cdot c \cdot \ell^2)$ for $k$ trees, $n$ training time series of length $\ell$, $C_e$ similarity-based candidate splits, and $c$ classes \citep{Lucas2018}. The term $k$ comes from the number of trees to train and $\log(n)$ from the average depth of the trees. In the worst case, tree depth may be $n$, however, on average, tree depth can be expected to be $\log(n)$. The term $n \cdot C_e \cdot c \cdot \ell^2$ represents the order of time required to select the best of $C_e$ candidate splits and partition the data thereon, based on the similarity of $n$ training instances to $c$ reference time series at the node using a random similarity measure. The slowest of the similarity measures used (WDTW) is bounded by $O(\ell^2)$.
The addition of the dictionary-based splitter adds a new initialization step and a new selection step to the Proximity Forest algorithm. The initialization part pre-computes $t$ BOSS transformations for $n$ time series. Since the cost of BOSS transforming one time series is $O(\ell)$ \cite[Section~6]{Schafer2015}, the complexity of the initialization part is $O(t \cdot n \cdot \ell)$. The Euclidean-based BOSS distance has a complexity of $O(\ell)$ \cite[Definition~4]{Schafer2015} and must be applied to every example at the node for each of the $C_b$ (dictionary-based candidate splits), resulting in order $O(C_b\cdot c \cdot n \cdot \ell)$ complexity for generating and evaluating dictionary splitters at each node of each tree.
The interval-based splitting functions are attribute-value splitters; we detail the complexity for training a node receiving $n'$ time series. Each interval is transformed using 4 different functions (ACF, PACF, AR and PS), which takes at most $O(\ell^2)$ time \cite[Table~4]{Lines2018}, leading to $O(r\cdot n'\cdot \ell^2)$ for $r$ intervals taken where $r$ is proportional to $C_r$.
For each of the $C_r$ candidate splits the data is then sorted and scanned through to find the best split --~$O(C_r\cdot n\log(n))$. Put together, this adds $O(C_r\cdot n\cdot \ell^2 + C_r\cdot n\log(n))$ complexity to the split selection stage. Note that $\ell$ in this term represents an upper bound on the length of random intervals selected. The expected length of random interval is 1/3 of $\ell$.
Overall, TS-CHIEF\xspace has quasi-linear average complexity \reviewone{with respect to the training size} :
\begin{align*}
O\Big(\underbrace{t\cdot n\cdot \ell}_\text{initialization} + \underbrace{k \cdot \log(n)}_{\substack{\text{avg.depth} \\ \text{for $k$ trees}}} \thinspace \cdot \thinspace
\big[&\underbrace{C_e \cdot c \cdot n\cdot \ell^2}_\text{similarity}
+ \underbrace{C_b\cdot c\cdot n \cdot \ell}_\text{dictionary} \\
&+ \underbrace{C_r\cdot n\cdot \ell^2
+ C_r\cdot n\log(n)}_\text{interval}\big]\Big).
\end{align*}
In Section~\ref{subsec:accuracy_ablative}, we have included an experiment to measure the fraction of training time taken by each splitter type over 85 UCR datasets \citep{UCRArchive2015}. As expected, the dominant term in the training complexity is the term representing the similarity-based splitter.
In practice, our experiments show that the similarity-based splitter takes about $80\%$ of the training time (See Figure~\ref{fig:splitter-timing}, on page \pageref{fig:scale-sat-time}).
\paragraph{Classification time complexity}
Each time series is simply passed down $k$ trees, traversing an average of $log(n)$ nodes. Moreover, the complexity at each node is dominated by the similarity-based splitters. Overall, this is thus a $O(k\cdot \log(n)\cdot c\cdot \ell^2)$ average case classification time complexity.
\paragraph{Memory complexity}
The memory complexity is linear with the quantity of data. We would need to store one copy of $n$ time series of length $\ell$ -- this is $O(n \cdot \ell)$. In the worst case there are as many nodes in each of the $k$ trees as there are time series and at each node, and we store one exemplar time series for each of the $c$ classes, $O(k\cdot n\cdot c)$. We pre-store all $t$ dictionary-based transformations, $O(t\cdot n \cdot \ell)$. Overall, this is $O(n \cdot \ell + k\cdot n\cdot c + t\cdot n \cdot \ell)$.
\section{Experiments}
\label{sec:experiments}
We start by evaluating the accuracy of TS-CHIEF\xspace on the UCR archive, and then assess its scalability on a large time series dataset. In essence, we show that TS-CHIEF\xspace can reach the same level of accuracy as HIVE-COTE but with much greater speed, thanks to TS-CHIEF\xspace's quasi-linear complexity \reviewtwo{with respect to the} \reviewone{number of training instances}.
\reviewone{We then present a study on the variation of training accuracy against the ensemble size, followed by an assessment of the contribution of each type of splitter in TS-CHIEF\xspace. Finally, we finish this section by presenting a study of the memory requirements for TS-CHIEF\xspace.}
\reviewone{We implemented a multi-threaded version of TS-CHIEF\xspace in Java, and have made it available via the Github repository \url{https://github.com/dotnet54/TS-CHIEF}. In these experiments, we used multiple threads when measuring the accuracy of TS-CHIEF\xspace under various configurations (Sections \ref{subsec:accuracy_ucr}, \ref{subsec:accuracy_var} and \ref{subsec:accuracy_ablative}). However, we used a single thread (1~CPU) for both TS-CHIEF\xspace and HIVE-COTE when measuring the timings for scalability experiments in Section \ref{subsec:scalability}.}
Throughout the experiments, unless mentioned otherwise, we use the following parameter values for TS-CHIEF\xspace: $t=1000$ dictionary-based (BOSS) transformations, $k=500$ trees in the forest. When training each node, we concurrently assess the following number of candidates: 5 similarity-based splitters, 100 dictionary-based splitters and 100 interval-based splitters. Ideally, we would also want to raise the number of candidates for the similarity-based splitter, but this has a significant impact on training time (since passing the instances down the branches measures in $O(\ell^2)$) with marginal improvement in accuracy \citep{Lucas2018}.
Note that we have not done any tuning of these numbers of candidates of each type. \reviewone{For hyperparameters of the similarity-based splitters (e.g. parameters for distance measures), we used exactly the same values used in Proximity Forest \citep{Lucas2018}. Similarly, for dictionary- and interval-based splitters, we used the same hyperparameters used in BOSS and RISE components of HIVE-COTE \citep{Lines2018}.}
\subsection{Accuracy on the UCR Archive}
\label{subsec:accuracy_ucr}
We evaluate TS-CHIEF\xspace on the UCR archive \citep{UCRArchive2015}, as is the de facto standard in TSC research \citep{Bagnall2017}. We use the 2015 version with 85 datasets, because the very recent update adding further datasets is still in beta \citep{Dau2018a}. All 85 datasets are fixed length univariate time series that have been $z$-normalized. We use the standard train/test split available at \url{http://www.timeseriesclassification.com}.
\reviewone{
To compare multiple algorithms over the 85 datasets, we use critical difference diagrams, as it is the standard in machine learning research \citep{Demsar2006, Benavoli2016}. We~use the Friedman test to compare the ranks of multiple classifiers \citep{Demsar2006}. In these statistical tests, the null hypothesis corresponds to no significant difference in the mean rankings of the multiple classifiers (at a statistical significant level $\alpha=0.05$). In cases where null-hypothesis was rejected, we use the Wilcoxon signed rank test to compare the pair-wise difference in ranks between classifiers, while using Holm's correction to adjust for family-wise errors \citep{Benavoli2016}.
}
We compare TS-CHIEF\xspace to the 3 time series classifiers identified by \citep{Bagnall2017} as the most accurate on the UCR archive (FLAT-COTE, ST and BOSS), as well as the de facto standard 1-NN DTW, deep learning method ResNet and the more recent HIVE-COTE (the current most accurate on the URC archive) and Proximity Forest (the inspiration for TS-CHIEF). We use results reported at the \url{http://www.timeseriesclassification.com} website for these algorithms, except for TS-CHIEF, Proximity Forest (our result \citep{Lucas2018}) and the deep learning ResNet method for which we obtained the results from Fawaz et. al's review of Deep Learning methods for TSC \citep{Fawaz2018}.
\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=.8\linewidth]{Fig-1.pdf}
\caption{Critical difference diagram showing the average ranks on error of leading TSC algorithms (described in Section \ref{sec:relatedwork}) across 85 datasets from the benchmark UCR archive \citep{Dau2018a}.
The lower the rank (further to the right) the lower the error of an algorithm relative to the others on average.}
\label{fig:cd-us-vs-tsc}
\end{figure}
\reviewone{
Figure~\ref{fig:cd-us-vs-tsc} displays mean ranks (on error) between the 8 algorithms; which is also the main result of this paper in terms of accuracy. TS-CHIEF\xspace obtains an average rank of 2.941, which rivals HIVE-COTE at 2.935 (statistically not different). FLAT-COTE comes next with an average rank of 3.818. Next, Residual Neural Network (ResNet) is ranked at 4.300.
Table~\ref{tbl:crit} presents the results of a comparison between each pair of algorithms. We use Wilcoxon's signed rank test and judge significance at the 0.05 significance level using a Holm correction for multiple testing. The comparisons that are judged significant at the 0.05 level are displayed in bold type. TS-CHIEF\xspace, HIVE-COTE, FLAT-COTE and ResNet are all statistically indistinguishable from one another except that HIVE-COTE is significantly more accurate than FLAT-COTE. TS-CHIEF\xspace and the two COTEs are all significantly more accurate than all the other algorithms except ResNet.}
\begin{table}[h!]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{lrrrrrrrr}
\toprule
{} & \textbf{BOSS} & \textbf{ST} & \textbf{PF} & \textbf{RN} & \textbf{FCT} & \textbf{HCT} & \textbf{TS-CHIEF\xspace} \\
\midrule
\textbf{DTW} & \textbf{$<$0.001} & \textbf{$<$0.001} & \textbf{$<$0.001} & \textbf{$<$0.001} & \textbf{$<$0.001} & \textbf{$<$0.001} & \textbf{$<$0.001} \\
\textbf{BOSS} & & 0.035 & 0.042 & 0.022 & \textbf{$<$0.001} & \textbf{$<$0.001} & \textbf{$<$0.001} \\
\textbf{ST} & & & 0.684 & 0.112 & \textbf{$<$0.001} & \textbf{$<$0.001} & \textbf{$<$0.001} \\
\textbf{PF} & & & & 0.127 & \textbf{0.002} & \textbf{$<$0.001} & \textbf{$<$0.001} \\
\textbf{RN} & & & & & 0.330 & 0.005 & 0.017 \\
\textbf{FCT} & & & & & & \textbf{$<$0.001} & 0.045 \\
\textbf{HCT} & & & & & & & 0.687 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\caption{\reviewone{p-values for the pairwise comparison of classifiers. Bold values indicate pairs of classifiers that are statistically different at the 0.05 level after applying a Holm correction. The algorithms are abbreviated as follows. RN: ResNet, DTW: 1-NN DTW, FCT: FLAT-COTE, and HCT: HIVE-COTE.}}
\label{tbl:crit}
\end{table}
To further examine the accuracy of TS-CHIEF\xspace against both COTE algorithms, Figure~\ref{fig:acc-best-vs-hcote} presents a scatter plot of pairwise accuracy.
Each point represents a UCR dataset. TS-CHIEF\xspace wins above the diagonal line. TS-CHIEF\xspace wins 40 times against HIVE-COTE (green squares), loses 38 times and ties on 7 datasets. Compared to FLAT-COTE (red circles), TS-CHIEF\xspace wins 47 times, and loses 33 times, with 5 ties. It is interesting to see that TS-CHIEF\xspace gives results that are quite different to both COTE algorithms, with a few datasets for which the difference in accuracy is quite large.
\reviewone{Table~\ref{tbl:results} (on page \pageref{tbl:results}) presents the accuracy of all 8 classifiers for the 85 datasets. TS-CHIEF\xspace is most accurate of all classifiers (rank 1) on 31 datasets, while HIVE-COTE is most accurate on 23, despite their mean ranks being equal at 2.94. With respect to the benchmark UCR archive, TS-CHIEF\xspace rivals HIVE-COTE in accuracy (without being statistically different).}
\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
\begin{subfigure}[b]{.45\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Fig-2a}
\label{fig:acc-best-vs-hcote-a}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.45\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Fig-2b}
\label{fig:acc-best-vs-hcote-b}
\end{subfigure}
\vspace*{-8pt}
\caption{\reviewone{Comparison of accuracy for TS-CHIEF\xspace \emph{versus} HIVE-COTE (left) and TS-CHIEF\xspace \emph{versus} FLAT-COTE (right) on 85 UCR datasets. TS-CHIEF\xspace's win/draw/loss against HIVE-COTE is 40/7/38 and against FLAT-COTE is 47/5/33.}}
\label{fig:acc-best-vs-hcote}
\end{figure}
\begin{table}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{lrrrrrrrr}
\toprule
{} & DTW & BOSS & ST & PF & RN & FCT & HCT & CHIEF \\
Dataset Type & & & & & & & & \\
\midrule
DEVICE & 59.54 & 66.81 & 70.58 & 64.40 & 72.94 & 69.47 & \textbf{73.24} & 69.26 \\
ECG & 87.14 & 91.69 & 94.43 & 92.34 & 92.87 & \textbf{95.56} & 95.20 & 94.88 \\
IMAGE & 74.87 & 81.27 & 79.71 & 82.30 & 79.79 & 82.67 & 84.05 & \textbf{84.35} \\
MOTION & 70.54 & 75.60 & 77.87 & 78.55 & 76.83 & 79.13 & 79.66 & \textbf{81.40} \\
SENSOR & 77.50 & 79.89 & 84.05 & 83.66 & 85.77 & \textbf{86.01} & 84.81 & 84.67 \\
SIMULATED & 87.25 & 92.61 & 92.20 & 89.26 & 93.13 & 93.96 & 94.49 & \textbf{94.79} \\
SPECTRO & 80.34 & 85.00 & 86.55 & 81.67 & 86.19 & 84.72 & \textbf{88.31} & 86.49 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\caption{\reviewone{Mean accuracy of TSC algorithms grouped by dataset types identified in the UCR archive \citep{UCRArchive2015}. FCT and HCT indicates FLAT-COTE and HIVE-COTE respectively, and RN indicates ResNet.}}
\label{tbl:dataset-type}
\end{table}
\reviewone{
We also looked at the accuracy of TS-CHIEF\xspace and other TSC methods on different data domains as identified in the UCR achive \citep{UCRArchive2015}. The results, in Table~\ref{tbl:dataset-type}, shows that TS-CHIEF\xspace performed best in three data domains, although the mean accuracy in these cases are similar to HIVE-COTE.
