None so blind: the Galloway affair

May as well enter the fray, as most other writers have in this country.  But how to deal with the maelstrom of "issues" that have jumped out of the closet? Why is this strange jack-in-the-box suddenly exploding out of the container, if everything is going so well (as the more privileged writers insist)? Why are you so upset all of a sudden, why are "all you survivor people out there" in such a snit? God's in his heaven, all's right with CanLit: isn't it? Hey, MY paycheque is OK, how about yours? Gone to any signings lately? And let's not get into all the other issues. Better yet: let's.  It's my video and I'll kvetch if I want to. But after all these years, I believe I have a right.

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Forgiveness: right or wrong?

I came across this on Facebook. I usually hate these things, whatever they're called, Little Cards of Wisdom that tell you what to do. They never suggest: they TELL, just assuming you've got it all wrong and need a lesson. 

But this one stood out. This is one that few people will even approach in a lifetime, and I am not even sure I agree with all of it.

If forgiveness means "it's OK what you did", then I do not forgive. I do not forgive the several men who molested me when I was a child and a teenager. 

If forgiveness means "I don't mind it, I'm over it, it doesn't affect me any more," then I do not forgive.

So what does it mean?

People say it's a  "letting go". If I stay angry, I'll burn the rubber down and run on bald tires (or something). So if I just let go of the memory and the damage and the way it all derailed my life, perhaps permanently, then everything will be OK.

I "should" forgive. I will feel so much better if I do.

This is some sort of psychological/spiritual imperative these days.

I don't know how to do this.

I thought I did.

But then, it has that line in it, "through their own confusions". The men who molested me were having a good time and wanted to grab someone's ass and rub up against me, and it didn't matter if it was the 14-year-old sister of the host of the party. They weren't "confused", they were drunk and lecherous and oblivious to my pain.

If they had it to do over again, they'd still do it, because the fact is, they enjoyed it and were not concerned with how much it might damage me. They did not think of that at all.

So do I forgive them? What does that mean? "It's OK that you very nearly brought about my suicide"? It will never be OK.

What IS OK is that I have a life. 

In spite of an incredible amount of personal pain, I have reclaimed it. I don't entirely understand this. I don't want to hate. I feel sorry for those sorry sons-of-bitches. I pity them (and a couple of them are dead), though I also feel considerable contempt.

Feeling sorry for, and feeling pity - are these things closer to "forgiveness", or to "hate"? This may be as far as I ever go on that glorious, impossibly idealized Buddhist path.

(But that last part, well. No matter how idealized, this is something I need so badly,  I can't even tell you.)

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Light comes from everywhere: the stone church

I seem to be obsessed with spring. This in spite of the fact it isn't even here yet: not for most of us. In the mild gloomy slick of Vancouver, winter never really comes, which is why croci are poking their purple Easter heads up above the soil, cherry blossom buds are ready to explode, and the roses at the Centennial Garden in Burnaby are already beginning to spear reddish-brown leaves directly out of their prickly, woody stems.

So I sit here in the a.m. with everything, or nothing, going on around me. I have become obsessed with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (which my Windows Media Player insists on listing as "Right" of Spring), and am listening to it now. What was chaotic, or at least what seemed chaotic back then, and is supposed to be chaotic, isn't at all. Now, with new ears, or a brain blasted clean by forces I don't understand, it is the most orderly piece of music I have ever heard.

As orderly as Spring:

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

As usual, Hopkins had me until the second stanza, when he went all Mary-ish on me again, as he always does. Poor little man, celibate but yearning, yearning for men, boys, all those forbidden things he put just out of his own reach. 

Even if I could write, I know I could not write this, because the art of building airy castles out of cinderblocks is given to so very few. So I plough ahead (yes! "Plough". And American readers, please don't see this emphasis on Canadian spelling as a slight: it's just that the constant, enveloping election coverage is beginning to wear me down. This is almost as exhausting as the Canadian election that caused normally-sane people to draw Hitler moustaches on Stephen Harper.) Life is a keep-on-going, it's the only thing I've found that makes any sense.

Yesterday, something sneaked into the back of my head. A memory, or a dream? A dreamlike memory. It was a memory of a wall made of slate, or something like it. A room, no, a whole building that was built like a box. Square and unadorned. And there were stone walls, impossibly, emitting light, light that seemed to come from everywhere.

