Allusions to DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, Patrick McGoohan's THE PRISONER, Kafka, Orwell, and Mordor

 

Dear Anonymous Google Accuser:

 

Thank you for your note, the contents of which sound much like the block warden’s caution (“Your attitude is noticed, comrade.”) to Yuri in the film version of Doctor Zhivago.

 

I have re-read the column, which I wrote nine years ago, and find nothing offensive in it (although it is rather puerile), nor do you detail exactly what is offensive in it and why I should be sanctioned. You are being Kafka-esque, and I say this as someone who has read Kafka: you do not tell me what offense I have purportedly committed nor do you face me with an accuser. You do not even face me with you, for you do not give your name. You employ the passive voice in referring to an “Adult Content policy” and to “Community Guidelines,” which sounds like something from an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner: “The Committee won’t like this, Number Six.”

 

Google (and one could find “google” offensive, with its history mocking someone’s physical characteristics) is a private company, and so is free to publish or not publish, as is only right.  And I am free to pity Google for moral, ethical, and literary cowardice.

 

I was raised in situational poverty, barely graduated from high school, and spent 18 months in Viet-Nam. Upon returning to the USA (with life-long skin cancer which the DVA denies) I worked straight nights (double shifts on weekends) as an ambulance driver and later an LVN to put myself through university. I taught for almost forty years in public school, community college, and university as an adjunct instructor of no status whatsoever. In retirement I volunteered with our local school’s reading program until the Covid ended that, and I still volunteer with the lads at the local prison. I volunteer in community cleanup after our hurricanes (tho’ I’m getting a little old for that). I’ve worked hard all my life, paid my taxes, paid off my house at age 70, receive only half of my Social Security because of some vague law, and never gamed the system. Indeed, I would say that the system has gamed me.

 

And was all of this so that some frightened committee of anonymous inquisitors staring at an Orwellian telescreen or a Mordor-ish Palantir could find an innocuous scribble insensitive?

 

Pffffft.

 

Sincerely,

 

Lawrence Hall

 

 

Opposite the House of Sculptures - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Opposite the House of Sculptures

 

“…unchanging, shrill, crazy exclamations and demands, which became progressively more impractical, meaningless, and unfulfillable…”

 

-Doctor Zhivago, Part Two, Chapter 13, “Opposite the House of Sculptures”

 

O strong man, strong man, Supremo Alpha-Weenie

Please be our Putin, Hitler, or Mussolini

 

O strong man, strong man; tell us what to think

Pour us some Jim Jones; we’ll take a real deep drink

 

O strong man, strong man; tell us what to do

We’ll happily go to prison just for you

 

O strong man, strong man; clench your mighty fist

You put for us the “GO” in your “jingoist”

 

O strong man, strong man, you are our latest god

Please break us to obedience with your mighty rod

 

O strong man, strong man, you are our highest law

Whatever dribbles from your mouth we listen in awe

 

O strong man, strong man, we are your little elves

We promise to stow our history upon the shelves

And never, ever again think for ourselves

 

 

W. K. Kortas: On Watching DOCTOR ZHIVAGO with the Sound Off

Until today I have never re-posted someone else's work on my modest site. This is brilliant:

W. K. Kortas

On Watching “Doctor Zhivago” With The Sound Off – W.k. kortas–mediocre means "better than some". (wordpress.com)

JUNE 22, 2021

      ON WATCHING “DOCTOR ZHIVAGO” WITH THE SOUND OFF

There is a certain shock, not from the silence itself

But of its revelations, the laying bare

Of the utter superfluence of language

In all which unfolds before us, the testament mute

But imbued with all the power of an orchestra

In full-throated fortissimo

Delivered through the panorama of the vast steppes,

The bounty of their Junes,

The desolation of their Januarys

The visage of the doomed Strelnikov,

The darting glances of the chameleonesque Komarovsky,

His eyes scuttling to and fro like dark cockroaches,

And most of all by the unquiet, not-of-this world gaze

Of Yuri Andreyevich, a stare which tells tales

Of how fleeting this world’s happiness will be,

How final and inescapable its sadness,

And as he stumbles and falls in his mad, final pursuit

Of a grail which is unheeding, unseeing,

Always just a step out of reach,

The dialogue is not a necessity,

For we have a trove of our own words and experience

To attest to the veracity of the scene in question.

