21 Essays

Friday, May 15, 2015

First Men in the Moon: History Repeats

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For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon,

May 13-17, 2015

LET'S RAISE SOME MONEY!!!

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then please follow this link to make a donation to the National Film Preservation Foundation to support our effort to restore, score, and stream Cupid in Quarantine (1918), a one-reel silent comedy starring Elinor Field and Cullen Landis.

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Selenite-blogging,
essay 3 of 5 blog entries

Part One: Titanic Similarities

A drawing is discovered in a safe deep below the ocean in Titanic (1997).

A team of scientific explorers discover a surprising artifact. Who did it belong to? Could the owner possibly still be alive? “But (s)he’d be at least 90 years old now!” However, the owner is alive. And the owner has a tale to share. Now listen closely. “Once upon a time…”

Arnold Bedford examines the
British flag found on the moon
in First Men in the Moon (1964).

In First Men in the Moon (1964), explorers discover a British flag on the moon, along with a note claiming the moon in the name of Queen Victoria. Old Arnold Bedford is discovered in a nursing home and he relates his tale of adventure and romance.

In Titanic (1997), explorers discover a drawing of a nude woman locked inside a safe inside the submerged wreck of the Titanic. An elderly woman comes forward claiming that the picture is of her. She relates her tale of adventure and romance.

Coincidence? Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that writer-director James Cameron cribbed from established science fiction authors… or from Ray Harryhausen movies, for that matter. Maybe I should let Cameron confess:

“The creations in my movies are really Ray’s illegitimate grandchildren. The Terminator owes its roots to the skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts, which I saw when I was seven years old. It blew my mind and I wanted to do that, whatever ‘that’ was.”

James Cameron

Testimonial from the book jacket of

Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life

If Cameron was six for Jason, he would have been seven for First Men in the Moon and my guess is that he was already furiously scribbling notes for future screenplays.

In all fairness, Nigel Kneale’s flashback plot structure for First Men in the Moon IS ingenious and Cameron deserves credit for borrowing from the best. The plot device works very well in Titanic. And Cameron’s stripped-down Terminator T-800 Model 101 was a nice twist on Harryhausen’s fighting skeletons, too.

As the famous paraphrase of Isaac Newton states:

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Old Bedford in First Men in the Moon and old Rose in Titanic
examine their documents.

Part Two: The Unintended Metaphor

Bedford on the attack, swinging his gun, in First Men in the Moon.

I could play off James Cameron with this next observation, too, by suggesting that the plot of Cameron’s Avatar (2009) expands on a central metaphor in First Men in the Moon. But I really don’t think that’s the case, not even subconsciously.

In fact, I don’t think the particular metaphor that I'd like to discuss was ever intentionally placed into First Men in the Moon. It was just an unplanned accident of plot. But once you see it, it’s hard to ignore.

Kate Calender (Martha Hyer) brings
a gun to the moon despite Cavor's
dismissal of the idea: "Madam,
the chances of bagging an elephant
on the moon are remote." But the
gun is ultimately used by both Kate
and Arnold Beckford (Edward Judd)
as they threaten and shoot at
the moon's native inhabitants.

The movie First Men in the Moon functions as a frighteningly plausible metaphor for the European settlement of the Americas. Arnold Bedford, well played by Edward Judd, represents the European explorer/soldier. His ethics are highly suspect, he’s prone to violence, and his primary incentive to explore is the promise of gold. Cavor, magnificently played by Lionel Jeffries, is the scientist/technician who unwittingly makes the invasion possible.

But there’s only one Bedford against a whole civilization of Selenites. How can a single Bedford possibly win in this battle for empire? Unfortunately, the answer is simple on both sides of the metaphor. Carried from a distant land, disease wipes out the civilization. The Europeans can now move in with relative ease, planting their flag of conquest.

The disease angle was not in the original H. G. Wells novel, and I seriously doubt that screenwriter Nigel Kneale considered the potential historic parallels when he borrowed the idea from Wells’ The War of the Worlds. But it unexpectedly hooked into the existing imperialist satire that really was lying dormant in Wells’ novel The First Men in the Moon, accidentally creating a scenario that is eerily resonant.