I knew this had happened to me, or else it was a dream so vivid it had left a burn-mark, a scar, a brand on me somewhere. My very skin was affected. I began to search my mind, but as with so many other fragile memories, I couldn't chase it or it would flee away from me. I had to sit there and see how much of it would come back of its own accord.

I was in a room, no, a whole building, and the walls were made of some sort of rock, and the rock was emitting light. Everywhere. I had no idea where I was in the dream/memory and couldn't place it, except that it must have been in our far-ago travels.

We had been to Utah to see Bryce Canyon twice (and surely, if God exists, s/he lives there in the sacred peach-gold turning of the light). I associated Utah and our trip to the States with minerals, rocks, petrified wood, but also religion. Could this not have been some odd little church (for I believed it must be a church) situated in the middle of nowhere, and made of some thin, porous rock, like alabaster? I asked my husband if he remembered it, and I got that tolerant, no-you're-crazy look I am so used to getting. He sort of acknowledged something like that might have happened some time, probably somewhere in the Southwest on our trips out there. 

But no. It couldn't be that. For some reason it seemed much farther back.

I started my usual internet search: churches made of alabaster/rock/translucent rock. Even names of minerals that would admit light. Nothing. It HAD to be translucent rock of some kind, and I was coming up empty, as almost never happens on the internet now.

But then.

Then, something, a photo of what looked like a rock plate with striations, and light just barely showing through it, not streaming but easing, glowingly. In fact, the rock faces on this wall - and there it was, a wall - were all glowing pinkly, redly, amberly.

It was a church.

It was a church in Switzerland, in a town called Meggen on Lake Lucerne - and yes, we had stayed near the lake for a day in 1998 - 1998! It was called St. Pius Church, and was the strangest Catholic church we had ever seen, bare, austere, just a box made of marble slabs. Marble so thin it emitted light, perhaps in that way Michelangelo exploited in his statues, giving them an almost phosphorescent glow. The place was so austere that it was almost severe: hard wooden benches with no backs, an altar too minimalist to be real with a cross suspended in the mid-air, and some sort of side-sanctuary made of cement - oh, cement! But I remembered it all, every bit of it, especially the way the light seemed to come from every direction.

The other strange thing, though, was how very little I could find out about this place. There was simply nothing but a very few Google images, with text either in German or Italian, or no text at all. The English text, what little I found, was in that stilted and often hilarious form that bespeaks the literal, translated word-for-word.

What I could (finally) winkle out was that this place was built in 1964 by - Fueg? Was that his name? The plain boxy shape was typical mid-'60s ultra-modern style, something I am trying very hard to forget  

This means the outside was almost howlingly ugly, like a particularly awful industrial building with an eyesore of a 1960s alarm-clock-looking tower outside it. It reminded me of the big TV aerial we used to have, the one you could literally climb.

But then things began to fall apart. Yes, I DID remember transparent rock, light, and a very boxy, square building. But how did we find this thing in Meggen, Switzerland? We stayed in Lucerne, and I don't think we ever came across any tourist info about this awful-looking (from the outside) place. We were used to seeing overwhelmingly-ornate cathedrals with flying buttresses, glistening with garishly-coloured stained glass, Catholic ostentation in the extreme. Yet here was this bare, unlikely, almost-impossible place.

I don't remember the outside. Not at all. No one would go near such a building unless they knew about what was inside. This place would have necessitated a deliberate side-trip, and we didn't have time for that.

But I put my HAND on that rock!

It was cool-warm to the touch, not as cold as you expected, because it had soaked up sun rays even though the day was cloudy. Far from being echo-y and cold, the acoustics were beautiful, warmly concentrating sound as if embracing it.

This couldn't be the same place, though. My "memory", if that's what it is, is of a small place we happened upon while driving around in Utah. The outside looked much like the inside (I think, or at least was more inviting than this cinderblock factory in a nothing little town). Someone invited us in and told us that the place had only one natural light source. The light came through the rock walls, which were made of gypsum or alabaster (or something). There was no electrical wiring whatsoever, and at night they used candles. We didn't stay long after marvelling over the walls, because really, there was nothing else to see.