}
Although we were not able to compare running time with either of the COTE algorithms because of their very high running time, even on the UCR archive, we give here a few indications of runtime for TS-CHIEF\xspace. The experiment was carried out using an AMD Opteron CPU (1.8~GHz) with 64~GB RAM, with 16~CPU threads. \reviewone{Note that this is the only timing experiment we ran with multiple threads, timing experiments in Section~\ref{subsec:scalability} were run using a single thread.}
Average training and testing times were respectively of about 3 hours and 27 min per dataset, but with quite a large difference between datasets. TS-CHIEF\xspace was trained on 69 datasets in less than 1 hour each and less than one day was sufficient to train TS-CHIEF\xspace on all but 10 datasets. It however took about 10 days to complete training on all the datasets, mostly due to the \texttt{HandOutlines} dataset which took more than 4 days to complete. Our experiments confirmed our theoretical developments about complexity: TS-CHIEF\xspace was largely unaffected by dataset size with the largest dataset \texttt{ElectricDevices} trained in 2h24min and tested in 9min. \texttt{HandOutlines} is the dataset with the longest series and in the top-10 in terms of training size, which shows that the quadratic complexity with the length has still a non-negligible influence on training time.
The next section details scalability \reviewtwo{with respect to} length and size.
\subsection{Scalability}
\label{subsec:scalability}
TS-CHIEF\xspace is designed to be both accurate and highly scalable. Section~\ref{subsec:complexity} showed that the complexity of TS-CHIEF\xspace scales quasi-linearly \reviewtwo{with respect to} number of training instances $n$ and quadratically \reviewtwo{with respect to} length of the time series $\ell$. To assess how this plays out in practice, we carried out two experiments to evaluate the runtime of TS-CHIEF\xspace when 1)~the number of training instances increases, and 2)~the time series length increases. We compare TS-CHIEF\xspace to the HIVE-COTE algorithm which previously held the title of most accurate on the UCR archive. We performed these experiments with 100 trees.
As the accuracy on the UCR archive has been evaluated for 500 trees (Section~\ref{subsec:accuracy_ucr}), we also estimated the timing for 500 trees (5 times slower). The experiments used a single run of each algorithm using 1~CPU \reviewone{(single thread)} on a machine with an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz processor with 200 GB of RAM.
\subsubsection{Increasing training set size}
First, we assessed the scalability of TS-CHIEF\xspace \reviewtwo{ with respect to the} training set size. We used a Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) dataset \citep{Tan2017} composed of 1 million time series of length 46, with 24 classes. \reviewone{The training set was sampled using stratified random sampling method while making sure at least one time series from each class in the training data is present in the stratified samples. We~also used a stratified random sample of 1000 test instances for evaluation.} We~evaluated the accuracy and the total runtime as a function of the number of training time series, starting from a subsample of 58, and logarithmically increasing up to 131,879 (a sufficient quantity to clearly define the trend).
\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.6\linewidth]{Fig-3.pdf}
\vspace*{-8pt}
\caption{Training time in logarithmic-scale for TS-CHIEF\xspace \emph{versus} HIVE-COTE with increasing training size using the Satellite Image Time Series dataset \citep{Tan2017}. Even for 1,500 time series, TS-CHIEF\xspace is
more than 900 times faster than the current state of the art HIVE-COTE.}
\label{fig:scale-sat-time}
\end{figure}
Figures~\ref{fig:scale-sat-time} and \ref{fig:scale-sat-acc} show the training time and the accuracy, respectively, as a function of the training set size for TS-CHIEF\xspace (in olive) and HIVE-COTE (in red). Figure~\ref{fig:scale-sat-time} shows that TS-CHIEF\xspace trains in time that is quasi-linear \reviewtwo{with respect to} the number of training examples, rather than the quadratic time for HIVE-COTE. For about 1,500 training time series, HIVE-COTE requires about 8 days to train, while TS-CHIEF\xspace was able to train in about 13 minutes. This is thus an 900x speed-up.
\begin{figure}[!htb]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=.6\linewidth]{Fig-4.pdf}
\vspace*{-8pt}
\caption{Accuracy as a function of training set size for SITS dataset.}
\label{fig:scale-sat-acc}
\end{figure}
Figure~\ref{fig:scale-sat-acc} shows that TS-CHIEF\xspace has similar accuracy to HIVE-COTE for any given number of training time series. However, TS-CHIEF\xspace achieves 67~\% accuracy within 2 days by learning from about 132k time series. By fitting a quadratic curve through HIVE-COTE training time, we estimate that it will require 234 years for HIVE-COTE to learn from 132k time series. This is a speed-up of 46,000 times over HIVE-COTE. Furthermore, to train all one million time series in the SITS dataset, we estimated that it would take 13,550 years to train HIVE-COTE, while TS-CHIEF\xspace is estimated to take 44 days. This is a speed-up of 90,000 times over HIVE-COTE for 1M time series.
Moreover, Figure~\ref{fig:scale-sat-acc} indicates that HIVE-COTE can only achieve 60~\% after 2 days of training, i.e. a decrease of 7.9~\% compared to TS-CHIEF\xspace.
In practice, the execution time of TS-CHIEF\xspace thus scales very close to its theoretical average complexity (Section~\ref{subsec:complexity}) by scaling quasi-linearly with the training set size.
\subsubsection{Increasing length}
Second, we assessed the scalability of TS-CHIEF\xspace \reviewtwo{ with respect} to the length $\ell$ of the time series. We use here \texttt{InlineSkate}, a UCR dataset composed of 100 time series and 550 test time series of original length 1882. We resampled the length from 32 to 2048 by using an exponential scale with base~2.
Figure~\ref{fig:scale-length-time} displays the training time for both TS-CHIEF\xspace (in olive) and HIVE-COTE (in red) as a function of the length of the time series. TS-CHIEF\xspace can learn from 100 time series of length 2,048 in about 4 hours, while HIVE-COTE requires more than 3 days. This is a 24x speed up. It also mirrors the theoretical training complexity of TS-CHIEF\xspace in $O(\ell^2)$, and HIVE-COTE in $O(\ell^4)$ \citep{Lines2018} \reviewtwo{with respect to the} length of the time series.
\begin{figure}[!htb]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=.6\linewidth]{Fig-5.pdf}
\vspace*{-8pt}
\caption{Training time as a function of the series length $\ell$ for a one UCR dataset.}
\label{fig:scale-length-time}
\end{figure}
\reviewone{
\subsection{Ensemble Size and Variance of the Results}
\label{subsec:accuracy_var}
\begin{figure}[!htb]
\centering
\begin{subfigure}[b]{.6\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth,height=6.5cm]{Fig-6a}
\label{fig:acc-var-a}
\end{subfigure}
\\
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.8\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Fig-6b}
\label{fig:acc-var-b}
\end{subfigure}
\vspace*{-8pt}
\caption{\reviewone{Mean accuracy (and variance) \emph{versus} ensemble size (top) and a critical difference diagram showing the mean rankings of different ensemble sizes (bottom).
Mean accuracy is calculated over 85 datasets for 10 runs.}}
\label{fig:acc-var}
\end{figure}
We also conducted an experiment to study the accuracy (and variance) \emph{versus} ensemble size $k$ (see Figure~\ref{fig:acc-var}). It shows that the accuracy increases with $k$ up to a point where it plateaus. This follows ensemble theory which shows that increasing the size of the ensemble reduces the variance, but that at some point this variance is compensated by the covariance of the elements of the ensemble: when they all start resembling each other, no additional reduction of the variance of the error is obtained \citep{Ueda1996, Breiman2001}. Our experiments show that using $k=500$ is significantly better than using $k=100$ (p-value is $<$0.001 in a pairwise comparison after Holm's correction) but that the magnitude of the difference is very small. Importantly, however, it shows that, when going from 100 to 500, there is a substantial reduction in the variance in the accuracy between runs.
In consequence, we make 500 trees the default, as it provides a good trade-off between accuracy and running times.}
\subsection{Contribution of Splitting Functions}
\label{subsec:accuracy_ablative}
\begin{center}
\begin{figure*}[ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{Fig-7.pdf}
\vspace*{-5pt}
\caption{Pairwise comparison of accuracy with one \reviewone{(bottom row)} or two \reviewone{(top row)} types of split functions \emph{versus} TS-CHIEF\xspace (where all three types of split functions were used). \reviewone{Similarity \emph{versus} TS-CHIEF\xspace (bottom-left) shows the pairwise comparison of Proximity Forest against TS-CHIEF\xspace.}
}
\label{fig:accu-contributions}
\end{figure*}
\end{center}
\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=.95\linewidth]{Fig-8.pdf}
\vspace*{-5pt}
\caption{
\reviewone{
Critical difference diagram showing the mean ranks of different combinations of split functions.
}}
\label{fig:cd-contributions}
\end{figure}
We also conducted ablation experiments to assess the contribution of each type of splitting function: similarity-based, dictionary-based and interval-based. For this purpose, we assess each variant of TS-CHIEF\xspace created by disabling one of the functions or a pair of the functions. We performed these experiments with 100 trees, \reviewone{and report the mean accuracy of 10 repetitions.}
Figure~\ref{fig:accu-contributions} displays six scatter-plots comparing the accuracy of TS-CHIEF\xspace using all splitting functions to that of the six ablation configurations.
The vertical axes indicate the accuracy of TS-CHIEF\xspace with all split functions enabled. The first row compares TS-CHIEF\xspace to variants with a single splitting function disabled \reviewone{(i.e with two types of split functions only)}. The second row compares TS-CHIEF\xspace to variants with only a single splitting function enabled. Please note that the use of only the similarity-based splitting function (first column, second row) corresponds to the \reviewone{Proximity Forest} algorithm \citep{Lucas2018}. Each point indicates one of the 85 UCR datasets. Points above the diagonal dashed line indicate that TS-CHIEF\xspace with all three splitting functions has higher accuracy than the alternative.
The scatter plots on the bottom row indicate that, individually, the dictionary-based splitter contributes most to the accuracy with 18 wins, 59 losses and 8 ties relative to TS-CHIEF\xspace.
We can also observe that the magnitudes of its losses tend to be smaller.
Conversely, the interval-based splitter contributes least to the accuracy, with losses of the greatest magnitude relative to TS-CHIEF\xspace. However, it still achieves lower error on 17 datasets, demonstrating that there are some datasets for which the interval-based approach performs well.
\reviewone{When comparing similarity-based splitter (Proximity Forest) against TS-CHIEF\xspace ($k=100$), the win/draw/loss is 67/2/16 in favor of TS-CHIEF\xspace. There are 5 datasets for which the wins are larger than 10\%: Wine (31\%), ShapeletSim (22\%), OSULeaf (15\%), ECGFiveDays (15\%) and FordB (11\%). When TS-CHIEF\xspace lost, the biggest three losses were for Lighting2 (10\%) Lightning7 (6\%) and FaceAll (5\%).}
In addition, the similarity-based splitter in conjunction with the dictionary-based splitter (that is, the variant with interval-based disabled) is closest to the accuracy of TS-CHIEF\xspace, with 26 wins against TS-CHIEF\xspace, 42 losses and 8 ties.
Figure~\ref{fig:cd-contributions} shows a critical difference diagram summarizing the the relative accuracy of all combinations of the splitting functions. This confirms our observations from the graphs in Figure \ref{fig:accu-contributions}. The combination of all three types of splitters has the highest average rank. Next come the pairs of splitters, with all pairs outranking the single splitters, albeit marginally for the pair that excludes the dictionary splitter.
\reviewone{
The contribution to accuracy from the interval-based splitter is small, and the sim+dict combination is not statistically different from TS-CHIEF\xspace (p-value is 0.777 in a pairwise comparison after Holm's correction) which uses the three splitters. There are three main reasons why we decided to keep the interval-based splitter in our method. (1) It ranks slightly higher than using only two. (2) It provides a different type of representation which we believe could be useful in real-world applications; in other words, we are conscious that there is a bias in the datasets of the UCR archive and want to prepare our method for unseen datasets as well. (3) Figure~\ref{fig:splitter-timing} (on page~\pageref{fig:splitter-timing})\reviewtwo{, which displays the fraction of time used by each splitting function,} shows that the interval-based splitter takes only a \reviewtwo{small} fraction of the time in TS-CHIEF\xspace, so that the downsides of including it are small.
}
\reviewone{
To analyze further, Figure~\ref{fig:splitter-wins} (on page~\pageref{fig:splitter-wins}) displays the percentage of times each splitter type was selected at a node. We observe that the dictionary-based splitter ($C_b = 100$) is selected more often than the other two types of splitters, with an average of 60\% of the time, across the 85 datasets. We used $C_e = 5$ for similarity-based splitters, but we also observe that similarity-based splitters were selected 30\% of the time, whereas, an interval-based splitter ($C_r = 100$) was selected only 10\% of the time. It is interesting that, despite that a dictionary-splitter was selected more often, it uses less time (15\%) than the similarity-based splitter (80\%) -- this can be seen from Figure~\ref{fig:splitter-timing}.