Wells’ novel is surprisingly complex and nuanced. As in the movie, the character of Bedford (who provides first-hand narration for most of the book) is presented as the typical adventure hero. His acknowledged faults of avarice and violent temper are minimized and/or justified. But then, in a very surprising twist late in the book, Cavor’s communications from the moon are presented intact and they paint a very different picture of Bedford:

“On the moon his (Bedford’s) character seemed to deteriorate. He became impulsive, rash, and quarrelsome…

“We came to a difficult passage with them (the Selenites), and Bedford mistaking certain gestures of theirs… gave way to a panic violence. He ran amuck, killed three, and perforce I had to flee with him after the outrage.”

Apparently, Bedford has been an unreliable narrator all along, suggesting that Wells’ novel was never intended as a simple science romance for boys. We’ve received the heroic adventure story from the viewpoint of the villain.

Cavor's cry of despair as he realizes that Bedford
is indiscriminately killing Selenites in
First Men in the Moon.

The screenplay—sometimes jarringly—retains the nastier elements of Bedford’s personality. Under the veneer of Victorian charm, we see Cavor’s ever-increasing distress at Bedford’s actions, with Cavor finally screaming in despair that Bedford is ruining everything. Personally, I think the resulting dissonance between the promise of a light-hearted space romp and Cavor’s heartfelt pain may have been behind the movie’s financial failure. Ultimately, First Men in the Moon doesn’t deliver on the feel-good vibe that’s promised.

When Wells’ theme of European imperialism collides with the disease subplot, the resulting implications are depressingly familiar. The Selenites are the Native Americans. Just sixty years after the first ship arrives, their world is in ruins. As Bedford says at the close of the movie, “Poor Cavor! He did have such a terrible cold.” The flag has been planted and the moon will now belong to the Earth. The aliens have invaded.

The British flag on the moon in First Men in the Moon.

Reference Sources
Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale by Andy Murray

Ray Harryhausen: Master of the Majicks by Mike Hankin

Film Fantasy Scrapbook by Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton

The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells

... and a special thank you to the hosts of For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon: Ferdy on Films, This Island Rod, and Wonders in the Dark.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Selenites and Skeletons

21 Essays is a proud participant in

For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon,

May 13-17, 2015

LET'S RAISE SOME MONEY!!!

If you like this blog...

if you like science fiction...

if you support the cause of film preservation...

Selenite-blogging,
essay 2 of 5 blog entries

Part One: Insectoids Everywhere!

“The moon is, indeed, a sort of vast ant-hill…”

The First Men in the Moon

By H. G. Wells

In his 1901 science fiction novel The First Men in the Moon, H. G. Wells repeatedly describes the moon’s Selenite inhabitants as insect-like:

“He (the Selenite) presented himself, therefore, as a compact, bristling creature, having much the quality of a complicated insect…”

For his 1964 movie of First Men in the Moon, visual effects master Ray Harryhausen designed remarkable models of insect-like Selenites to bring to life through his inimitable stop motion animation. While departing from Wells in some particulars, they retain the weird half-human/half-arthropod weirdness in Wells’ descriptions:

“The neck on which the head was poised was jointed in three places, almost like the short joints in the leg of a crab.”

A Selenite Gallery: Profile, rear (with termite wings), and full frontal.

Inspecting the insectoid
alien remains from
Quatermass and the Pit.

Both Ray Harryhausen and screenwriter Nigel Kneale were fans of the science fiction novels of H. G. Wells. The concept of upright insectoids in The First Men in the Moon appears to have particularly appealed to them. Several years before First Men in the Moon, Kneale placed an eerie insectoid alien invasion at the center of the plot of his TV series classic Quatermass and the Pit, first broadcast in 1958.

Near the end of his career, Harryhausen cribbed from his Selenite design to create a trio of insectoid ghouls, complete with little horns reminiscent of the demon insects of Quatermass and the Pit. Designed for Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), the ghouls are skeletal rather than segmented, but the faces possess a familiar creepy insect-like impassivity, like animated mantises.

The insectoid ghouls from Harryhausen's
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

Intelligent alien insects remain a popular subject in science fiction, turning up everywhere from Star Trek to Starship Troopers. H. G. Wells basically invented the trope, as he also appears to have been the first to play with an alien hive concept, where intelligence is centralized in a highly ordered society. This probably relates in some way to the socialism that Wells later advocated, but as of 1901, it’s easier to see the lunar society as a satire of political ideas rather than either a utopia or a dystopia. The scientist Cavor is content to live in the moon’s great ant-hill but the prospect appears to have much less appeal to the other two humans along for the trip.

