Hunches

I saw Die Große Stille yesterday. It’s an almost three our long (and mostly silent) documentary on life in a Carthusian monastery. I only felt like a complete voyeur while watching the old monks. The director has repeating sections where three monks stare into the camera for a full minute. Some shift their eyes, some smirk, others glare. The old monks look like Dürer woodcuts. Their eyes tell you you’re trespassing. This was someone else’s idea.

One of the monks was getting a cream treatment. I think that’s a very European thing. Grandfather got that sometimes. His skin had boils, it sagged. His beard was wiry and cracked.

Another monk hobbled everywhere. He was hunched as though excessive prayer had moistened his bones until they became unable to support him. Or maybe it was all that kneeling that gave him that “struck down by god” appearance like the homeless lady who lives near club Mansion on South Beach.

She sleeps at the bus stop between Mansion and Twist. Her chest is higher than her head. She’s become so grotesque that most tourists don’t bother to look at her entirely— Their eyes stop at her edges. She’s something that belongs to the slums of Calcutta, not America, and definitely not South Beach. She must have fucked up royally or led an exceptionally sad life.

It’s sort of interesting that the pious and forsaken both end up stooped… but that’s probably unfair.

The monks’ situation was a religious mix between a penitentiary and boarding school. They live in cells and receive most of their meals through a window. A man with a creaky cart comes by, unlocks the little window facing the hallway, and slides the meal in.

Dinner is in a large hall where no one talks except one monk who reads a selection from what seems to be the Carthusian rulebook as the others eat.

The only conversation happens during the weekly walks in the countryside. And even then it’s about something as banal as hand washing procedures at other monasteries. The concept of living a completely inner, but utterly exposed life seems bizarre. (exposed in the sense that you are, in theory, in the intimate presence of god the entire time.) The monks share a lot in common with the prisoner obsessing about his girl on the outside – or the locked up loon with the imaginary friend. It’s quiet in their cell but there’s the incessant mental chatter of prayer, conversations with god, penance, ritual.

Rand would have had considered the whole deal sick.

Although note that her heroes tend to live internal lives similar to the monk, and the homeless woman.