}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\begin{subfigure}[b]{.8\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth,height=6.5cm]{Fig-9a}
\label{fig:splitter-timing-a}
\end{subfigure}
\hfill
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.8\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth,height=6.5cm]{Fig-9b}
\label{fig:splitter-timing-b}
\end{subfigure}
\hfill
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.8\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth,height=6.5cm]{Fig-9c}
\label{fig:splitter-timing-c}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{Fraction of training time taken for each splitter type for 85 UCR datasets \citep{UCRArchive2015}. In this experiment, we selected the hyperparameters as follows: number of similarity-based splitters $C_e = 5$, number of dictionary-based splitters $C_b = 100$, and the number of interval-based splitters $C_r=100$.
We ran this experinment with $k=10$ trees to evaluate the fraction of training time used by each splitter type.}
\label{fig:splitter-timing}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\begin{subfigure}[b]{.8\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth,height=6.5cm]{Fig-10a}
\label{fig:splitter-wins-a}
\end{subfigure}
\hfill
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.8\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth,height=6.5cm]{Fig-10b}
\label{fig:splitter-wins-b}
\end{subfigure}
\hfill
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.8\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth,height=6.5cm]{Fig-10c}
\label{fig:splitter-wins-c}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{Percentage of times each splitter type was selected at the nodes.
}
\label{fig:splitter-wins}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Memory Usage}
\label{subsec:memory}
\reviewone{
In Section~\ref{subsec:complexity} we saw that the memory complexity of TS-CHIEF\xspace is $O(n \cdot \ell + k\cdot n\cdot c + t\cdot n \cdot \ell)$. Recall that $t$ is the number of BOSS transformations precomputed at the beginning of training. There is a memory \emph{vs} computational time tradeoff between precomputing $t$ BOSS transformations at the forest level and computing a random BOSS transformation at the tree or node level. To measure the actual memory usage due to the storage of BOSS transformations, we conducted an experiment using $k=1$ on the longest UCR dataset \emph{HandOutlines} ($n$ = 1,000, $\ell$ = 2,700) and on 131k instances (same amount used in Figure~\ref{fig:scale-sat-time}) of SITS dataset (see Section~\ref{subsec:scalability}). We found that the \emph{HandOutlines} uses 36.9~GB and SITS uses 49.8~GB of memory.
Thus, our decision to precompute BOSS transformations at forest level is due to the following reasons: (1) memory usage is reasonable compared to the computational overhead of transforming at tree or node level, (2) a pool of transformations at the forest level will allow any tree to select any of the $t$ transformations, which helps to improve diversity of the ensemble, whereas, if using, for example, one random BOSS transformation per tree, each tree is restricted to learn from one (or a less diverse pool, if using more than one) transformation.
}
\section{Conclusions}
\label{sec:conclusion}
We have introduced TS-CHIEF\xspace, which is a scalable and highly accurate algorithm for TSC. We have shown that TS-CHIEF\xspace makes the most of the quasi-linear scalability of trees \reviewone{relative to quantity of data}, together with the last decade of research into deriving accurate representations of time series.
Our experiments carried out on 85 datasets show that our algorithm reaches state-of-the-art accuracy that rivals HIVE-COTE, an algorithm which cannot be used in many applications because of its computational complexity.
We showed that on an application for land-cover mapping, TS-CHIEF\xspace is able to learn a model from 130,000 time series in 2 days, whereas it takes HIVE-COTE 8 days to learn from only 1,500 time series --~a quantity of data from which TS-CHIEF\xspace learns in 13 minutes. TS-CHIEF\xspace offers a general framework for time series classification. We believe that researchers will find it easy to integrate novel transformations and similarity measures and apply them at scale.
\reviewone{
We conclude by highlighting possible improvements. This includes improving the tradeoff between computation time and memory footprint, incorporating information from different types of potential splitters, as well as finding an automatic way to balance the number of candidate splitters considered for each type (possibly in a manner that is adaptive to the dataset). Furthermore, future research on TS-CHIEF\xspace could extend it to multivariate time series and datasets with variable-length time series.
}
\section*{Supplementary material}
To ensure reproducibility, a multi-threaded version of this algorithm implemented in Java and the experimental results have been made available in the github repository \url{https://github.com/dotnet54/TS-CHIEF}.
\section*{Acknowledgements}
This research was supported by the Australian Research Council under grant DE170100037. This material is based upon work supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development (AOARD) under award number FA2386-17-1-4036.
The authors would like to thank Prof.~Eamonn~Keogh and all the people who have contributed to the UCR time series classification archive.
We also would like to acknowledge the use of source code freely available at \href{http://timeseriesclassification.com/}{http://www.timeseriesclassification.com} and thank Prof.~Anthony~Bagnall and other contributors of the project. We also acknowledge the use of source code freely provided by the original author of BOSS algorithm, Dr.~Patrick~Sch{\"{a}}fer. Finally, we acknowledge the use of two Java libraries \citep{osinski2015hppc, friedmangnu}, which was used to optimize the implementation of our source code.
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{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
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Die Mannschafts-Europameisterschaften der Herren und Damen 2017 im Squash ( 2017 European Team Squash Championships) fanden vom 26. bis 29. April 2017 in Helsinki, Finnland, und vom 4. bis 7. April 2016 in Saint Helier auf Jersey statt. Insgesamt traten 34 Mannschaften bei den Herren und 24 Mannschaften bei den Damen an. Bei den Herren handelte es sich um die 45. Auflage der Meisterschaft, bei den Damen um die 40. Austragung. Die in Division 3 eingeteilten Mannschaften spielten ihr Turnier bereits Anfang April in Saint Helier, während die Divisionen 1 und 2 ab Ende April in Helsinki ihre Spiele bestritten.
Modus
Die teilnehmenden Mannschaften spielten gemäß ihrer Platzierung bei der vorangegangenen Europameisterschaft in drei unterschiedlichen Divisionen. In der Division 1 traten bei Herren und Damen jeweils die acht besten Mannschaften an und spielten um den Europameistertitel. Zunächst wurden die Mannschaften auf zwei Gruppen aufgeteilt und trugen ihre Partien im Round-Robin-Modus aus. Die beiden besten Mannschaften zogen ins Halbfinale ein, die übrigen mussten in die Abstiegsrelegation. In der zweitklassigen Division 2 traten bei den Herren insgesamt zwölf Mannschaften in vier Gruppen an. Die Gruppenersten und -zweiten trafen in einer K.-o.-Runde aufeinander und ermittelten die zwei Aufsteiger in Division 1. Die beiden schwächsten Mannschaften der Division 1 stiegen im Gegenzug ab, bei den Damen galt der Auf- und Abstiegsmodus äquivalent. Die Division 2 der Damen bestans in diesem Jahr aus neun Mannschaften, die ebenfalls zunächst in einer Gruppenphase die Gruppensieger ermittelten. In der Division 3 traten bei den Herren insgesamt 15 Mannschaften in drei Vierergruppen und einer Dreiergruppe an. Die Gruppenersten und -zweiten spielten wiederum in einem K.-o.-System weiter. Bei den Damen, bei denen sieben Mannschaften antraten, wurden in einem Round-Robin-Modus die Platzierungen ermittelt. Bei dem Turnier wurden alle Plätze ausgespielt.
Alle Mannschaften bestanden aus mindestens drei und höchstens sechs Spielern bzw. Spielerinnen, die in der Reihenfolge ihrer Spielstärke gemeldet werden mussten. Pro Begegnung wurden drei Einzelpartien bei den Damen bzw. vier bei den Herren bestritten. Die Spielreihenfolge der einzelnen Partien war unabhängig von der Meldereihenfolge der Spielerinnen bzw. Spieler.
Herren
Division 1
Gruppenphase
Gruppe A
Gruppe B
Halbfinale, Finale
Die Begegnung zwischen Deutschland und Schottland im Spiel um Platz drei endete aufgrund des besseren Punktverhältnisses (133:127) zugunsten Deutschlands.
Relegation
Die Resultate der Begegnungen zwischen den Dritt- und Viertplatzierten derselben Gruppe wurden in der Relegation übernommen.
Division 2
Gruppenphase
Gruppe A
Gruppe B
Gruppe C
Gruppe D
Finalrunde
Plätze 5 bis 8
Relegation
Division 3
Gruppenphase
Gruppe A
Gruppe B
Gruppe C
Gruppe D
Finalrunde
Viertelfinale, Halbfinale, Finale
Plätze 5 bis 8
Die Begegnung zwischen Estland und Malta in der ersten Runde endete aufgrund des besseren Punktverhältnisses (119:103) zugunsten von Estland.
Trostrunde
Plätze 9 bis 14
Die Begegnung zwischen der Isle of Man und Guernsey in der zweiten Runde endete aufgrund des besseren Punktverhältnisses (159:158) zugunsten der Isle of Man.
Spiel um Platz 13
Damen
Division 1
Gruppenphase
Gruppe A
Gruppe B
Halbfinale, Finale
Relegation
Die Resultate der Begegnungen zwischen den Dritt- und Viertplatzierten derselben Gruppe wurden in der Relegation übernommen.
Division 2
Gruppenphase
Gruppe A
Gruppe B
Finalrunde
Halbfinale, Finale
Spiel um Platz 5
Plätze 7 bis 9
Das Resultat der Begegnung zwischen dem Viert- und Fünftplatzierten der Gruppe A wurde übernommen.
Division 3
Abschlussplatzierungen
Herren
Damen
Weblinks
Ergebnisse der Divisionen 1 und 2
Ergebnisse der Division 3
2017
Squashturnier 2017
Squashturnier in Helsinki
Sportveranstaltung in Saint Helier
Squashturnier in Jersey
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| 3,522
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Gabriel Adolphe Magnien, né le à Chalon-sur-Saône et mort le à Plottes, est un homme politique français, député de Saône-et-Loire.
Biographie
Avocat, puis avoué à Autun, il est maire de la ville de 1876 à 1879 et conseiller général à partir de 1878. Il est député de Saône-et-Loire de 1885 à 1898, siégeant à la gauche radicale. Il s'occupe d'organisation judiciaire, et préside la commission spéciale sur la loi de réorganisation du Conseil d'État. Sénateur de 1898 à 1914, il siège à la Gauche démocratique, et s'investit dans la commission des pétitions, qu'il préside à partir de 1900.
Il est membre des loges maçonniques et de la Grande Loge de France dont il est le grand-maître de 1895 à 1898.
Notes et références
Annexes
Articles connexes
Grande Loge de France
Liste des députés de Saône-et-Loire
Liste des sénateurs de Saône-et-Loire
Canton d'Autun
Liste des maires d'Autun
Sources
Liens externes
.
Naissance en janvier 1836
Naissance à Chalon-sur-Saône
Décès en septembre 1914
Décès en Saône-et-Loire
Député de Saône-et-Loire (Troisième République)
Député de la quatrième législature de la Troisième République
Député de la cinquième législature de la Troisième République
Député de la sixième législature de la Troisième République
Sénateur de Saône-et-Loire
Maire de Saône-et-Loire
Conseiller général de Saône-et-Loire
Décès à 78 ans
Dirigeant de la Grande Loge de France
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
}
| 9,127
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Matt Dunford (born 4 March 1968) is an Australian former professional rugby league footballer who played in the 1990s. Dunford played for Manly-Warringah in the NSWRL, and the ARL and London Broncos in the Super League.
Playing career
Dunford made his first grade debut for Manly-Warringah in round 1 1990 against Balmain at Leichhardt Oval. In the same year, Dunford played in Manly's minor semi-final loss against the Brisbane Broncos.
In 1991, Dunford played 21 games for Manly including both of their finals matches which ended in defeat. Dunford subsequently played for Manly in their 1994 finals campaign where they were once again defeated by Brisbane.
In the 1995 ARL season, Dunford played 9 games for Manly as the club won the minor premiership losing only twice in the process but did not feature in their finals campaign or grand final loss to Canterbury. In the 1996 ARL season, Dunford only featured in 2 games for Manly as they won the minor premiership for a second consecutive year.
In 1997, Dunford signed for English side the London Broncos and played two seasons with them before retiring.
References
1968 births
Place of birth missing (living people)
Living people
London Broncos players
Manly Warringah Sea Eagles players
Rugby league hookers
Rugby league locks
Rugby league second-rows
|
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"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
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\section{Introduction}
\label{Sec:intro}
The discoveries of light mesons and detailed studies of their decays have played crucial roles in the development of our understanding of elementary particle physics. In the case of weak interactions, important insights were gained from kaon and pion decays, such as the observation of CP violation and the validation of V-A structure of the theory. In addition, the discovery of strangeness inspired the SU(3) flavor symmetry, which, in turn, gave the birth to the quark model picture of the underlying structure of observed particles. To date, about seven decades since the discovery of the first light mesons (the pion and kaon), studies of light meson decays continue to provide opportunities for a variety of physics at low energy scales, including precision tests of effective field theories, investigations of the quark structure of the light mesons, tests of the fundamental symmetries, and searches for new particles.
The \mbox{BESIII} experiment~\cite{Ablikim:2009aa} collected the world's largest samples of $1.3\times 10^9$ $J/\psi$ events~\cite{Ablikim:2016fal} and $4.5\times 10^8$ $\psi(3686)$ events~\cite{Ablikim:2017wyh} produced directly from $e^+e$ annihilation in 2009 and 2012.
Due to the high production rates of light mesons in the charmonium decays, these data, in combination with the excellent performance of the detector, offer unprecedented opportunities to explore the light meson decays. Moreover, the \mbox{BESIII} data sample of $e^+e^-$ annihilation events at energies between 2.0 and 3.08 GeV with an integrated luminosity of $~650$ pb$^{-1}$ allows for explorations of properties of the light vector mesons, in particular the vector strangeonium states.
\section{Precision tests of QCD at low energies }
At high energies, QCD serves as a reliable and useful theory, whereas at low energies non–perturbative QCD calculations are usually performed by an effective field theory called Chiral Perturbation Theory (ChPT). High quality and precise measurements of low-energy hadronic
processes are necessary in order to verify the systematic ChPT expansion.
Thus, studies of light meson decays are important guides to our understanding of how QCD works in the non-perturbative regime.