I understand how memories from different times can become conflated. I see how rare it would be for ANY cathedral to be built of marble slabs, carefully chosen to match their grain. I understand it would be extremely expensive, and that even inside, there would be aspects of it (a lot of metal to hold the slabs together, and a Cosco-like gridwork on the ceiling) that were ugly by necessity. There is no way that even a mini-version of this could be built over here. But I just don't remember the size, the scale of this thing. Though like real estate photos, the rare pictures of it (and I've used nearly all of them here) might make it look a lot bigger.

Adding to my confusion is the fact that on the internet, where I very rarely run up against stone walls, this place barely exists. There are no YouTube videos of it. People don't write about it in their travels because they don't go there. The outside is just plain hideous, plainer than plain, a dud.

I don't know what happened here. If this happened at all - and now it's up for grabs - it was eighteen years ago, our grandkids hadn't been born yet. . . and we were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary with what we knew would be our one and only trip to Europe. Unlike all my strutting, fretting, ostentatious "friends" on Facebook, I can't post lavish photos of Algiers and Bath and Provence and wherever-the-hell, the travel destination of the month, with even more enthralling pictures of ravioli from that fabulous little Tuscan cafe (and by all means, show me your food!), because we are too old and poor and our health too dicey to go overseas, or travel anywhere at all any more. 

So that is that.

This must be it, though. It must. Where else would you find a whole church (you can't exactly call it a cathedral because it's basically a box made of stone) built so strangely? When the light kisses and splashes the stone from the outside, the walls inside glow like beaten gold. Nowhere else on earth will you find light like this. If there were an earthquake, even a small one, the whole thing would come crashing down, for those marble slabs are all of 27 centimeters thick: just over one inch.

One inch of stone between you and the sun. Think of it. But why is the memory so mixed-together with something quite different? Bill does not remember this at all, and has a hard time believing we were actually there.

Which perhaps we weren't. Perhaps we were somewhere else? But I know I could not dream stone walls emitting light. 

I'm NOT trying to make a point here, except a rather queasy one about memory. Back when I was wrestling and grappling with PTSD (which had no name then) from my father's abuse when I was a small child, there was a sudden, very high-profile "movement" called False Memory Syndrome, in which believers (whose daughters all seemed to be claiming sexual abuse from family members) tried to force on us the idea that we could create any old memory we wanted to, usually from sheer malice and a desire to hurt our parents as much as possible.

This could not have come at a worse time for me, and I was so close to suicide I was hanging on by my fingernails. Every day I signed a contract I had drawn up for myself: I will not kill myself today, dated it, and filed it with my therapist. My sister sent me whole magazine stories about "FMS" (which, who knows, may have wormed its way into the DSM by now) with long passages underlined. When I tried to explain to her what I was going through, the way my guts were being pulled out in a long ribbon by something I NEVER wanted for myself or anyone else, she ripped the letter to shreds and mailed the pieces back to me.

I had a letter from my dad, hand-written in all-caps: NO! IT DID NOT HAPPEN! He had the document countersigned by a psychiatrist who used to treat me when I was fifteen years old. This doctor was certain it didn't happen, as if he had been there. One thing you can say about my family: they sure know how to discredit a person.

The point of all this is, I don't want to believe memories can be scrambled or altered by time. They were all telling me it didn't happen. At all. My sister is a lot older than me, which (she said) guaranteed it never happened. It's a sore point with me. I DO remember the essence of something, of putting my hand on the cool-warm stone which was so very smooth. I remember Bill and I, both of us, marvelling that such a thing could even be.

But why does part of my brain say, "no, wait a minute. . . "

Not that it doesn't exist at all, but perhaps that it existed in a different form, smaller, more rudimentary, and somewhere in the United States (for Canada would never produce such a mineral oddity - we don't have marble anywhere). Knowing also that such a thing is virtually impossible, unless a North American architect decided to copy it on a smaller scale.

So what is the point here? Does this have anything to do with spring? Of course not. We didn't even travel to Switzerland in spring, it was the fall. Maybe that lovely Donovan song I posted yesterday? Maybe the crocuses, the everlasting green of Vancouver - the memory springing up or sneaking in like new life from nothing?

Probably there's no connection at all. I have never wanted to post polished essays here, but explorations that don't ever happen in a straight line. Which explains all the P.S.-es, the "oh wait!" at the end of the posts. If discoveries don't happen in a straight line, surely memories don't come back that way, or are changed in some sense - but are they invented, as my family insisted they were, just for spite or for sport?