Cavor (Lionel Jeffries) surrounded by Selenites in First Men in the Moon.

Part Two: The Resurrected Skeleton

Here’s Martha Hyer as Kate Callender receiving a full body scan from Lunar Homeland Security.

Martha Hyer gets x-rayed in First Men in the Moon.

Martha Hyer.

For this First Men in the Moon scene, Hyer’s body double was a warrior skeleton model left over from Jason and the Argonauts, pulled off the shelf by master animator Ray Harryhausen. The shot opens with Hyer fully exposed in naked skeleton mode, making demands to her interrogators as they study her bones. Then she leaves the scanner area and emerges screen left with her skin and clothes neatly in place.

Whoever would have guessed that Martha Hyer had the frame of a Greek warrior?

And… retroactively applying logic… wouldn’t this suggest that we can see Hyer—that ever-dependable chameleon of an actress—among the skeleton defenders of the Golden Fleece?

Why, I’d recognize that skeleton anywhere!

I think that's Hyer's skeletal frame second from left.

Hyer gracefully parries a sword thrust.

She's a little more graceful than the other skeletons, don't you think?
Personally, I'm rooting for Hyer.

This is how Greek tragedy inevitably ends.

It just goes to show that we’re all the same under the skin.

Enjoy the video!

Reference Sources

Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale by Andy Murray

Ray Harryhausen: Master of the Majicks by Mike Hankin

Film Fantasy Scrapbook by Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton

The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells

... and a special thank you to the hosts of For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon: Ferdy on Films, This Island Rod, and Wonders in the Dark.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

First Men in the Moon: Cavor in Quarantine

21 Essays is a proud participant in

For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon,

May 13-17, 2015

LET'S RAISE SOME MONEY!!!

If you like this blog...

if you like science fiction...

if you support the cause of film preservation...

Selenite-blogging,
essay 1 of 5 blog entries

Part One: A Person Can Develop a Cold

Cullen Landis on left in
Cupid in Quarantine (1918).

Because Cupid in Quarantine (1918) is a comedy based on turn-of-the-century scientific ideas concerning disease, the For the Love of Film leaders (Ferdy on Films, This Island Rod, and Wonders in the Dark) have adopted a science fiction theme for this blogathon.

And my choice for blogging subject is First Men in the Moon (1964), a delightful science fiction film from 1964 that cleverly incorporates a disease subplot. In the film, the brilliant scientist Joseph Cavor is plagued by a cold and—as any War of the Worlds fan can tell you—aliens are very sensitive to Earth viruses.

As the 1953 version of The War of the Worlds explained:

“After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things, which God, in His wisdom, had put upon this earth.”

An alien succumbs to Earth viruses in The War of the Worlds (1953).

Absent from the original H. G. Wells science fiction novel, the viral subplot in First Men in the Moon was added by the script’s co-author Nigel Kneale (1922-2006). Kneale was one of the most intelligent screenwriters to ever contribute to the cinema of the fantastic. As President John F. Kennedy had vowed that America would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade, Kneale decided that he needed a Wells-ian plot twist to wipe out the moon’s alien civilization before the official astronauts arrived. He borrowed the virus from The War of the World and released it on the moon.

In addition to the disease angle, I also liked that First Men in the Moon was a period movie, taking place in England in 1899, a mere 19 years before Cupid in Quarantine was filmed in Hollywood. Movies were still in their infancy in 1899—there’s a good chance that the two male protagonists of First Men in the Moon, Arnold Bedford and Joseph Cavor, have never even seen a movie. But Bedford lives to see the world’s first moon landing and so in his lifetime he would have witnessed the development of movies from early single reelers (like Cupid in Quarantine!) to the age of cinemascope, color, and Dynamation!

The monster kids who work at Pixar
paid homage to Ray Harryhausen in
Monsters, Inc. (2001).

Dynamation was the term coined for the animation work of brilliant special effects technician Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013), who brought dinosaurs and mythical creatures to life in movies like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, and One Million Years B.C. In addition to leading the visual effects team on First Men in the Moon, Harryhausen served as Associate Producer. Ray Harryhausen is revered by monster kids like me who grew up in the 1960s. It’s an honor to pay tribute to one of his best movies.

