The Chimney by Ron Morin
On the genesis of The Chimney
The Chimney is a figment of my imagination. The image finds its origin in a memory I made while visiting Auschwitz in 2002. In a building there, I saw what the Germans called "a starvation cell" - it only looked like a chimney to me because the structure was similar, a small tubular space where two Jews were placed, naked, facing each other, with no room to change positions or sit. The opening, where they had to stoop to get in, was bricked in after they were placed. Occasionally this horror, the guide told us, led to cannibalism. From there we went to the room where they stored the hair and teeth.
When I visited Auschwitz, I was not thinking about writing. I was trying to understand a sacred piece of history. However, the "starvation cell" began to haunt me - mostly in nightmares. Thinking back, my memory of a chimney is probably a fusion of that cell and the chimneys of the crematoria.
The second element upon which this drama rests is personal feelings. Without going into details, I wrote The Chimney in a year-long trance of nameless pain. Nameless not because I could not name the origin of my pain, loss, but nameless because I could not name the cause of my loss. A whole host of memories, fragments, and images came back to me insistently: What could I have done differently? Decision, however, was impossible because rationally I had not understood what had happened and I had refused to surrender on faith. Was God blessing me or was the Devil damning me? Out of those two extremes of interpretation, the characters of Helene and David were born. Doubt became the maniacal energy of my trance. Such tension usually leads to something. Suffering has a way of pushing us through every synaptic possibility imaginable to some meaning. In such a heightened state, I wrote The Chimney, a religious service of sorts, as I see it now.
The third major stimulus to my imagination was what in France is called The Battle for the Plateau des Glieres. This is the back-story for our drama, how a Frenchman working for the Nazis during the occupation betrays a group of resistance fighters. I needed this history to hang my exhausted, unresolved imagination on a narrative structure that would bring me peace.
Compelled as I was to let out the voices of my pain - the beautiful and the ugly - I realized that I must love all my characters. To do less would have been fatal. True to my doubt, my feverish uncertainty, I could not choose between Helene and David. If only Keats had been right! If truth were beauty, there would be no need for Helene to overcome, and David would be right: we would have no need of transcendence.
Helene and David have suffered war trauma. I have tried to love them, as I would my own children. I pity David, and as much as he did not want to, he had to answer for his actions.
In my mind, David is the heart and soul of this tragedy, because, if we take Helene seriously as a saint, then she transcends tragedy - she has no human flaw to atone for. Helene is beautiful, in the Keatsian sense, because she is trying to create the circumstance by which miracles occur - a miracle being what George Bernard Shaw says in his St. Joan, "a miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith." Whereas David, like Oedipus, extremely slow to see what he has done wrong, must face the music of redemption. He does, which, ultimately, makes The Chimney religious - in the way Greek plays are religious, and that, of course, vindicates Helene's vision of reality. In her world, we as entities are hard-wired to be moral, our conscience is a structural part of the brain, like language, and ultimately life is not a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing because we are made in the image of God. By the end of the play the argument of David, that morality is nothing but a cultural construct invented by religion, is washed away by David's surrender to Helene's vision.
In the Tree of Life of the Kabbala, the earthly is separated from the spiritual by a veil at the 6th sefirah, the ego. The drama of The Chimney is in the renting of that veil, below which ordinary consciousness is another chimney. Helene is trying with all her soul to free David from the bind of his ego, to go beyond. The rage of war trauma, which David is unconscious of, comes out as cynicism, and that and his guilt, which he is also unconscious of, holds him back. Helene, an awakening being, tears down the veil, expanding David's consciousness and exposing his guilt.
The Nazis had a genius for mocking life. Life is a chimney says the father. That is true - in this fundamental way: We are all locked in the consciousness of our own survival. The soul of this play is the refusal to accept the destruction of love, which is the courage to go beyond our need to survive materially. The power of The Chimney comes, like the atom, from the splitting of my soul over the inhibiting fear of the murderousness of life and the fearless courage to love life.
The Chimney is about constriction, boundedness, limitation - spirits trapped in bodies; brains trapped in unknowing. However, Helene's interpretation of what happened in that chimney between her parents - really, a leap of faith - that even in the belly of horror, Helene can imagine that humans can love: That, in her world, is the wonder of God, the very opposite of constriction - to love in spite of all.
Melville, a well-known agnostic, once wrote to Hawthorne, a well-known religious pessimist, "the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and we are the pieces".
The characters of The Chimney, like all victims of trauma, are struggling, yet again, for trauma never seems to end, to put the Godhead back together one more time.
Painting - The Chimney, by Ron Morin
Contact Ron - ronmarcel@comcast.net
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