Dostoevsky on HLN

I am reminded of the trial scenes of The Brothers Karamazov as I search to write something, begin a new novel perhaps, with the events of the Jodi Arias trial fresh in memory.  I watched, saw the grim accusatory faces seated in rows as the sex-tape was played, followed a skeleton gist of the trial that I had avoided, saw photos, watched the archived coverage to sample the general flavor, and then I turned away, not without some of it sticking to the curls of the intricate brain.  (Today I will light some incense.)

As I say, I had that sensation, Mitya at the trial.  Strange courtroom proceedings, foreign customs, the same righteous serious-about-the-law solemnity, strutting lawyers claiming to know everything, a path to truth.  You're reading The Brothers Karamazov, trying to follow along, and really, besides the Alyosha and the old Father Zossima spiritual stuff, not a whole lot of it makes sense to you, as if it were indeed The classic wandering Russian novel, a wall of verbage full of femme fatals, incomprehensible, hard to predict, hard to figure, 'why is this here?' with its relationships and plot turns.  And I think you even know, as you read, that Dimitri is being railroaded, but doesn't even care, being too involved with a certain kind of woman.  The whole thing, almost hallucinatory, or at the least, baffling, murky, and there's even this other brother, Ivan, the skeptic, who in his own feverish hallucinations dreams up the whole Grand Inquisitor thing, which is itself, haphazardly, as if the landing of a UFO in the midst of novel's plot (serialized, to keep the public interest up, with murder, lurid women, foolish people, humanity misbehaving over money and what-not) one of the greatest observations a novelist has ever made about moral 'realities and pieties,' i.e., it's all bullshit, as only a Russian can understand bullshit, except of course the essential Jesus himself, which one is able to grasp well enough.

CNN, a panel of mock jurors, is interviewed, freshly post the verdict, and a woman is saying, "I want her to fry, fry like that chicken I ate for dinner."  Really?  (Was she, too, constrained to follow the script that itself had become a runaway train constantly wrecking its way down the tracks in slow motion bit-by-bit horror?)

And it might even seem, if you were to be somewhat honest with yourself--'honesty,' hah!--that this one woman on the stand was herself a character worthy of putting into a Russian novel, or even left one with the impression that she was in fact several, almost countless numbers, of characters.  (Her drastically changing appearance cooperated.)  One does not want to really admit nor share too much of his own guesses, having spent so little time following the whole thing--even that sounds coy now--but it could seem that there was a foolish girl who had fallen in with a guy who seemed okay and upright, a Mormon, even, infallible, but who was the perfect utterly shallow make-a-sex-tape (extremely painful to listen to in all its stupidity) kind of a guy, who knew not love, nor spiritual love, but merely puerile porno as a relationship, to which poor girl was all too accommodating, or simply forced, hoping for a relationship with a successful guy.  Living in a porn culture, one is not being completely self-righteous in observing that, given the quick selfish pleasure video-game fix allowed by the digital age, that has made sex into, just that, a video game with a scorecard.  And here's this poor uncentered young woman completely adrift in it, reaching out to the vain picture of modern love, finding it empty, hair-coloring, the guy, the perfect inspirational business salesman, able to be shallow enough to talk the stupid banal talk, from what it would seem, with a perfect backstory.  A disease few, it would seem, are immune to as they conform to the flow of information that bestows status.

Who knows what happened.  I got out of it before forming much of an opinion, beyond that of finding the whole thing a perfect representation of modern times, the lack of morality, and the willingness to turn a blind eye to the words of Jesus himself before the sinful woman and her accusers, now a sort of inapplicable joke almost, 'judge not, lest ye be judged.'  Because we're going to judge, we must judge.  And it is, after all, the law, and you can't go around murdering people, of course.  Justice must play all stories out and attempt to get at the truth, and you can't be cynical about it and say it's all Kafkaesque.  (It is, unfortunately, easier to be negative, critical and accusatory when we try to make clinical sense out of stories, as if there can be no good intentions, or at least ones that don't pave the road to hell.)

If I remember, the condition of Ivan, best financially-situated of the brothers, worsens, and he, with little ceremony, dies.  Dimitri, the eldest, the passionate one, innocent of murder, is found guilty and sent off to hard labor, the bright side being that he will be spiritually-aided (and hopefully made okay) by the quiet hero of the novel, youngest brother and monk, Alyosha.  And all the while, it is this queer idiot sort of handy man of the wicked cruel old man with the money and father of all three, Smerdyakov-- a certain suggestive onomotopoeia to the name-- and one should have been been suspicious about the novelist when he throws in a chapter strangely entitled, "Smerdyakov, with a guitar."  (To which our minds have to stop, take pause, and wonder, why this pointless actionless moment, but Dostoevsky so clever and so great a dreamer of a novelist, with such great faith in the form, such that that faith is astounding and beautiful, that we can't initially see this, suddenly, as a possible suspect and plot denouement ...) Smerdyakov himself has gotten the fever of consumption, and probably would be hardly coherent anyway, but he admits, it was he, with the blunt instrument, bloody and recovered from the crime scene, who did it, even to protect everyone, including Dimitri, ironically.  Is it Alyosha who hears his confession?  I forget.  It is all post-trial, and there's nothing anyone can do about it anyway, as we all begin to drift away, not quite knowing yet, again having no clue, how this all might end, much like life itself.  (This another hint of Dostoevsky's musical genius.)

As a measure of satisfaction, the great moment at the end, that is a reaffirmation of the Christian spirit that itself almost suffered hallucination and imprisonment under some venemous creep of an Archbishop Inquisitor, Christ told that he is meaningless and should simply go away and not mess with the perfect system humanity has figured out quite on its own, thank you very much, Alyosha and the schoolboys, coming to the deathbed of the boy they have previously tormented, now peace made, (through, of all things, a stray dog.)  The little boy then dies, and we're left outside the churchyard after the burial (the poor father sobbing, sobbing), and Alyosha, a pure person, from back in that time we didn't need to think cynical thoughts all the time, gently marshals the boys, his 'little chickens' together, and the boys go, right at the end of, what?, eight hundred and forty pages, "Hurrah for Karamazov."  And after all that, after how many pages of strangeness, facts, legality, characters, it's actually quite touching, as if you yourself was just about to be released from prison for a crime you didn't commit, touching indeed.  That's what you're left with, this little 'hurrah,' and it means all the world.  And it is as if we are all learners, like children again, and we are here at the moment where, from previous lifetimes and understandings, we have already mature knowledge and wisdom, but yet we are learning something new and fresh, reaching that fine point we knew we were somehow always reaching for.  We have, despite all, learned something new and fresh.  (Do we become more adult, or more open, childlike learners--one study question.)

But of course, real life is stranger than fiction, and hard to make sense of.

Maybe novelists aren't so bad after all.


And, as a postscript, after all this great lack of faith in prose and imagination that such a trial and cultural phenomenon represents, unable to extract a larger lesson from the puerility of behavior, unable to find a sensitivity, such that no one stood up for any sensitivity, any sympathy, any Mother Theresa feeling for the lepers, the sick, the dying sensualists, just a blind glassy screen on the television to watch it all, a willingness to hype, it seems plain.  Of course, who wants to understand, who really cares, about such people?  Television reveals no wish but to judge, a pundit poking up at every place to deliver an opinion.  The pleasure of skewering, as if one were, himself, perfect, moral, beyond reproach, immune to what all floats in our blood.  As was noted on Bill Moyers, all the public seems able to do, as in Boston, is to cheer "USA, USA," patriotism, pride in the police state, every criminal caught now a Bin Laden brought to justice.  Legalese, we are caught in legalese.