\subsection{Light quark mass ratios in $\eta/\eta^\prime\rightarrow 3\pi$ decays}
The decay of the $\eta$ meson into 3$\pi$ violates isospin symmetry, which is related to the difference of light-quark
masses, $m_u \neq m_d$. Therefore the decay of $\eta\rightarrow 3\pi$ offers a unique way to determine the quark mass ratio
$Q^2\equiv (m_s^2-{\hat m}^2)/(m_d^2-m_u^2)$ (where ${\hat m} = \frac{1}{2}(m_d + m_u)$ ). Extensive theoretical studies have been performed within the framework of combined ChPT and dispersion theory~\cite{Gasser:1984pr,Bijnens:2007pr,Schneider:2010hs,Kampf:2011wr,Guo:2015zqa, Colangelo:2018jxw}.
In addition to the recent results from the WASA-at-COSY~\cite{Adlarson:2014aks} and KLOE-2~\cite{Anastasi:2016cdz} experiments, \mbox{BESIII} reported a Dalitz plot analysis of $\eta\rightarrow 3\pi$ decays~\cite{Ablikim:2015cmz}. The measured matrix elements are in agreement with the most precise KLOE-2 determination and theoretical predictions.
Taking experimental results as input,
two dedicated analyses presented the results, $Q= 22.0 \pm 0.7$~\cite{Colangelo:2016jmc} and $Q = 21.6 \pm 1.1$~\cite{Guo:2016wsi} , respectively. In the near future, the study of
$\eta \rightarrow \pi^{+}\pi^{-}\pi^0$ and $\eta\rightarrow\pi^0\pi^0\pi^0$ decays at \mbox{BESIII} will provide an independent check of these results by directly fitting to differing theoretical models.
Historically, the $\eta^\prime\rightarrow \pi^+\pi^-\pi^0$ decay was considered to proceed via $\pi^0-\eta$ mixing~\cite{Gross:1979ur}, which offered the possibility of comparable strength $u$-$d$ quark mass difference
from the branching fraction ratio of $r={{{\cal B}}(\eta^\prime\rightarrow\pi\pi\pi)}/{\mathcal{B}(\eta^\prime\rightarrow\pi\pi\eta)}$.
However, it was argued subsequently that the decay amplitudes are strongly
affected by the intermediate resonances~\cite{Borasoy:2006uv}, e.g., the $P$-wave contribution from $\eta^\prime\rightarrow\rho\pi$, and, thus, $u-d$ quark mass difference could not be extracted in such a simple way.
In addition to the first observation of $\eta^\prime\rightarrow\rho^{\pm}\pi^{\mp}$ (Fig.~\ref{m3pidalitz}) by \mbox{BESIII}~\cite{Ablikim:2016frj},
the resonant $\pi$-$\pi$
$S$-wave, interpreted as the broad $f_0(500)$, is also expected to play an essential role in $\eta^\prime\to\pi^+\pi^-\pi^0$ decays.
The contribution of $f_0(500)$ provides a
reasonable explanation for the negative slope parameter of the
Dalitz plot of $\eta^\prime\rightarrow\pi^0\pio\pi^0$~\cite{Ablikim:2015cmz}.
Due to limited statistics, it has been impossible to differentiate
between $S$ and $D$ waves; larger event samples are crucial
for carrying out amplitude analyses of these processes.
Several theory groups have expressed interest to describe the decay using a
dispersive approach. These improved theoretical studies along with more precise experimental measurements of $\eta/\eta^\prime\rightarrow 3\pi$ decays from a variety of experiments are expected to improve the accuracy of the quark mass ratio.
\begin{figure}[hbtp]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=9.cm,height=9.cm]{nsr-1.eps}
\caption{Dalitz plot of $M^2(\pi^+\pi^0)$ versus $M^2(\pi^-\pi^0)$ for the
$\eta^\prime\rightarrow\pi^+\pi^-\pi^0$ decay, where the two clear clusters correspond to the $\eta^\prime\to\rho^\mp\pi^\pm$ decay ~\cite{Ablikim:2016frj}.
}
\label{m3pidalitz}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Cusp effect in $\eta^\prime\rightarrow \pi^0\pi^0\eta$ decays}
In addition to the test of the effective theoretical models, common to all $\eta^\prime\rightarrow \pi\pi\eta$ decays, the neutral decay $\eta^\prime\rightarrow \pi^0\pi^0\eta$
also allows us to examine the cusp effect, $i.e.$, an abrupt change in the $\pi^0\pi^0$ invariant mass distribution as it crosses the 2$m_{\pi^+}$ threshold.
An accurate measurement of the cusp effect may enable a determination of the S-wave pion–pion scattering lengths to high precision.
For $\eta^\prime\rightarrow\pi^+\pi^-\eta$, \mbox{BESIII} results~\cite{Ablikim:2017kp} are not consistent well with theoretical predictions based on the chiral unitary approach~\cite{Borasoy:2005du}. The discrepancies show up as about four standard deviations on some of the parameters that are used to describe the Dalitz plot distribution.
In the case of $\eta^\prime\rightarrow\pi^0\pio\eta$, the results are in general consistent with theoretical
predictions within the uncertainties and the latest results reported by the A2 experiment~\cite{Adlarson:2017wlz}.
Due to the limited statistics, the present results are not precise enough to firmly establish
isospin violation and additional effects, {\it e.g.}, radiative corrections~\cite{Kubis:2009sb} and the $\pi^+/\pi^0$
mass difference should be considered in the future experimental and theoretical studies.
At \mbox{BESIII} search for the cusp in $\eta^\prime\rightarrow\eta\pi^0\pi^0$ performed by inspecting the $\pi^0\pi^0$ mass spectrum
close to $\pi^+\pi^-$ mass threshold~\cite{Ablikim:2017kp}, revealed no statistically significant effect.
From an experimental perspective, the available high-statistics of 10 billion $J/\psi$ events at \mbox{BESIII} is expected to increase the $\eta^\prime$ decay event sample by nearly an order of
magnitude. These additional data coupled with the incorporation of recent dispersive theoretical analyses~\cite{Isken:2017dkw} make an investigation of the cusp effect in this channel very promising.
\subsection{Box anomaly in $\eta/\eta^\prime\rightarrow\gamma\pi^+\pi^-$ decay}
In the Vector Meson Dominance (VMD) model, the main contribution to the decay $\eta^\prime\rightarrow\gamma\pi^+\pi^-$ comes from $\eta^\prime\rightarrow\gamma\rho$.
However, a significant deviation in the dipion distribution between the theory predictions and data is observed, and this may be attributable to the Wess-Zumino-Witten box anomaly~\cite{box-anomaly,box-anomaly2}. The previous measurements~\cite{Althoff:1984jq,Aihara:1986sp,Albrecht:1987ed,Bityukov:1990db,Benayoun:1992ty,Abele:1997yi} give sometimes opposite conclusions on the presence
of the box anomaly term.
Recently, a precision \mbox{BESIII} study of $\eta^\prime\rightarrow\gamma\pi^+\pi^-$ ~\cite{Ablikim:2017fll} found, for the first time, that a fit that only included the components of $\rho$ and $\omega$ and their interference failed to describe the data; a significant additional contribution, either the box anomaly or a $\rho(1450)$ component, is found to be necessary, as indicated in Fig.~\ref{etap-invidata}, to provide a good description of data.
In this case, the influence of the box anomaly phenomenon , $i.e.$, the presence of a well-defined contact term is still awaiting a definite and unambiguous demonstration.
The large and clean $\eta/\eta^\prime$ sample produced in $J/\psi$ decays at \mbox{BESIII} is expected to promote the study of $\eta/\eta^\prime\rightarrow\gamma\pi^+\pi^-$ into an unprecedented precision era. Along with a recently proposed model-independent approach~\cite{Stollenwerk:2011zz},
a combined analysis of $\eta/\eta^\prime\rightarrow\gamma\pi^+\pi^-$ may present a consistent picture for the dynamics of these two decays.
\begin{figure}[hbtp]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=9.cm,height=7.5cm]{nsr-2.eps}
\caption{The results of the model-dependent fits to $M(\pi^+\pi^-)$ with $\rho^0$-$\omega$-box anomaly~\cite{Ablikim:2017fll}.
}
\label{etap-invidata}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\subsection[]{Test of higher-order ChPT with \boldmath $\eta/\eta^\prime\to\gamma\gamma\pi^0$ and $\eta^\prime\to \gamma\gamma\eta$ decays }
The decays $\eta/\eta^\prime\to\gamma\gamma\pi^0$ are of particular interest for tests of ChPT at the two-loop level. Since light vector mesons play a critical role in these models, the dynamical role of the vector mesons has to be systematically included in the context of either the VMD or Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model to reach a deeper understanding of these decays.
The $\eta\to\gamma\gamma\pi^0$ decay has been measured by many experiments~\cite{pdg2000}. Of interest is that the branching fraction of
$\eta\to\gamma\gamma\pi^0$, ${(8.4\pm 2.7\pm 1.4)}\times 10^{-5}$~\cite{DiMicco:2005stk}, as reported by KLOE is approximately a factor of three lower than that from the A2 experiment~\cite{Nefkens:2014zlt}.
Experimentally, both the $\eta^\prime\rightarrow\gamma\gamma\pi^0$~\cite{Ablikim:2016tuo} and $\eta^\prime\rightarrow\gamma\gamma\eta$~\cite{Ablikim:2019wsb} decays were studied at \mbox{BESIII}.
The measured branching fractions are in agreement with a recent theoretical calculation based on the Linear sigma model with VMD couplings~\cite{Escribano:2018cwg}.
It was also found that the di-photon invariant mass dependence of the partial decay widths differs in shape from predictions of the different theoretical models~\cite{Escribano:2018cwg}. Thus a precision measurement of the di-photon mass spectrum would be a more sensitive tool for testing the reliability of theoretical calculations than just measurements of the branching fraction.
In this case, an updated measurement for these double radiative decays using the full $J/\psi$ sample at \mbox{BESIII} will provide an opportunity to have a combined analysis that will distinguish between different theoretical models.
\subsection{Transition form factors of light mesons}
The $\eta/\eta^\prime\to\gamma l^+l^- (l=e,\mu)$ Dalitz decays, where the lepton pair is formed by internal conversion of an intermediate virtual photon and
the decay rates are modified by the electromagnetic structure arising at the vertex of the transition, are of special interest. Deviations of measured quantity from their QED predictions are usually described in terms of a
timelike transition form factor, which, in addition of being an important probe into the meson's structure~\cite{Landsberg:1986fd}, has an important role in the evaluation of the hadronic light-by-light contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment (see a nice review~\cite{Aoyama:2020ynm} for details).
In contrast to SND and WASA experiment's studies of $\eta\to\gamma l^+l^-$ \cite{snd,wasa}, \mbox{BESIII} has a unique advantage in the study of Dalitz decays of both $\eta$ and $\eta^\prime$ due to their high production rate in $J/\psi$ radiative and hadronic decays. \mbox{BESIII} reported the first measurement of the $e^+e^-$ invariant-mass distribution for $\eta^\prime\rightarrow \gamma e^+e^-$~\cite{Ablikim:2015wnx}. It was found that the single-pole parameterization provides a good description of data as illustrated in Fig.~\ref{etap:fit}. The corresponding slope parameter,
$b_{\eta'}=(1.56\pm0.19)$~GeV$^{-2}$, is in agreement with the predictions from different theoretical models~\cite{Bramon:1981sw,Ametller:1983ec,Ametller:1991jv,Hanhart:2013vba} and a 1979 previous measurement of
$\eta'\to \gamma \mu^+\mu^-$~\cite{Dzhelyadin:1979za}.
The decays $\eta/\eta^\prime\rightarrow l^+l^- l^+l^-$ address decays via two off–shell
photons and indicate whether double vector meson dominance is realized in
nature. To date, only the decay $\eta\rightarrow e^+e^- e^+e^-$ was observed at KLOE~\cite{KLOE2:2011aa}.
The corresponding form factor has neither been
measured in the timelike nor the spacelike region.
In accordance with the theoretical investigation in Ref.\cite{Petri:2010ea} predicted decay rates of $\eta^\prime\rightarrow e^+e^-e^+e^-$ of the order of $10^{-4}$, hundred of events are expected to be
observed at \mbox{BESIII} and significant progress could be made to test the latest theoretical prediction of $2.1\times 10^{-6}$ \cite{Escribano:2015vjz} based on a data-driven approach.
In addition, using the data sample collected at a center-of-mass energy of 3.773 GeV by the \mbox{BESIII} experiment, studies~\cite{Czerwinski:2012ry} show that the measurements of the spacelike transition form factors in the decay
$e^+e^-\rightarrow e^+e^- \pi^0(\eta,\eta^\prime)$ via $\gamma\gamma$ interactions in the range of the transfer momentum $Q^2$ within $[0.3, 10]$ GeV/c$^2$ are feasible. It is worth mentioning that more data
samples at 3.773 GeV and higher are planned for the \mbox{BESIII}. They will be useful for the spacelike transition form factor measurements that are complementary to the data
from other experiments and uniquely cover the $Q^2$ range that is relevant to the hadronic
light-by-light correction for the evaluation of the muon anomaly moment.
\begin{figure}[hbtp]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=9.cm,height=7cm]{nsr-3.eps}
\caption{ Fit to the single pole form factor $|F(q^2)|^2$ , where $q^2$ is the square of the $e^+e^-$ invariant mass~\cite{Ablikim:2015wnx}. }
\label{etap:fit}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Cross channel effect in $\omega\rightarrow \pi^+\pi^-\pi^0$ decays}
The decay $\omega\to \pi^+\pi^-\pi^0$ is usually employed to investigate the $\omega$ decay mechanism by comparing a high–statistics Dalitz plot density distribution with theoretical predictions.
In the dispersive theoretical framework~\cite{Niecknig:2012sj,Danilkin:2014cra}, the Dalitz plot distribution and integrated decay width are sensitive to the so-called crossed-channel effect~\cite{Danilkin:2014cra}. However, prior to \mbox{BESIII},
no experimental $\omega\rightarrow \pi^+\pi^-\pi^0$ data of sufficient precision were available to compare with the predictions.