Part Two: The Lost Films of Nigel Kneale

Nigel Kneale's credit on The Quatermass Experiment (1953).

Every lost film is a reminder of the fragility of our film culture.

As with early film, the vast majority of the shows produced in television’s first years have been lost. Nigel Kneale, co-screenwriter of First Men in the Moon, was an enormously important and influential writer in the new medium of dramatic television in the 1950s. Unfortunately, much of his work has not survived.

A giant phantasmagoric alien demon looms over
London in the climax of the film version of
Quatermass and the Pit (1967).

Perhaps most famous for his Quatermass science fiction series (the third of which was the remarkable Quatermass and the Pit), Nigel Kneale joined BBC Television in 1951, becoming one of the station’s first writers.

When the BBC faced a shortage of new material in summer 1953, Kneale offered to write a science fiction serial. The result, The Quatermass Experiment, galvanized England and racked up extremely impressive ratings. Neale became pegged as a master of the offbeat and macabre. For the following thirty years, he moved back and forth between TV and the movies, venturing into numerous genres while always remaining true to his own quirky interests and obsessions.

But even nationwide acclaim was not enough to guarantee that his work would be saved for posterity in those early throw-away days of television. Here are just a few of the many lost works of Nigel Kneale.

Arrow to the Heart (1951): Kneale’s first dramatic adaptation for the BBC, it was broadcast live and never recorded.

Curtain Down (1953): Years before launching his successful film direction career, Tony Richardson spent an unhappy apprenticeship directing TV shows for the BBC. The one person he did like and respect at the studio was Kneale. They collaborated on this now-lost adaptation of an Anton Chekhov story. Later Richardson would pull Kneale away from his TV work to write the scripts for Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960).

The Quatermass Experiment (1953): The first two episodes of Kneale’s influential TV science fiction hit were recorded, but the network declined to preserve the subsequent four episodes.

Orwell's famous slogan of the future
from Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954).

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954): Starring a young Peter Cushing, Kneale’s 1954 adaptation of the George Orwell novel divided the critics but riveted the nation. The live performance was repeated later in the same week, and the second broadcast was recorded and saved. But, according to contemporary accounts, the first performance was the better of the two and it wasn’t preserved.

The Creature (1955): Later remade by Hammer Films as The Abominable Snowman (1957), the original TV broadcast of this thoughtful drama of gentle, telepathic Yeti in the Himalayas was presented live and never recorded for posterity.

The Road (1963): Acclaimed at its broadcast for its innovative mixing of science fiction and the paranormal, The Road appears to be a lost film.

The psychedelic visuals of The Year of the
Sex Olympics (1968) cry out for color.

The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968): A black-and-white recording of this science fiction serial exists, but it’s considered to be a pale shadow of the original color version (which—granted—would have mainly played on black-and-white TV sets at the time).

The Chopper (1971): Kneale played with the idea of inanimate objects becoming possessed by spirits long before Stephen King drove the idea to mass popularity. In the now-lost The Chopper, a motorcycle harbors the ghost.

THIS IS SO DISCOURAGING! ENOUGH LOST FILMS!!!

Now grab this opportunity to save a film by contributing to our effort to restore Cupid in Quarantine (1918)!

Reference Sources
Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale by Andy Murray

Ray Harryhausen: Master of the Majicks by Mike Hankin

Film Fantasy Scrapbook by Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton

The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells

... and a special thank you to the hosts of For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon: Ferdy on Films, This Island Rod, and Wonders in the Dark.

Monday, February 16, 2015

Thomas Merton, William Blake, and I Contemplate Eternity

Trappist Blogging
in Honor of Thomas Merton's
100th Birthday:
Essay 6 of 6 on
"Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,"
the epilogue of
The Sign of Jonas

My son Terry overlooking the Grand Canyon.

The things of Time are in connivance with eternity.

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

I turn a corner on the path and suddenly the Grand Canyon is before me. In that moment, the bottom drops out of my experience of time. Personal insignificance and timeless significance coincide. People on the rim are just grains of sand arbitrarily blowing across the uppermost layer of strata. A glance over the edge is a plunge into eternity.

While it sounds right and looks awesome, I don’t think this is what Thomas Merton is referring to in the sentence highlighted above—which happens to be my personal favorite sentence in “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,” Merton’s sublime epilogue to his book The Sign of Jonas. The Grand Canyon experience is powerful, a true contender for supreme iconic image of eternity colliding with time. But I think Merton was referencing something on an altogether different scale, available to everyone on a daily basis without the investment in a Southwest vacation.