But I DID put my hand on that stone, meaning it existed then, and must exist right now, this very minute, somewhere.

As usual, there is a small P. S. (until more seaweed trailings stream from the oozing clump I pulled out of nowhere last night). Someone here has tried to describe St. Pius in lyrical terms. After that, an amen.

Project description

The geometrical rigour and the clarity of St. Pius’s proportions help give the church its presence in the majestic – and dynamic – alpine setting and within a heterogeneous residential quarter. The white of the marble appears to enter into a dialogue with the distant glaciers. This dialectic is set forth inside the church with the contrast between the rhythm of the 74 steel columns and the cloud-like painterly structure of the stone wall panels. From the exterior, the polished walls appear to be pure white, while at night the interiors are cast in a honey-yellow glow, and their velvety surfaces radiate warmth and physical presence. St. Pius’s has not received the widespread acclaim that the expressive churches by Füeg’s contemporaries Walter Förderer and Gottfried Böhm met with. (Frank Kaltenbach)

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Little Sexpot (short fiction)

It’s not that she wasn’t grateful. When you don’t get to go anywhere on a Saturday night because everyone thinks you’re a loser and full of shit, you should be grateful for any kind of social contact at all.

Or so her siblings thought. Her sister Noreen was thirteen years older than she was, and obviously Mum and Dad were going to trust her with her little sister's wellbeing. Besides, it was good for her to “get out”, much better than hiding in her room crying like she always did.

Her older brother Don had lots of friends too, and their wives came along, but that didn’t stop the “goings-on” that were considered to be all part of the fun. She noticed the minute she stepped into the babble and funk of these parties that she was the mascot, younger than anyone else by ten years or more. Was she game? A target? Who knew, but what she did know was that she was supposed to be grateful.

There was an obnoxious creep called Shivas, but after a while she figured out that it wasn’t his real name, that it came from his habit of making a certain drink called a Shivas Special. Chivas Regal and one ice cube. Another was Tang crystals dissolved in vodka.

They were all quite interested in seeing how the mascot would react to having her glass filled and refilled. After all, she was allowed wine at home. Lots of it. Her parents didn’t frown on her drinking and even seemed to think it was “good for her”. Her brother and sister waved the banner of booze at every opportunity, insisting it was an unalloyed good, even when they woke the next day vomiting and ashen.

The party deteriorated over time, got louder, with people bumping together and the smell of pot wafting under door-cracks. Once she felt a hand, someone’s hand, didn’t know whose. Then her brother’s best friend started smiling at her. She looked the other way. Like the Ugly Duckling, she just didn’t believe it at first.

But then he sort of beckoned with his eyes. Come upstairs with me. Upstairs?? His wife was over in the corner flirting with her brother like they always did. Did she dare to do this, could she sneak up with him and –

This is how it always happened.

It happened because her brother’s friend was a really good kisser. He knew the spots to touch. Her body responded like flame, though she felt overpowering shame at her reaction. She knew she wasn’t supposed to feel this way, to feel anything at all. But she also knew she had caused this, somehow. He managed to convey without words that he had always found her attractive and not mousy or fat.

All she knew about sex she had learned from books, the books stashed in her father’s bureau drawer under his underwear and pajamas. When her parents were away at choir practice, she took them out. They were very clinical and  did not deal with passion or pleasure, as if those sensations did not belong in the field of sex.

But she knew about erections, because he was pressing his against her body with force. Her heart beginning to race, she wondered if she would be raped. She wondered if she should fight back, break away. But the truth is, she loved the attention.

“Hey, you two!” a voice came up the stairs. “Get down here, will you? Quit messing around.” It was a woman’s voice, and at first she wondered if it was the man’s wife.  When she came downstairs, stumbling a little, she saw it was her brother’s girl friend, her makeup badly askew. The woman grabbed her around the waist and squeezed: “Little Lolita,” she crooned. “Little sexpot.”

The booze continued to flow. Her sister held court in an astonishing display of vanity and narcissism, “looking after” her little sister by ignoring her and handing her over to the good graces of Shivas and his endless noxious drinks. People made less and less sense. She felt more hands on her and didn’t know who they were.

She remembered trying to tell her sister about what was happening to her at these parties, what was being done to her. Done to her by married men with their wives in the next room (or even the same room). Her older sister rolled her eyes a bit and said, “I don’t know why you’re so upset! You don’t seem to have any friends your own age. This way you can have a social outlet with the grownups.”