Due to the high production rate of $\omega$ in $J/\psi$ hadronic decays,
\mbox{BESIII} was able to perform a precision Dalitz plot analysis with a sample of $2.6\times 10^5$ $\omega \rightarrow \pi^{+}\pi^{-}\pi^{0}$ events~\cite{Ablikim:2018yen}, which is about six times larger
than the samples in the previous work~\cite{Adlarson:2016wkw} by WASA-at-COSY.
It was found that the Dalitz plot distribution of data significantly differs from the pure $P$-wave phase space, and additional contributions from resonances and/or final-state interactions (FSI), are necessary.
However, with the present statistics, the experimental results are consistent with the theoretical predictions without the need for incorporating crossed-channel effects, which may indicate that the crossed-channel effect contributions are overestimated in the dispersive calculations.
Thus, the investigation on this decay dynamics with higher precision by analyzing the full $J/\psi$ data sample is needed to clarify this issue.
\section{Quark structure of light scalar mesons}
The nature of the light scalar mesons $f_0(500)$, $K^*_0(800)$, $a_0(980)$ and $f_0(980)$ has been a controversial issue for several decades.
Taking into account the observations in heavy meson decays, the existence of these scalar mesons is no controversial, though $K^*_0(800)$ is still qualified as "needs confirmation" in the PDG listings~\cite{pdg2000}. However, the properties of these scalar mesons cannot be understood as simple $q\bar{q}$ mesons, and non-$q\bar{q}$ interpretations of the light scalar nonet are supported by a variety of theoretical approaches~\cite{Chen:2007xr,RuizdeElvira:2010cs,Hooft:2008we,Parganlija:2010fz}.
Compared to scattering experiments, $J/\psi$ decays provide a clean laboratory to explore these scalar states. At BESII, a series of amplitude analyses were performed to study the
scalar mesons decays into pseudoscalar meson pairs $\pi\pi$, $K\bar{K}$ and $\pi K$ in $J/\psi$ decays~\cite{Ablikim:2004qna,besf0,beskappa} that established the existence of the $f_0(500)$ and $K^*(800)$.
At \mbox{BESIII}, the $a_{0}(980)$-$f_{0}(980)$ mixing effect, an essential approach for probing their nature, was observed for the first time in studies of $J/\psi\to\phi\eta\pi^0$ and $\chi_{c1}\to\pi^0\pi^+\pi^-$ decays
~\cite{Ablikim:2018pik}. The anomalous shape of $a_0(980)$ and the very narrow $f_0(980)$ peak produced by the mixing effect was clearly seen in the $\eta \pi^0$ and $\pi^+\pi^-$ mass spectra.
The significance of the mixing effect was then investigated as a function of the two coupling constants, $g_{a_{0}K^{+}K^{-}}$ and $g_{f_{0}K^{+}K^{-}}$, and compared with
different models for the mesons' substructure, as shown in Fig. ~\ref{signif}. The results
favor the tetraquark model, although other possibilities still can not be completely ruled out.
\begin{figure}[htbp]
\centering
\vskip -0.2cm
\includegraphics[width=12.0cm,height=8.0cm,angle=0]{nsr-4.eps}
\vskip -0.1cm
\hskip 0.0cm
\caption{The statistical significance of the signal scanned in the two-dimensional space of $g_{a_{0}K^{+}K^{-}}$ and $g_{f_{0}K^{+}K^{-}}$~\cite{Ablikim:2018pik}, where
the markers indicate predictions from various illustrative theoretical models. The regions with
higher statistical significance indicate larger probability for the
emergence of the two coupling constants. }
\label{signif}
\end{figure}
In addition to their production via charmonium decays, other processes can also be used to explore the properties of scalar mesons at \mbox{BESIII}, including light meson and charm meson decays. Examples are the prominent $f_0(500)$ contribution in $\eta^\prime \rightarrow 3\pi$ decays~\cite{Ablikim:2016frj}, and the evident effects of $a_{0}(980)$-$f_{0}(980)$ mixing
in an amplitude analysis of $D_s^+\to \pi^+ \pi^0\eta$~\cite{Ablikim:2019pit}. Scalar mesons copiously produced in these decays
are further evidences that the \mbox{BESIII} experiment is a unique facility for understanding the controversial nature of these particles.
\section{Precision tests of fundamental symmetries}
The $\eta$ and $\eta^\prime$ mesons are eigenstates of $P$, $C$ and $CP$ whose strong and electromagnetic decays are either anomalous or forbidden to lowest order by $P$, $C$, $CP$ and angular momentum conservation. Therefore, their decays provide a unique laboratory for testing the fundamental symmetries in flavor-conserving processes, which was extensively reviewed in Ref.\cite{Gan:2020aco}.
A straightforward way to test these symmetries is to search for $P$- and $CP$-violating
$\eta/\eta^\prime$ decays into two pions. In the SM, the branching fractions for these modes are very tiny~\cite{Jarlskog:2002zz}, but they may be enhanced by $CP$ violation in the extended Higgs sector of the electroweak theory~\cite{Jarlskog:1995gz}.
The high production rate for $\eta^\prime$ mesons in $J/\psi$ decays enabled \mbox{BESIII} to report the best experimental limit to date, $4.5 \times 10^{-4}$ , for $\mathcal{B}(\eta^\prime\rightarrow\pi^0\pi^0)$~\cite{Ablikim:2011vg} at the 90\% confidence level.
More recently, \mbox{BESIII} made a search for the rare decay of
$\eta^\prime\rightarrow 4\pi^0$ and reported the branching upper limit, ${\cal{B}}(\eta^\prime\to 4\pi^0)<3.8 \times 10^{-5}$ at the 90\% confidence level, for the first time~\cite{Ablikim:2019msz}.
Another interesting signal for possible CP violating mechanisms would be an asymmetry in the angle between the $\pi^+\pi^-$ and
$e^+e^-$ planes in the $\eta/\eta^\prime$ rest frame, where the asymmetry would be caused by the interference between the usual $CP$ allowed magnetic transition (driven by the chiral anomaly) and a $CP$ violating flavor-conserving electric dipole operator~\cite{Geng:2002ua}. The experimental bound on this asymmetry for $\eta\rightarrow \pi^+\pi^- e^+e^-$, $A_\phi = (-0.6\pm 3.1)\times 10^{-2}$~\cite{Ambrosino:2008cp}, from the KLOE experiment is compatible with zero. At \mbox{BESIII}, taking into account the measured branching fraction for $\eta^\prime\rightarrow \pi^+\pi^- e^+e^-$, $(2.11\pm0.12\pm
0.15)\times10^{-3}$~\cite{Ablikim:2013wfg}, about $2\times 10^4$ events could be used to explore the CP violation using the full data sample of 10 billion $J/\psi$ events.
Most recently, the $\eta^\prime\rightarrow\pi^+\pi^-\mu^+\mu^-$ decay is observed for the first time by the BESIII experiment~\cite{Ablikim:2020svz}.
Experimentally, $\eta/\eta^\prime\rightarrow l^+l^- \pi^0$ decays could be used to test charge-conjugation invariance. In the SM, this process can proceed via a two-virtual-photon exchange whereas one-photon-exchange violates C-parity. Within the framework of the VMD model, the most recent predictions~\cite{Escribano:2020rfs} for the branching fraction
are on the order of $10^{-9}$ for $\eta\rightarrow l^+l^- \pi^0$ and $10^{-10}$ for $\eta^\prime\rightarrow l^+l^- \pi^0 (\eta)$. Thus,
a significant enhancement of the branching fractions exceeding the two-photon model may be indicative of C violation.
With the available 10 billion $J/\psi$ events, further improvement for these rare decays will be achieved.
\section{Light quark vector mesons in $e^+e^-$ annihilation}
Information on light vector meson decays has been obtained from $e^+e^-$ annihilations by, $e.g.$, the KLOE, SND, CMD-2, Babar and Belle experiments (see Ref.~\cite{scattering} for a review), where the vector mesons are observed as the peaks in the total cross section for the specific final states when the $e^+e^-$ center of mass energy is varied by tuning the beam energy or by the initial state radiation (ISR) process. With energy scan data in the $2.0-3.08$ GeV, \mbox{BESIII} can perform direct searches for light vector mesons, especially the poorly studied vector strangeonium states.
The $\phi(2170)$, previously referred to as the Y(2175),
has been established by the BaBar~\cite{babar} and BES~\cite{bes} experiments, but its measured mass and width remain controversial.
There have been a number of different interpretations for $\phi(2170)$, such as
a conventional $s\bar{s}$ state, a QCD hybrid, tetraquark state,
a $\Lambda\bar{\Lambda}$ bound state,
or $\phi K\bar{K}$ resonance state.
The situation will not be clarified without further experimental data.
At \mbox{BESIII}, the line shapes of the cross sections for a number of measured channels, including $e^+e^-\to K^+K^-$~\cite{besKK}, $e^+e^- \to K^+K^-\pi^0\pi^0$~\cite{KKpi0pi0}, and $e^+ e^- \to \phi\eta^\prime$~\cite{Ablikim:2020coo}, were measured and a clear structure around 2.2 GeV was evident in each of them. The measured widths and masses are consistent with
those from $J/\psi\to\phi\pi^+\pi^-\eta$~\cite{Ablikim:2014pfc}, as summarized in Table.~\ref{phi2170}. Of interest is the process of $e^+e^-\to K^+K^-K^+K^-$~\cite{KKKK} , and its dominant
submode $e^+e^-\to \phi K^+K^-$. The line shape for the latter is shown in Fig.~\ref{lineshape4K}.
In both cases, a very narrow enhancement at $\sqrt{s}= 2.232$~GeV is observed,
which is very close to the $e^{+}e^{-} \to \Lambda \overline{\Lambda}$
production threshold.
Another interesting possible strangeonium candidate is the $X(1750)$ observed in the photoproduction process~\cite{focus}, which was originally interpreted as the photoproduction mode of the $\phi(1680)$. However, the recent simultaneous observation of the $\phi(1680)$ and $X(1750)$
in $\psi(2S)\to K^+K^-\eta$ decays~\cite{Ablikim:2019xhx} indicates that the $X(1750)$ is distinct from the $\phi(1680)$ and possibly a strangeonium state.
The above examples demonstrate that \mbox{BESIII} is a powerful instrument for investigating the light vector mesons. At present, more studies, such as $e^+ e^- \to \phi\pi^+\pi^-$, $e^+ e^- \to \phi\eta$ and $J/\psi\to K^+K^-\eta $ are ongoing with
the aims of a deeper understanding of the nature of the $\phi(2170)$ and $X(1750)$, and searching for new strangeonium states.
\begin{table}[htpb]
\caption{\label{phi2170} Summary of mass and width of $\phi(2170)$ obtained from \mbox{BESIII}. }
\begin{tabular} {l |c|c}
\hline
Process & Mass (MeV/c$^2$) & Width (MeV) \\
\hline
$e^+e^-\to K^+K^-$~\cite{besKK} & $2239.2\pm7.1\pm11.3$ & $139.8\pm12.3\pm20.6$ \\
\hline
$e^+e^- \to K^+K^-\pi^0\pi^0$~\cite{KKpi0pi0} & $2126.5\pm16.8\pm12.4$ &$106.9\pm32.1\pm28.1$\\
\hline
$e^+e^-\to \phi \eta^\prime$~\cite{Ablikim:2020coo} & $2177.5\pm 4.8\pm 19.5$& $149.0\pm15.6\pm8.9$\\
\hline
$J/\psi\to \phi \pi^+\pi^-\eta$~\cite{Ablikim:2014pfc} & $2200\pm 6\pm 5$& $104\pm15\pm15$\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\begin{figure*}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=8.6cm,height=5.8cm]{nsr-5.eps}
\end{center}
\caption{The measured Born cross section of $e^+e^-\to \phi K^+K^-$~\cite{KKKK}. }
\label{lineshape4K}
\end{figure*}
\section{Summary and prospects}
\label{Sec:Summary}
The light meson decays, as described above, provide a unique opportunity to investigate many aspects of particle physics at low energy, with the advantages of high production rates and the excellent performance of the detector.
In addition to improved accuracy on many of the measured properties of well known light meson decays, a series of first observations, such as new decay modes of $\eta^\prime$, $a_0(980)-f_0(980)$ mixing as well as possibly new strangeonium states, were reported. These
significant advances demonstrate that \mbox{BESIII} is playing a leading role in
the study of light meson decays.
Despite this impressive progress, many light meson decays are still unobserved and need to be explored. At \mbox{BESIII}, $10^{10}$ $J/\psi$ events data are now available. This is eight times larger than the subdata sample used in the present publications and offers great additional opportunities for research in light meson decays, especially for pseudoscalar and vector mesons, with unprecedented precision. Moreover,
\mbox{BESIII} expects to take an additional 20 fb$^{-1}$ of data at 3.773 GeV, which will support investigations of the light meson physics with different ISR and two-photon production techniques, such as the production of new vector mesons and measurements of the two photon width of the light scalar mesons.
In addition, different experimental techniques will give access to previously unexplored regions of the electromagnetic transition form factors, allowing a quantitative connection between the timelike and the spacelike regions.
In general, together with the other high precision experiments, such as KLOE-2, A2, GlueX and BelleII, these very abundant and clean event samples that are accumulated at \mbox{BESIII} will bring the study of light meson decays into a precision era, and will definitely play an important role in the developments of chiral effective field theory and Lattice QCD, and make significant contributions to understanding of hadron physics in the non–perturbative regime.
\section*{Acknowledgments}
The author appreciate Prof. S. L. Olsen for useful comments and suggestion,
This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Contracts Nos. 11675184 and 11735014.
The author declares that we do not have any commercial or associative interest that represents a conflict of interest in connection with the work submitted.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
}
| 9,142
|
Andile Khumalo Talks Lessons Learned
As POWER 987 turns five this year, POWER Head of Digital Verashni Pillay sat down to chat to one of its co-founders, Andile Khumalo. Read the interview below.