Merton prefaces this sentence with a paragraph that resonates with the poetry of William Blake:

But there is a greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. Eternity is in the present. Eternity is in the palm of the hand. Eternity is a seed of fire, whose sudden roots break barriers that keep my heart from being an abyss.

The things of Time are in connivance with eternity…

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

The Grand Canyon.

Having written his Master’s thesis at Columbia University on William Blake (“Nature and Art in William Blake; A Essay in Interpretation”), Merton very intentionally echoes the famous first four lines of Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour…

“Auguries of Innocence”

by William Blake

Merton knows that God must be met in the present moment, which he has learned from Blake is a doorway opening to eternity. But what sounds simple is difficult because the awareness of passing time is a barrier to the experience of the moment of time. It is a problem unique to mankind. As Merton writes, “Only man makes himself illuminations he conceives to be solid and eternal.” The things of time tease us with intimations of eternity, while leading us away from an experience of the spirit.

Merton steps through the door of the tower, onto the monastery’s roof, open to an experience of God in the night and in the moment. The “things of time” sentence opens a paragraph that relegates the created world to shadows.

The things of Time are in connivance with eternity. The shadows serve You. The beasts sing to You before they pass away. The solid hills shall vanish like a worn-out garment. All things change, and die and disappear. Questions arrive, assume their actuality, and also disappear. In this hour I shall cease to ask them, and silence shall be my answer. The world that Your love created, that the heat has distorted, and that my mind is always misinterpreting, shall cease to interfere with our voices.

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

So while my view of the Grand Canyon is profoundly felt on one level, its very majesty connives to hide its ephemerality. It, too, will “vanish like a worn-out garment,” a faith belief entirely in line with geological understanding. Like the beasts in Merton, the view sings of eternity. It blindsides us. And then the mind pitches in and begins misinterpreting it.

Detail, Children's Games (1559-1560)
by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569)
oil on wood.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

My most profound experience of eternity was not at the Grand Canyon or any of the National Parks, much as I love them. It took place nearly thirty years ago when I was playing on a swing set. At the time, I was working as an assistant at a home for five women with severe mental retardation. One afternoon, I remember sitting on a two-person swing set in the home’s backyard. I was on one swing and Carol, a young woman with Down syndrome, was on the swing next to me. And we were simply swaying in the fall breeze, both of us content for the moment. She had a beautiful smile and I was happy that she was happy. Then the particulars vanished in the knowledge that everything was good, that there was no need to worry, that there was endless love emanating from anywhere and everywhere in the world and we were both loved.

You’re sitting on a swing and the bottom unexpectedly drops out of your normal experience of time ticking by. The second hand on the watch stops. A moment expands into eternity.

And then it contracts, as the second hand inevitably starts circling again. The things of time fall back into place. I recall the impossible-to-capture experience but not how it ended. Perhaps it was like this:

There are drops of dew that show like sapphires in the grass as soon as the great sun appears, and leaves stir behind the hushed flight of an escaping dove.

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

Those are the concluding words of “Fire Watch,” coming after God speaks in Paradise, conveying a message that everything is blessed. (“No more lay hold on time, Jonas, My son, lest the rivers bear you away.”) In Merton’s case, his job on the Fire Watch ends as the sun rises. He returns to the mundane tasks of being a monk while the Holy Spirit departs like a dove.

The Grand Canyon.

Reference Source

Friday, February 13, 2015

Thomas Merton and a Hedgehog on the Hero's Journey

Trappist Blogging
in Honor of Thomas Merton's
100th Birthday:
Essay 5 of 6 on
"Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,"
the epilogue of
The Sign of Jonas

Part One: Fear of the Dark

In Yuri Norstein's enchanting animated short
Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), our hero ventures
into the fog drawn by a beautiful vision. It is
a classic hero story, where the hero embarks
on a quest that leads to deeper self-knowledge.
Hedgehog in the Fog shares much in common
with Thomas Merton's "Fire Watch," where
Merton's solitary trek through the monastery
leads to revelation.

Defying traditional expectations, Thomas Merton depicts the dark as spiritually good. This is in the nature of a paradigm shift—and it’s not easy to cause a shift in anything as hidebound as a 2,000- year-old religion anchored to a set of ancient sacred texts.