When she told her a little bit about the seductions, she shook her head.

“Are they having sex with you?” For one second, concern seemed to flicker in her eyes.

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. You’re exaggerating. I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with a little smooch and a snuggle.  Look, we’re trying to include you and I really think you should be more grateful.”

Much later, she read about something called Walpurgis Night, a sort of witch’s Sabbath with hideous swarms of demonic figures that swept through communities leaving blackened wreckage in their wake. But this was supposed to be an advantage for her, a social outlet!

How many 14-year-olds wouldn’t give their right arm to be included in a group of adults with full-blown adult privileges?

She would go home after midnight, stagger into the bathroom and throw up all the Chivas Regal. The next morning, pale as a spook, she would throw up again, with her mother hearing her but saying nothing.

Her mother knew. She knew everything. Wanted to be rid of this social liability, to hand her over. Keep her happy. Later that day the family received a bouquet. She knew it was from her brother’s friend, the one who had pinned and groped her. It couldn’t be anyone else.

”Had a great time last night," the sloppily-written tag read. "See you next week."

It was not signed. Incredibly, her parents did not ask who had sent it, but put the pink roses in a vase on the table. 

Twenty years later, the family was absolutely horrified to learn that Little Sister had joined AA. It was a total disgrace to the family, who had never had problems like that and never would. It was obviously an act of hostility on her part. They could never understand why she wasn't more grateful for all they had done for her. When she began to see a therapist, it was even worse, for that implied that the family was crazy. Then they decided that SHE was the one who was crazy, and the matter was closed.

Post-script. Some years later my brother's friend, the one who liked to send me roses, lost his job and all his money and (finally) his wife, and shot himself in the head. I suppose these things never end well. For me, they never end at all. 

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Josh Duggar: let's read that first draft!

Thus, the abject, Jimmy-Swaggart-esque apology written by Josh Duggar's lawyers, before yet another lawyer edited the thing. Red-pencilled are the remarks that might be considered "litigious". In other words, too close to the truth.

Needless to say, Josh's little escapades led to TLC cancelling (after long and ratings-conscious deliberation) the wildly-popular paean to assembly-line babymaking in the Fundamentalist realm, 19 Kids and Counting.

So what will Josh do now? I think he ought to drag his sorry ass to jail for some serious time, but that won't happen. He'll twist things around so that if WE don't forgive him, there will be something wrong with us. We'll be choosing to hold bitterness in our hearts rather than surrender the whole icky mess to the Lord God Almighty and his sidekick, J. Christ.

But it's more likely TLC will choose to build another reality show around Josh. Shall we call it 19 Sins and Counting? 

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Woody Allen: creepier and creepier

Blogger's note: This is just a little piece that ran in Esquire, an update of a much earlier article that must have been ignored at the time. I remember trying to watch Hannah and her Sisters again a few years ago and having to turn it off because of all the child-molesting jokes. Yes, jokes. While this isn't legal proof that Woody Allen is a pedophile, it does reveal a sickening and stomach-turningly insensitive attitude towards the most horrific form of child abuse. 

That astonishing "oh, you were lucky, I WISH I had been molested" attitude is something I have actually heard people say. Everybody knows they enjoy it, after all. So it's no big deal, even pleasurable for them (or, even better, it initiates them into sex, which is doing them a favor).

What has always struck me about sexual abuse is that people can look right at it and not see it. When a lot of women and men stepped forward in the '80s and '90s to claim they had been psychologically devastated by incest, a juggernaut called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation sprang up to run them over. 

To some degree, it worked, but I can't help but notice a persistent theme in reality TV shows, the kind that feature people who weigh 600 pounds and can't get out of bed, or live in a festering landfill of rats and garbage heaped to the ceiling. Almost all of them say they were molested as children. Either they all got together and formed a Let's Pretend We Were Molested club, or they are revealing the horrific psychological aftereffects of being violated, a force that leaves a legacy of jaw-droppingly extreme damage that can be permanently crippling.

We laughed at this stuff. Think of it. I don't know why - it was like laughing at holocaust victims (which some people also do). It was a way of acknowledging abuse and burying it at the same time, joking it away as trivial, so that even if it IS happening, it's no big deal.