Verashni Pillay: How did POWER come to be?
Andile Khumalo: Radio was always our plan. The strategy of MSG Afrika at the time was to be a big player in the media industry, but what you do is, you start with all the 'barrier to entry' media services. And the most sophisticated and most high margin services in those in was advertising. So that's how we ended up owning the Jupiters of the world [Jupiter Drawing Room] and Metropolitan Republic. But the plan was always to own the platforms. And radio was the play. Radio was definitely the play.
Verashni Pillay: It was always the long-term goal?
Andile Khumalo: Yeah. And Capricorn FM blew the lights out. It absolutely changed the game for us in a secondary market, and now we had an opportunity to play in the most lucrative primary market of Gauteng.
Verashni Pillay: So the idea of POWER wasn't crazy?
Andile Khumalo: The amazing thing was that we could finally play with the big boys because now it's a Gauteng station, you know, it's not a little station in a rural province.
Verashni Pillay: And, crucially, taking on the big players?
Andile Khumalo: Yes. And you always felt that something was kind of missing… Because I would listen to 702, as I needed to know my news before I started my day, and it would sometimes be something that John Robbie just wouldn't quite get the way I did, or would express it in a way I wouldn't. But that's all there was to listen to. And I would listen to the conversation – the station is clearly professionally run, sounds really good – but the perspective, the point of departure, was not a black one. I use John because I listened to him more than perhaps any other presenter on the station.
Verashni Pillay: And he was brilliant.
Andile Khumalo: Very good broadcaster, but the station missed it. It became more obvious to me because I knew what we were working on, and for the first time, thanks to Given's insights I had something to compare it to.
Verashni Pillay: I want to take you back to the early days. Tell me some anecdotes that you recall that stand out in your mind.
Andile Khumalo: First of all, it was having to fly the plane while we were building it. We had no offices, and had to camp out at our advertising agency, The Jupiter Drawing Room, as the builders were busy here at POWER House getting it ready for us. We had to start hiring people and building systems while getting ready to launch the station.
Verashni Pillay: What was your role?
Andile Khumalo: My job was to raise the capital for POWER. That was hard. I remember a senior executive at one of our funders said: "We're going to do this, but I think it's the biggest waste of money".
Verashni Pillay: Really?
Andile Khumalo: Yeah, he was man enough a few years later to come back and say: "You absolutely proved me wrong".
Verashni Pillay: And you guys are doing it because of the passion. I mean it was really driven by passion.
Andile Khumalo: And you know what? I don't think we'd be here if it was anything else. Because I'm pretty sure with the God-given talents we've been given, we could do so much else, but this is institution stuff. This is legacy stuff. This is stuff that gets you to be interviewed by Verashni, talking about the early days, because you were there, you helped bring it to life. Wherever it ends up now is great, as long as it's alive and still doing what it's doing. But, man those days were tough.
Verashni Pillay: You became the Managing Director of POWER in addition to your other roles at group level. And then on top of all of that you started hosting POWER Business? How did that happen?
Andile Khumalo: So one day the POWER Business presenter calls at around 3pm and says he isn't feeling well and won't be able to come in. Given and I had very clear roles in the business, and he was the one responsible for programming. So I shouted over to Given, who sits next door to me, that he didn't have a presenter that day. What would normally follow is a call to the programmes manager who would then frantically search for stand-in for the day. But not on this day. Given replies by saying: "Let's go for a smoke" — which is his code for: "Let's talk about something I've been trying to figure out how to tell you". He says: "Man, I think you should do this. You've got the content, you're full of shit, you're going to be an equal to these CEOs, you've got personality, you know this shit". I'm like: "Given, no. How the hell am I going do that on top of all of this?
Verashni Pillay: When was this conversation?
Andile Khumalo: I think I might still have my first runner. I'm not joking. I've been doing it for three years. I stopped now in 2018. So yeah, 2015.
Verashni Pillay: And you had no radio experience?
Andile Khumalo: Zero. Nothing. None whatsoever. I had a lot of opinions, which is lovely. It's like being a football coach on my couch. But needless to say I couldn't say no and I did the first show and the second show and the third show …
Verashni Pillay: And you fell in love with it?
Andile Khumalo: I think that there are a few things in my life that I cannot anticipate. This is the one thing in my life that I could never have thought I would enjoy as much as I did.
Verashni Pillay: You had a very clear idea of where you were going in life…
Andile Khumalo: I generally do, you know, like, my life is not an accident.
Andile Khumalo speaking at the OR Tambo Dialogue at POWER House in 2017.
Verashni Pillay: I know that you're a planner.
Andile Khumalo: I'm a planner. And I don't like people who mess with my plans. I'm very deliberate. This was a surprise. The other problem, of course, about myself which I know very well is that I can't do half measures. If I commit to something I want to serve it, I want to be there. I want to honour it. And if I realise that, for whatever reason, I can no longer honour it, I leave. I don't try to make it work, because that's just not the life I want for myself.
Verashni Pillay: Because that leads to mediocrity?
Andile Khumalo: Yeah. So when I got on air, I then had to create room in my life, cos I'm going to do this well. I'm not going to just do it. So I dedicated a lot of time and energy. I listened to every podcast of every interview I did in the first six months of my show. Every day. Before I slept, I'd listen to my whole show all over again.
Verashni Pillay: But who does that? Most people go crazy hearing themselves talk.
Andile Khumalo: It drove me crazy too. I was like: I speak like that?! I didn't know I speak like that. My voice sounds funny.
Verashni Pillay: It's horrible.
Andile Khumalo: Then I got used to it and I was like, screw it Andile, how else are you going to be better? So I listened to a lot of radio, and I listened to all my podcasts. And I would say: I could have asked that question differently, or I there was too much preamble to that question, and over time I got better at it. In my own style of course.
Verashni Pillay: So you were learning radio on the job?
Andile Khumalo: I was learning on the job. And fighting with my producers!
Verashni Pillay: What's interesting to me is that this business was run on passion and on a lot of gut instinct. And people looking on from the outside started to criticise. What was it like internally? For me who was on the outside at the time, it almost felt like an unprecedented level of criticism.
Andile Khumalo: POWER will always draw more of a response from the market or the public than any other radio station. Because the listeners of POWER – the ordinary South African – sees POWER as their own.
Verashni Pillay: They do. "Emotional shareholders".
Andile Khumalo: They call themselves emotional shareholders, I mean, where else have you ever heard that? Perhaps the closest is a very big political party whose members call themselves a broad church – even there – no one believes they own it!
Verashni Pillay: Who says that, where does that term come from?
Andile Khumalo: They know it's Andile and Given [behind it]. But they don't care. We're just the guys who run it.
But our people have a very high standard of us. When the few of us, those who get those rare opportunities, get to play in the premier league, or be up there with the big boys, we then put very high expectations on them. So the same thing that happens at 702, if it happens at POWER, the first question is: "Ah, look, black people again. They're gonna screw it up again". And that's not because black people hate other black people; it's because of the place we find ourselves in the timeline of our own maturity as a society of South Africans, particularly as black South Africans. And we as the generation that is here need to recognise we are here and instead of fighting that reality we must own it and say: how then do I play my part in dealing with it?
Verashni Pillay: You're being quite benevolent about it, and diplomatic, but it got ugly: the so-called exodus of presenters in the early days, the reports about trouble at the station, the rumours that circulated about you guys?
Andile Khumalo: I'm not benevolent about it. I just get it. Maybe I'm fortunate that I get it. You have an industry that is very limited for talent – proven talent – and there are only a few that you are able to attract to buy into the dream of POWER. But because of where you are in the timeline of our country, you're just waiting for one sign: one thing to show you that this thing is sub-standard. Why? Because white is right. You come from generations and generations of brainwashing to tell you that black is sub-standard and white is the standard. You couldn't wish that away when POWER launched. You can't unlearn it that quickly. It's not easy. So I think because they loved it so much they were just waiting for somebody to prove them wrong. And like most things in life, if you look for the reason, sooner or later you will find it. What does Denzel Washington say ?"If you hang around the barber shop longer enough, you will eventually get your hair cut"?
Verashni Pillay: Yes, you're used to putting on a mask when you go into a white corporate environment.
Andile Khumalo: Yes, because then you learn to deal with it, you are there for the pay check. And actually, it's easier for you to tolerate because their levels of expectation of you are low in any case.
Verashni Pillay: I still think you're benevolent but yes. Okay last question: do you still think POWER is keeping its promise?
Andile Khumalo: I think generally we are. I think we have moments we could do it better. We could be better at serving our people on specific things, and specific items. My own personal view is that POWER needs to be more bold, and start taking a stance on things that affect our people the most, ands tart being an agent for positive change. As we all know, we are not just a radio station. We are much more than that.
Verashni Pillay: Thank you so much AK, thanks for your time.
Andile Khumalo: You're most welcome V.
I really enjoyed this interview, i was there at the beginning of Power and to see it where it is now – it shows that you have to show up and you will get it right … inspiring
What a stunning interview, what a stunning gent.
I remember when I caught on about Power and that they were coming, I listened to broadcast ONE, i listened to the technical gremlins and smiled thinking "what a time to be alive". Radio is one my favourite things in the whole world and to have it for blacks by blacks?! shuuuuuu.
I absolutely adore Andile, uMtungwa. I listened to that show from the very beginning because as he started, a few months later Stevie B (whom I personally think was the greatest Biz presenter) left Kaya. So the next best alternative was Andile, what I never anticipated was that this man would get better literally every single day. No joke. And then he groomed Aya and I was blown away at how a man with zero prior experience could shoot the lights out every single day and then even make sure his succesor would do better than him. That is the black excellence our ancestors dreamt of!
Power to you!
Definitely, building …
http:///andile-khumalo-talks-lessons-learned/
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{
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\section{Introduction}
Molecular clouds are turbulent, with linewidths indicating highly
supersonic motions \citep{1974ARA&A..12..279Z}, and magnetized, with
magnetic energies in or near equipartition with thermal energy
\citep{1999ApJ...520..706C}. They have low ionization fractions
\citep{e79} leading to imperfect coupling of the magnetic field with
the gas. Molecular clouds are the sites of all known star formation,
so characterizing the properties of this non-ideal, magnetized
turbulence appears central to formulating a theory of star formation.
The drift of an ionized, magnetized gas through a neutral gas coupled
to it by ion-neutral collisions is known by astronomers as ambipolar
diffusion (AD) and by plasma physicists as ion-neutral drift. It was
first proposed in an astrophysical context by
\citet{1956MNRAS.116..503M} as a mechanism for removing magnetic flux
and hence magnetic pressure from collapsing protostellar cores in the
then-novel magnetic field of the Galaxy. However, more recently, as
turbulence has regained importance in the theory of star formation, AD
has been invoked as a source of dissipation for magnetic energy in the
turbulent magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) cascade and thus a characteristic
length scale for the star formation process
\citep*[e.g.,][]{2004ApJ...616..283T}.
This is due to its well-known ability to damp certain families of
linear MHD waves
\citep*{1969ApJ...156..445K,1988ApJ...332..984F,1996ApJ...465..775B}.
However, as \citet{1996ApJ...465..775B} pointed out, AD does allow
slow modes to propagate undamped.
A brief calculation suggests that AD should be the most important
dissipation mechanism in molecular clouds. AD can be expressed as an
additional force term in the momentum equation for the ions
\begin{equation} \label{force_in}
F_{in} = \rho_i \rho_n \gamma_{AD} (\mathbf{v_n} - \mathbf{v_i}),
\end{equation}
and an equal and opposite force $F_{ni} = - F_{in}$ in the neutral
momentum equation, where $\rho_i$ and $\rho_n$ are the ion and neutral
densities and $\gamma_{AD} \simeq 9.2 \times 10^{13}\ \mathrm{cm^3\
s^{-1}\ g^{-1}}$ is the collisional coupling constant \citep*{1983ApJ...264..485D,1997A&A...326..801S}.
The effect of ion-neutral drift on the magnetic field can be simply
expressed in the strong coupling approximation
\citep{1983ApJ...273..202S} that neglects the momentum and pressure of
the ion fluid and equates the collisional drag force on the ions
$F_{in}$ with the Lorentz force,
\begin{equation} \label{strong}
-\rho_i \rho_n \gamma_{AD} (\mathbf{v_i} - \mathbf{v_n}) = \frac{\mathbf{(\nabla \times B) \times B}}{4 \pi}.
\end{equation}
\citet{1994ApJ...427L..91B} note that by substituting
equation~(\ref{strong}) into the induction equation for the ions, one
arrives at
\begin{equation} \label{induction}
\partial_t \mathbf{B} = \mathbf{\nabla} \times \left[(\mathbf{v_n \times
B})+ \frac{\mathbf{(\nabla \times B) \cdot B}}{4 \pi \rho_i \rho_n
\gamma_{AD}} \mathbf{B} - (\eta + \eta_{AD}) \mathbf{\nabla \times
B}\right],
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation}
\eta_{AD} = \frac{B^2}{4 \pi \rho_i \rho_n \gamma_{AD}}
\end{equation}
is the ambipolar diffusivity and $\eta$ is the Ohmic diffusivity.
However, dissipation is not the only contribution of AD to the
induction equation. Given that AD tends to force magnetic fields into
force-free states \citep{1995ApJ...446..741B,1997ApJ...478..563Z} with
$\mathbf{(\nabla \times B) \times B} = 0$, it should come as little
surprise that the $\mathbf{(\nabla \times B ) \cdot B}$ term must be
given proper consideration.