(AUTHOR’S NOTE–as I would be justly castigated by my good friend Lawrence Hall if I failed to do so, I made a point of adding the good Yuri’s patronymic .)

On Reading Doctor Zhivago (a Russia series, 25) - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

On Reading Doctor Zhivago

Love lost along abandoned railway lines,
Grave-cold, grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,
A thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -
Sacrarium of a martyred civilization.

A silent wolf pads west across the ice,
The rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,
Slung casually between its pale pink jaws -
A cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.

Above the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link
A dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,
It gives no light, there is no life; a mist
Arises from the clotted, haunted earth.

For generations the seasons are lies,
Since neither love nor life is free to sing
The eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -
And yet beneath the lies the old world gasps

The old world gasps in sudden ecstasy
A whispered resurrection of the truth
As tender stems ascend and push the stones
Aside, away into irrelevance.

And now the sunflowers laugh with the sun
Like merry young lads in their happy youth
Coaxing an ox-team into the fields,
Showing off their muscles to merry young girls.

The men of steel are only stains of rust,
Discoloring the seams of broken drains,
As useless as the rotted bits of brass
Turned up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.

For this is Holy Russia, eternally young;
Over those wide lands her church domes bless the sky,
While Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth
With the songs of lovers in God’s ever-spring

Upon Re-Reading Doctor Zhivago - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Upon Re-Reading Doctor Zhivago

for two friends

Love lost along abandoned railway lines,
Grave-cold, grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,
A thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -
Sacrarium of a martyred civilization.

A silent wolf pads west across the ice,
The rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,
Slung casually between its pale pink jaws -
A cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.

Above the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link
A dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,
It gives no light, there is no life; a mist
Arises from the clotted, haunted earth.

For generations the seasons in darkness slept,
Since neither love nor life were free to sing
The eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -
And yet beneath the lies the old world sighs

The old world sighed in sudden ecstasy
A whispered resurrection of the truth
As tender stems ascended, pushed the stones
Aside, away into irrelevance.

And now golden sunflowers laugh with the sun
Like merry young lads in their happy youth
Coaxing an ox-team into the fields,
Showing off their muscles to merry young girls.

The men of steel are only stains of rust,
Discoloring fragments of broken drains,
As useless as the rotted bits of brass
Turned up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.

For this is Holy Russia, eternally young;
Over her wide lands high church domes bless the sky,
While Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth
With the songs of lovers in God’s eternal now.



(The 1965 movie version is brilliant, and the recent mini-series is good, but these worthy endeavors are but shadows of the novel.)

Upon Reading Doctor Zhivago

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Upon Reading Doctor Zhivago

 

Love lost along abandoned railway lines,

Grave-cold, grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,

A thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -

Sacrarium of a martyred civilization.

 

A silent wolf pads west across the ice,

The rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,

Slung casually between its pale pink jaws -

A cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.

 

Above the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link

A dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,

It gives no light, there is no life; a mist

Arises from the clotted, haunted earth.

 

For generations the seasons are lies,

Since neither love nor life is free to sing

The eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -

And yet beneath the lies the old world gasps

 

The old world gasps in sudden ecstasy

A whispered resurrection of the truth

As tender stems ascend and push the stones

Aside, away into irrelevance.

 

And now the sunflowers laugh with the sun

Like merry young lads in their happy youth

Coaxing an ox-team into the fields,

Showing off their muscles to merry young girls.

 

The men of steel are only stains of rust,

Discoloring the seams of broken drains,

As useless as the rotted bits of brass

Turned up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.

 

For this is Holy Russia, eternally young;

Over those wide lands her church domes bless the sky,

While Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth

With the songs of lovers in God’s ever-spring.