In the very first paragraph of “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,” Merton writes:

“You (God) have seen the morning and the night, and the night was better.”

Merton’s God blesses the darkness. This is a concept that would seem to fly in the face of much scripture:

The hero's journey continues.
Top frame: The hedgehog sees a beautiful
vision of a white horse in the fog. Middle
frame: Unseen by the hedgehog, the horse
sniffs a leaf that that the hedgehog has
dropped. Bottom frame: Safely home, the
hedgehog is haunted by the vision of
the horse. In "Fire Watch," Merton
pursues an unattainable intimacy,
yearning to receive answers from God
to his existential questions.

“And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.” (Note: Light good, dark bad.)

Genesis 1:3-4

“So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days… but all the people of Israel had light where they dwelt.” (Note: Light good, dark bad.)

Exodus 10:22-23

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.” (Note: Light good, dark bad.)

Isaiah 9:2

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (Note: Light good, dark bad.)

John 1:5

“Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” (Note: Light good, dark bad.)

Romans 13:12

While positive passages about darkness exist in the Bible, they are few and far between. Negative views of darkness overwhelmingly predominate.

The hero's journey continues.
Wandering lost in the fog, hoping to see the
horse again, the hedgehog is frightened by
mysterious beasts of the night: an owl, a
bat, and an elephant, dimly seen. As he
wanders through the monastery at night,
Merton evokes a haunted house: "Shadows
move everywhere... There are faint sounds
in the darkness, the empty choirstalls creak
and hidden boards mysteriously sigh."

But Merton saw through this darkness surrounding darkness to realize that the light-dark dichotomy was always intended as metaphor, and that sometimes metaphors must change with the times. Darkness served as a favorite image in ancient times because it was universally known and feared. Our contemporary fears of darkness are much milder by comparison. If fear begins to seize us, we can simply flick on a light switch, performing our own, “Let there be light.”

When the books of the Bible were written, intense anxieties about the night, the darkness, and the wilderness were very real and reasonable. Communities banded close together to protect themselves from the dangers that lurked outside. Assurances of safety dissolved when the sun sank below the horizon. The civilized space contracted. People gathered together within known, familiar spaces... and they barred the doors. The wilderness outside the city walls, home to dangerous animals and bandits, advanced closer in the darkness. Any venture out into the dark carried considerable risk. Better to wait inside for the night to pass and a new day to dawn.

A twentieth century man living in the first full century of electric illumination, Thomas Merton was open to finding new metaphors to express the old truths. For him, the night was simply an unexplored space—like the terra incognita at the edge of an old map. With less to fear, he was more aware that God was fully present in the dark, blessing the night just as he blessed the day.

At the close of “Fire Watch,” Merton prophetically speaks for God:

The Voice of God is heard in Paradise:

“What was vile has become precious. What is now precious was never vile. I have always known the vile as precious for what is vile I know not at all.”

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

In the new metaphor, there’s nothing to fear in the dark. The night assumes a new dignity, now recognized as precious before God.

The hero's journey continues.
Despite his fears, the hedgehog ultimately finds only kindness and
compassion in the fog. Left: A dog (with very scary jaws) returns the
hedgehog's lost bag to him. Right: When the hedgehog falls into a
stream, a fish offers him a ride back to safety. In "Fire Watch,"
Merton writes that the animals in the wilderness outside the monastery
are misunderstood. "That is why some people act as if the night and the
forest and the heat and the animals had in them something of contagion,
whereas the heat is holy and the animals are the children of God..."

The hero's journey at its most sublime.
Perhaps the most beautiful of all the images in Hedgehog in the Fog,
the hedgehog uses a firefly to light his way as he moves forward
through a cathedral of trees. The world appears sacred. In "Fire Watch,"
Thomas Merton writes: "Now the huge chorus of living beings rises up
out of the world beneath my feet: life singing in the watercourses,
throbbing in the creeks and the fields and the trees, choirs of millions
and millions of jumping and flying and creeping things. And far above
me the cool sky opens upon the frozen distance of the stars."

Watch Hedgehog in the Fog...

Purchase the The Complete Works of Yuri Norstein DVD at Amazon or other vendor.

Purchase Masters of Russian Animation 2 DVD at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Rent Masters of Russian Animation 2 at Netflix or other rental service.

Reference Source