We can approximate the scale $\ell_{ds}$ below which dissipation
dominates turbulent structure for a given diffusivity $\eta$ in at
least two ways. The first is commonly used in the turbulence
community. It is to equate the driving timescale
\begin{equation} \label{taudr}
\tau_{dr} = L_{dr} / v_{dr},
\end{equation}
where $L_{dr}$ is the driving wavelength and $v_{dr}$ is the rms
velocity at that wavelength, with the dissipation timescale $\tau_{ds}
= \ell_{ds}^2 / \eta$, and solve for $\ell_{ds}$. The second method
was suggested by \citet{1996ApJ...465..775B} and
\citet{1997ApJ...478..563Z} and advocated by \citet{khm00}. It is to
estimate the length scale at which the Reynolds number associated with
a given dissipation mechanism becomes unity. The Reynolds number for
ion-neutral drift can be defined as
\begin{equation}
R_{AD} = \frac{L V}{\eta_{AD}},
\end{equation}
where $V$ is a characteristic velocity. This method requires setting $R_{AD}$ to one and solving for
$L = \ell_{ds}$ to find
\begin{equation}
\ell_{AD} = \frac{B^2}{4 \pi \rho_i \rho_n \gamma_{AD} V}.
\end{equation}
\citet{khm00} show that by adopting values characteristic of dense
molecular clouds, a magnetic field strength $B= 10 B_{10}\ \mathrm{\mu
G}$, ionization fraction $x = 10^{-6} x_6$, neutral number density
$n_n = 10^3 n_3\ \mathrm{cm^{-3}}$, mean mass per particle $\mu = 2.36
m_H$ where $m_H$ is the hydrogen mass, such that $\rho_n = \mu n_n$,
and the above value for the ion-neutral coupling constant, the length
scale at which AD is important is given by
\begin{equation}
\ell_{AD} = (0.04\ \mathrm{pc}) \frac{B_{10}}{M_A x_6 n_3^{3/2}},
\end{equation}
where $M_A = V/v_A$ is the Alfv\'en\ Mach number. By contrast, Ohmic
dissipation acts only at far smaller scales, $\ell_\eta \sim 10^{-13}\
\mathrm{pc}$ \citep{1997ApJ...478..563Z}.
For our purposes, we use the Reynolds number method and choose $V =
v_{RMS}$, the RMS velocity. Although we use Reynolds numbers, we find
that using the timescale method has no effect on our results.
Previous three-dimensional numerical studies of turbulent ion-neutral
drift have used the strong coupling approximation
\citep*{2000ApJ...540..332P}. This by definition renders simulations
unable to reach below $R_{AD} \sim 1$, and thus into the dissipation
region.
In this paper, we present runs in which we vary the ambipolar
diffusion coupling constant, and thus $\ell_{AD}$. We find a
surprising lack of dependence of the spectral properties on the
strength of the ambipolar diffusivity. In particular, no new
dissipation range is introduced into the density, velocity or magnetic
field spectra by ambipolar diffusion, nor is the clump mass spectrum
materially changed.
\section{Numerical Method}
We solve the two-fluid equations of MHD using the ZEUS-MP code
\citep{2000RMxAC...9...66N} modified to include a semi-implicit
treatment of ion-neutral drift. ZEUS-MP is the domain-decomposed,
parallel version of the well-known shared memory code ZEUS-3D
\citep{cn94}. Both codes follow the algorithms of ZEUS-2D
\citep{1992ApJS...80..753S,1992ApJS...80..791S}, including
\citet{1977JCoPh..23..276V} advection, and the constrained transport
method of characteristics
\citep{1988ApJ...332..659E,1995CoPhC..89..127H} for the magnetic
fields. We add an additional neutral fluid and collisional coupling
terms to both momentum equations. Because ion-neutral collisions
constitute a stiff term, we evaluate the momentum equations using the
semi-implicit algorithm of \citet{1997ApJ...491..596M}. We also
include an explicit treatment of Ohmic diffusion by operator splitting
the induction equation \citep*{2000ApJ...530..464F}.
We ignore ionization and recombination, assuming that such processes
take place on timescales much longer than the ones we are concerned
with. This means that ions and neutrals are separately
conserved. Furthermore, we assume that both fluids are isothermal and
at the same temperature, thus sharing a common sound speed $c_s$.
\subsection{Initial Conditions and Parameters}
All of our runs are on three-dimensional Cartesian grids with periodic
boundary conditions in all directions.
The turbulence is driven by the method detailed in
\citet{1999ApJ...524..169M}. Briefly, we generate a top hat function
in Fourier space between $1 < |k| < 2$. The amplitudes and phases of
each mode are chosen at random, and once returned to physical space,
the resulting velocities are normalized to produce the desired RMS
velocity, unity in our case. At each timestep, the same pattern of
velocity perturbations is renormalized to drive the box with a
constant energy input ($\dot{E} = 1.0$ for all simulations) and applied
to the neutral gas.
Our isothermal sound speed is $c_s = 0.1$, corresponding to an initial
RMS Mach number $M = 10$. The initial neutral density $\rho_n$ is
everywhere constant and set to unity. The magnetic field strength is
set by requiring that the initial ratio of gas pressure to magnetic
pressure be everywhere $\beta = 8 \pi c_s^2 \rho / B^2 = 0.1$; its
direction lies along the z-axis.
Although our semi-implicit method means that the timestep is not
restricted by the standard Courant condition for diffusive processes
(that is, $\propto [\Delta x]^2$), the two-fluid model is limited by
the Alfv\'en\ timestep for the ions. This places strong constraints on the
ionization fraction ($x = n_i/n_n$) we can reasonably compute. We
therefore adapt a fixed fraction of $x= 0.1$ for our simulations.
While this fraction is certainly considerably higher than the
$10^{-4}$--$10^{-9}$ typical of molecular clouds, the ionization
fraction only enters the calculation in concert with the collisional
coupling constant $\gamma_{AD}$. Thus, we are able to compensate for
the unrealistically high ionization fraction by adjusting
$\gamma_{AD}$ accordingly.
We present four runs, two with AD, one with Ohmic diffusion, and one
ideal MHD run (see Table~\ref{run_tab}). For the AD runs, we vary the
collisional coupling constant in order to change the diffusivity.
Our results are reported for a resolution of $256^3$ at time $t =
0.125 t_s = 2.5$ where $t_s = 20$ is the sound crossing time for the
box. This exceeds by at least 30\% the turbulent crossing time over
the driving scale $\tau_{dr}$ computed from equation~(\ref{taudr}),
and tabulated in Table~\ref{run_tab}. Our computation of $\tau_{dr}$
is done for $L_{dr} = 1$, the maximum driving wavelength.
\citet*{2003ApJ...590..858V} note that $\tau_{dr}$ is the relevant
timescale for the formation of nonlinear structures. Furthermore, we
find from studies performed at $128^3$ out to $t = 0.3 t_s$ that
$0.125 t_s$ is enough time to reach a steady state in energy.
\section{Results}
Figure \ref{rho_pic} shows cuts of density perpendicular and parallel
to the mean magnetic field. For the ambipolar diffusion runs, we show
the total density $\rho = \rho_i + \rho_n$. The morphology of density
enhancements in the different runs appears similar, giving a
qualitative suggestion of the quantitative results on clump mass
spectra discussed next.
\subsection{Clump mass spectrum}
We wish to understand whether AD determines the smallest scale at
which clumps can form in turbulent molecular clouds. Determining
structure within molecular clouds has proved difficult in both theory
and observation. Molecular line maps (eg, Falgarone et al 1992) show
that for all resolvable scales, the density fields of clouds is made
up of a hierarchy of clumps. Furthermore, the identification of clumps
projected on the sky with physical volumetric objects is questionable
\citep*{2001ApJ...546..980O,2002ApJ...570..734B}.
Nonetheless, density enhancements in a turbulent flow likely provide
the initial conditions for star formation. To clarify the effects of
different turbulent dissipation mechanisms on the clump mass spectrum,
we study our three dimensional simulations of turbulence without
gravity. By using the {\sc clumpfind} algorithm
\citep*{1994ApJ...428..693W} on the density field to identify
contiguous regions of enhanced density, we can construct a clump mass
spectrum (Fig.~\ref{clump_mass}). Although such methods are
parameter-sensitive when attempting to draw comparisons to observed
estimates for the clump-mass spectrum \citep{2002ApJ...570..734B}, we
are only interested in using the mass spectrum as a point of
comparison between runs with different dissipative properties.
For this section, we dimensionalize our density field following
\citet{1999ApJ...524..169M}, with a length scale $L' = 0.5$~pc,
and mean density scale $\rho_0' = 10^4 (2 m_H)
\mbox{ g cm}^{-3}$ in order to present results in physical units
relevant to star formation.
We search for clumps above a density threshold set at $5 \langle \rho
\rangle$ (where in the AD cases $\rho = \rho_i + \rho_n$) and bin the
results by mass to produce a clump-mass
spectrum. Figure~\ref{clump_mass} shows that while Ohmic diffusion has
a dramatic effect on the number of low-mass clumps, AD has nearly
none. Although there are small fluctuations around the hydrodynamic
spectrum, there is no systematic trend with increasing strength of AD.
This result suggests that AD does not control the minimum mass of
clumps formed in turbulent molecular clouds.
\subsection{Magnetic Energy and Density Spectra}
The lack of an effect on the clump mass spectrum can be better
understood by examining the distribution of magnetic field and
density.
AD produces no evident dissipation range in the magnetic energy
spectrum. As seen in Figure~\ref{mag_spec}, for two different values
of ambipolar diffusivity $\eta_{AD}$, the power spectrum of magnetic
field retains the shape of the ideal run. For comparison, we have
also plotted the run with Ohmic diffusion. While the expected
dissipation wavenumbers (determined in both cases by the Reynolds
number method mentioned above) of the $\eta_{AD} = 0.275$ and $\eta =
0.250$ runs are very similar, the effect of Ohmic diffusion is quite
apparent in the declining slope of the magnetic energy spectrum, in
contrast to AD.
The total power does decrease as the ambipolar diffusivity $\eta_{AD}$
increases. Because we drive only the neutrals, this could be
interpreted as magnetic energy being lost during the transfer of
driving energy from the ions to the neutrals via the
coupling. However, we performed a simulation in which both ions and
neutrals were driven with the same driving pattern and found almost no
difference in the power spectra from our standard (neutral driving
only) case.
We instead suspect that the decline in total magnetic energy occurs
because AD does damp some families of MHD waves, notably Alfv\'en\ waves
\citep{1969ApJ...156..445K}, even though it does not introduce a
characteristic damping scale.
In order to demonstrate this, the flow will need to be decomposed into
its constituent MHD wave motions at each point in space. Such a
technique has been used before by \citet{2001ApJ...554.1175M} for
incompressible MHD turbulence and by \citet{2002PhRvL..88x5001C} for
compressible MHD turbulence. The technique used by
\citet{2002PhRvL..88x5001C} decomposes wave motions along a mean field
assumed to be present. However, because the local field is distorted
by the turbulence and thus not necessarily parallel to the mean, a
mean-field decomposition tends to spuriously mix Alfv\'en\ and slow modes
\citep{2001ApJ...554.1175M}. If the local field line distortion is
great enough, the decomposition must be made with respect to the local
field, a much more demanding proceedure. Although wave decomposition
analysis is outside the scope of this paper, it remains a fruitful
avenue for future research.
In order to ensure that the lack of spectral features seen in the
magnetic spectrum (and similarly in the density spectrum) is not an
artifact of the limited inertial range in our simulations, we ran our
$\eta_{AD} = 0.275$ (medium collision strength) case at resolutions of
$64^3, 128^3,$ and $256^3$. Figure~\ref{resolution} demonstrates that
increasing the resolution increases the inertial range, but does not
resolve any noticeable transition to dissipation at the AD length,
suggesting that our results are not sensitive to the resolution.
Figure~\ref{rho_spec} shows the spectrum of the density for all runs.
In the case of the AD runs, we use the sum of the neutral and ion
density.
The density spectrum peaks at small scale in compressible turbulence
\citep{jm05}. Varying the ambipolar diffusivity by a factor of two
makes little systematic difference to the shape of the density
spectrum. It seems clear that although there are only slight
differences in the density spectrum due to varying magnetic
diffusivities, the density spectrum is not a particularly good
indicator of underlying clump masses.
Note that we use for the density spectrum the Fourier transform of the
density field rather than its square, which in the case of the
magnetic field yields the one-point correlation function (or power
spectrum) of the magnetic energy.
\section{Discussion}
Supersonic turbulence performs a dual role in its simultaneous ability
to globally support a molecular cloud against gravity while at the
same time producing smaller density enhancements that can sometimes
gravitationally collapse \citep{khm00}. While our simulations do not
include gravity, it is clear that AD does not set a characteristic
scale to the density field below which MHD turbulence is unable to
further influence structure formation.
One of the main motivations of this study was to verify the claim made
by, for example, \citet{khm00} that AD sets the minimum mass for
clumps in molecular cloud turbulence. However, it appears that AD is
unable to set this scale, because of its selective action on different
MHD waves. We do note that AD can occasionally help form
magnetohydrostatic objects in MHD turbulence, but this is not a
dominant pathway, as shown by \citet{2005ApJ...618..344V}. Although
Ohmic diffusion has little trouble inhibiting low mass clump
formation, it never reaches significant values at the densities where molecular
clumps form.
This opens up other possibilities for the physical mechanisms
determining the smallest scale fluctuations occurring in molecular
clouds. An attractive option is the sonic-scale argument of
\citet*{2003ApJ...585L.131V}, in which the length scale at which turbulent
motions become incompressible, with Mach numbers dropping well below
unity, determines where turbulence ceases to have an effect on the
pre-stellar core distribution, and thus determines the minimum mass scale.
\section{Acknowledgments}
We thank J. Ballesteros-Paredes and K. Walther for collaborating on
early phases of this work, and J. Maron, A. Schekochihin, J. Stone,
and E. Zweibel for productive discussions. We acknowledge support from
NASA grants NAG5-10103 and NAG5-13028. Computations were performed at
the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center, supported by NSF, on an
Ultrasparc III cluster generously donated by Sun Microsystems, and on
the Parallel Computing Facility at the American Museum of Natural
History.
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{"url":"https:\/\/studyrankersonline.com\/7235\/curved-surface-total-surface-cylinder-volume-cylinder-height","text":"# If the ratio of curved surface area and total surface area of a cylinder is 1 : 3, then find the volume of cylinder when the height is 2 cm.\n\n5 views\nIf the ratio of curved surface area and total surface area of a cylinder is 1 : 3, then find the volume of cylinder when the height is 2 cm.\n\nanswered Nov 27, 2017 by (-3,089 points)\n\nLet the radius and height of the cylinder be r and h, respectively .\n\nGiven that, Curved surface area \/ Total surface area = 1\/3\n\n\u21d2 2\u03c0rh \/\u00a02\u03c0r(h + r) =\u00a01\/3\u00a03h = h + r\n\n\u21d2 r = 2h = 4cm\n\n\u2234 volume of cylinder\u00a0\u03c0r2h\n\n=\u00a0\u03c0\u00a0\u00d7\u00a0(4)\u00d7 2 = 32\u03c0 cm\n\n+1 vote","date":"2019-06-19 02:38:30","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": false, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.8876420855522156, \"perplexity\": 558.2137460976313}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2019-26\/segments\/1560627998882.88\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20190619023613-20190619045613-00091.warc.gz\"}"}
| null | null |
Q: Permalink from meta fields for custom post type wordpress I have 5 custom fields in my wordpress instance that are boolean true/false values.
property_type_investment, property_type_office, property_type_rental, property_type_industrial, property_type_land
Is it possible to create a permalink for this custom post type that will check each of those meta value's are true - and if so append a value to the url hyphenated?
example: if property_type_investment, property_type_office, and property_type_land are true. I would like the permalink to be...
/listings/investment-office-land/post-title/
Here is my register post type.
register_post_type( 'properties',
array(
'labels' => array(
'name' => 'Properties',
'singular_name' => 'Property',
'add_new' => 'Add New',
'add_new_item' => 'Add New Property',
'edit' => 'Edit',
'edit_item' => 'Edit Property',
'new_item' => 'New Property',
'view' => 'View',
'view_item' => 'View Property',
'search_items' => 'Search Properties',
'not_found' => 'No Property found',
'not_found_in_trash' => 'No Properties found in Trash',
'parent' => 'Parent Property'
),
'public' => true,
'rewrite' => array('slug'=>'listings'),
'menu_position' => 15,
'supports' => array( 'title', 'editor', 'comments', 'thumbnail', 'custom-fields' ),
'taxonomies' => array( '' ),
'has_archive' => true
)
);
A: you can rewrite the rule.
function prefix_investment_rewrite_rule() {
add_rewrite_rule( 'listings/([^/]+)/investment-office-land', 'index.php?listings=$matches[1]&investment-office-land=yes', 'top' );
}
add_action( 'init', 'prefix_investment_rewrite_rule' );
//You should register the query var
function prefix_register_query_var( $vars ) {
$vars[] = 'investment-office-land';
return $vars;
}
add_filter( 'query_vars', 'prefix_register_query_var' );
// assign a template
function prefix_url_rewrite_templates() {
if ( get_query_var( 'investment-office-land' ) && is_singular( 'listings' ) ) {
add_filter( 'template_include', function() {
return get_template_directory() . '/single-listings-investment-office-land.php';
});
}
}
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'prefix_url_rewrite_templates' );
Don't forget to flush the rewrite rule after register_post_type.
flush_rewrite_rules();
A: You can test using by a simple way using by /%category%/%postname%/ in your admin panel->settings->permalink-> custom structure.
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Arlum en Stöndar (deel van) (Zweeds: Arlum och Stöndar (del av)) is een småort in de gemeente Sollefteå in het landschap Ångermanland en de provincie Västernorrlands län in Zweden. Het småort heeft 56 inwoners (2005) en een oppervlakte van 39 hectare. Eigenlijk bestaat het småort uit twee plaatsen: Arlum en Stöndar. Stöndar hoort echter maar gedeeltelijk bij het småort.
Verkeer en vervoer
Bij de plaats loopt de Länsväg 335.
Plaats in Västernorrlands län
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{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
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layout: post
title: How To Install Node.js with NVM (Node Version Manager)
comments: True
---
Introduction
============
If you already know what Node.js is what it's for and why it's cool, then skip straight to the installation directions. If you want to know a bit more about node and it's ecosystem read on.
For those who haven't heard node.js is, it is the hot new cool kid on the block in web application development. It lets you write web apps that use Javascript on both the server and the client, so you don't need to know multiple programming languages to program your website. It's also really good at handling real-time concurrent web applications, which makes it a great choice for a lot of modern web apps.
The downside though is that all these cool new features are really, really new. As a result, getting up and running with node.js isn't as easy as, say, getting WordPress up and running on your web server.
This is the first in a series of how to install, code in, and use node. Joyent, the team behind node.js, has been improving node.js at a frantic pace, to the point where there are multiple releases of the software every month. For the most part, they've done a pretty good job of keeping things compatible; the things you write for one version of node will work just as well in the next. But nonetheless, sometimes a particular node app will only work with one version of node. And you will need to upgrade or downgrade your node.js install in order to use it.
This used to be a pain, but the node community has come together and created a great solution that lets you easily manage all your node installations and change node versions whenever you feel like it. It's called NVM, or the Node Version Manager.
Installing Node.js
==================
The install process couldn't be easier. Once you're logged into your VPS, run this command:
```
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.26.1/install.sh | bash
```
or Wget:
```
wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.26.1/install.sh | bash
```
You'll see some output fly by, and then nvm will be installed. You will see a line that says:
=> Close and reopen your terminal to start using NVM
It's not actually necessary to log out, we just need to make sure that the changes nvm made to your path are actually reflected, so just do:
```
source ~/.profile
```
Alternatively, run the command suggested in the output of the script. Now type:
```
nvm ls-remote
```
To download, compile, and install the latest v0.10.x release of node, do this:
```
nvm install 0.10
```
And then in any new shell just use the installed version:
```
nvm use 0.10
```
Or you can just run it:
```
nvm run 0.10 --version
```
Or, you can run any arbitrary command in a subshell with the desired version of node:
```
nvm exec 0.10 node --version
```
To set a default version of npm, just run
```
nvm alias default 0.10
```
|
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'use strict';
const DateTimePicker = require('./libs/DateTimePicker.js');
module.exports = DateTimePicker;
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 7,884
|
We are not only drinking wine, you know. We take care of ourselves and eat healthy. At least we try to. Me and my husband are fans of granola. Especially during the week when you don't have a lot of time to prepare breakfast granola, fruit and yogurt are delicious and quick option.
Last week we first time made our own and we loved it.
Below is the recipe we used.
Combine all dry ingredients except cocoa powder and salt. In a small saucepan melt coconut oil over low heat. Add rice malt syrup, vanilla, salt and cocoa powder to the melted coconut oil. Whisk until smooth.
Pour liquid ingredients over dry and fold to coat.
Spread mixture out in an even layer on a baking tray lined with baking paper and press firmly with the back of spatula to ensure the mixture is compact. Bake for approximately 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and flip in large chunks. Return to oven to bake for another 10 minutes stirring every few minutes to avoid overbaking.
If you are not sure if granola is done, try nuts, they take longest to bake and they should have a nice nutty roasted taste.
Once baked you can add raisins, dried cranberries or other similar fruit to your granola.
You can serve it with natural full fat yogurt, your favorite milk (we love almond) and some fresh or frozen red fruits.
For wow looks serve in a nice jar in layers.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
}
| 958
|
package org.nexbook.tags
import org.scalatest.Tag
/**
* Created by milczu on 1/1/16.
*/
object Performance extends Tag("org.nexbook.tags.Performance")
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 6,711
|
Q: Determine if your build is running as a private build As part of my build i store some of the output if a build is successful. But id rather not do this if its a private build. Is there a build parameter than i can check so i can skip this?
A: Got the answer, thanks to :Michael @ jet brains
"take a look at build.is.personal at Predefined Build Parameters"
http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/TCD65/Predefined+Build+Parameters
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
}
| 543
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East 79th (signed as East 79th Street) is a station on the RTA Blue and Green Lines in Cleveland, Ohio. It is located on East 79th Street south of Holton Avenue.
History
The station opened on April 11, 1920 when service commenced on the line west of Shaker Square to East 34th Street and via surface streets to downtown.
The worst accident in the history of the RTA Rapid Transit occurred just east of the station. On July 8, 1977, two cars collided head-on during single track operation. The accident occurred at the bridge over East 92nd Street. Both operators and 60 passengers were injured, and both cars were a total loss.
In 1980 and 1981, the trunk line of the Green and Blue Lines from East 55th Street to Shaker Square was completely renovated with new track, ballast, poles and wiring, and new stations were built along the line. The renovated line opened on October 30, 1981.
Station layout
References
Blue Line (RTA Rapid Transit)
Green Line (RTA Rapid Transit)
Railway stations in the United States opened in 1920
1920 establishments in Ohio
|
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"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
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| 8,518
|
Q: Proof about groups and subgroups Let $G$ be a finite group, $H$ a subgroup of $G$ with index $p$, where $p$ is a prime number. If $K \leq G$, then either $K \leq H$ or $[K: K \cap H]=p$.
I don't get it to show that always one of the statements is true. I think it's a short proof or is it more complicate?
A: I have found this exercise in the textbook I use:
3. Prove that if $H$ is a normal subgroup of $G$ of prime index $p$ then for all $K\leq G$ either (i) $K\leq H$ or (ii) $G=HK$ and $|K:K\cap H|=p$.
Proof. Assume $K\not\leq H$. Since $H\unlhd G$, we have $HK/H\cong K/H\cap K$. Also, we have $H\leq HK\leq G$. Since $|G:H|=p$, we have $HK=H$ or $HK=G$. Suppose $HK=H$. Then $K\leq HK=H$, contradiction. So $HK=G$. Hence $G/H\cong K/H\cap K$. So $|K:H\cap K|=p$.
The exercise is from Dummit and Foote page 101.
In the link, $H=A_{G}$ is a normal subgroup of $S_{G}$, so we can still use the fact.
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
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| 3,540
|
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<persistence version="1.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_1_0.xsd">
<persistence-unit name="Garage_ManagmentPU" transaction-type="RESOURCE_LOCAL">
<provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
<properties>
<property name="hibernate.connection.username" value="root"/>
<property name="hibernate.connection.driver_class" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"/>
<property name="hibernate.connection.password" value="1234"/>
<property name="hibernate.connection.url" value="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/garage?zeroDateTimeBehavior=convertToNull"/>
<property name="hibernate.cache.provider_class" value="org.hibernate.cache.NoCacheProvider"/>
<property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create-drop"/>
</properties>
</persistence-unit>
</persistence>
|
{
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
}
| 6,730
|
{"url":"https:\/\/stacks.math.columbia.edu\/tag\/0CET","text":"# The Stacks Project\n\n## Tag 0CET\n\nLemma 28.23.3. The composition of a pair of (universally) submersive morphisms of schemes is (universally) submersive.\n\nProof. Omitted. $\\square$\n\nThe code snippet corresponding to this tag is a part of the file morphisms.tex and is located in lines 4157\u20134161 (see updates for more information).\n\n\\begin{lemma}\n\\label{lemma-composition-universally-submersive}\nThe composition of a pair of (universally) submersive morphisms of\nschemes is (universally) submersive.\n\\end{lemma}\n\n\\begin{proof}\nOmitted.\n\\end{proof}\n\nThere are no comments yet for this tag.\n\n## Add a comment on tag 0CET\n\nIn your comment you can use Markdown and LaTeX style mathematics (enclose it like $\\pi$). A preview option is available if you wish to see how it works out (just click on the eye in the lower-right corner).","date":"2017-09-22 07:50:54","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.7885977625846863, \"perplexity\": 3391.552838880674}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2017-39\/segments\/1505818688926.38\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20170922074554-20170922094554-00393.warc.gz\"}"}
| null | null |
There are several reasons for individuals getting sick these days and the main reasons being pollution and stress. Many of us usually go to the doctor immediately and doctors would suggest that you take drugs to cure the symptoms and signs of your sickness. What we don't know is that these medicines go to the vital organs of our body and they have side effects to these vital organs. Ultimately, these side effects would show and you will not recognize that these signs and symptoms are in fact from the medicines you took long time ago. Now, it is the right time to switch to naturopathic remedies, before its too late.
Now, what is naturopathic remedy and how can it heal our diseases?
Have you ever questioned yourself why our ancestors lived more back in the days when synthetic drugs didn't occur yet? Have you ever questioned yourself why? Well, that happened because their way of curing themselves from disease is just around them – the nature. Naturopathic remedy isn't just a medicine similar to what your usual doctors give you when you're sick. This is a way of life, a multi disciplinary way of healing yourself and getting rid of your disease.
Like I said, its multi disciplinary and there are many ways to treat a disease. However, there are also concerns and questions that you have to ask yourself. Because we will be using the nature's resources in healing, you have to know whether you have allergies to some foods or things found in nature, like pollen maybe. Your genetic make-up must also be considered so research your background and take note of information note worthy or relevant.
Also, we must bear in mind that naturopathic remedy is not a remedy which you could just use when you are sick, you have to maintain it and incorporate it to your lifestyle so as not to just treat your disease but to keep the illnesses at bay also. These remedies mostly impact your life-style and diet, like drinking of pure water, and exposing yourself to the sunlight and indulging in healthy physical activities.
Naturopathic remedies include the use of alternative medicine, herbal remedies, homeopathy, massaging and also acupuncture and more. These remedies may be used one at a time in healing your disease but it could even be used together in different combinations, according to what fits you best and what's more appropriate.
Tony Daniel is the Director of Capalaba Natural Health. He has put together a team of natural healthcare professionals who practice, naturopathy, homeopathy, energy healing, reiki and other modalities with the aim of providing holistic, affordable natural health solutions. Capalaba Natural Health provides a wide range of services and tests, because they understand that simply treating the symptoms is not the solution.
PreviousCan Homeopathic Treatment Bring Pain Relief?
NextTreatment For Sciatic Pain – Want the Pain to Go Away?
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