Dylan Farrow's accusations are, in my mind, becoming more and more plausible. But what makes me furious are the statements I keep hearing: "We can't comment on this because nobody really knows what went on in that attic." It's a neat way of avoiding indicting a beloved and rich and powerful figure, while at the same time leaving Dylan's accusations in that hazy area of "false memories", memories that were "implanted" by her hysterical mother.

Two people know what happened - I believe - but for absolute certain, one does, and he was the one who held all the cards, a father-figure to Mia's children (in spite of his strenuous denials) for years. If he did those things that Dylan Farrow is talking about, he will never confess to it because he truly can't or won't see what all the fuss is about.

Re-Watching Woody Allen

The newly-chilling themes that you can see throughout his movies

By Stephen Marche on February 4, 2014

FEBRUARY 5, 2014: This post has been updated to include more examples from Woody Allen's films.

MICKEY: Why all of a sudden is the sketch dirty?
ED: Child molestation is a touchy subject, and the affiliates...
MICKEY: Read the papers, half the country's doing it!

ED:Yes, but you name names.

The above is from an early scene in Woody Allen's 1986 film, Hannah and Her Sisters. I've been thinking about it since reading Dylan Farrow's essay in The New York Times, accusing her adoptive father of molesting her when she was a child. The allegations are nothing new. Nobody except Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen knows what happened in that attic, and no one else ever will. But the sheer vividness with which Farrow recounts the experience, as well as the forum in which she does so, is enough to make even the most ardent fan reevaluate an artist's entire body of work, especially one as personal as Allen's.

So what happens when you go looking for evidence of sex crimes in Woody Allen movies? If you look, you find it, again, and again, and again.

Take this scene from Manhattan, when the Allen character, Isaac, introduces his new girlfriend to his friends.

YALE: Jesus, she's gorgeous.

ISAAC: But she's seventeen. I'm forty-two and she's seventeen. I'm older than her father. Do you believe that? I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father. That's the first time that phenomenon ever occurred in my life.

EMILY: He's drunk.

YALE: You're drunk. You know you should never drink.

ISAAC: Did I tell you that my ex-wife—

EMILY: Who, Tina?

ISAAC: My second ex-wife is writing a book about our marriage and the breakup…It's really depressing. You know she's going to give all those details out, all my little idiosyncrasies and my quirks and mannerisms. Not that I have anything to hide because, you know...but there are a few disgusting little moments that I regret.

How are we supposed to read "a few disgusting little moments that I regret" when Isaac is dating a girl still in high school? And what are we to make of the scene in Love and Death (1975), in which the wise Father Andre tells the Allen character, "I have lived many years and, after many trials and tribulations, I have come to the conclusion that the best thing is…blond twelve-year-old girls. Two of them, whenever possible”? Or this exchange from Stardust Memories (1980), in which the Allen character, Sandy, hints at incest when talking with his lover Dorrie about her father?

SANDY: What about you? Did you have a little crush on him? You can admit this to me if you like.

DORRIE: Sure, we had a little flirting.

SANDY: A little small flirt? Mother away getting shock treatment, and the only beautiful daughter home. Long lingering breakfasts with Dad.

In a later scene, Sandy and Dorrie have the following argument, while in the background a large newspaper headline on a wall reads "Incest between father's..."
SANDY: I'm not attracted to her. What are you talking about?DORRIE: Staring at her all through dinner. Giving each other looks.

SANDY: Stop it. She's fourteen. She's not even fourteen. She's thirteen and a half.

DORRIE: I don't care. I used to play those games with my father, so I know. I've been through all that.

SANDY: What games? You think I'm flirting with your kid cousin?

DORRIE: You smile at her.

SANDY: Yeah, I smile at her. I'm a friendly person. What do you want? She's a kid. This is stupid. I don't want to have this conversation.

DORRIE: Don't tell me it's stupid. I used to do that with my father across the table. All those private jokes. I know.

Incestuous themes—stated or implicit—seethe throughout the whole of Allen's career. Here's a snippet of dialogue from Honeymoon Motel, a one-act play produced three years ago:

FAY: I was a little girl. I had an Uncle Shlomo…

NINA: Oh Mom!

FAY: Three fingers, he tried to molest me. Suddenly, three fingers I feel fondling me—

JUDY: What's the three fingers got to do with it?

FAY: It's hard to explain, but most people get groped by five.

SAM (to FAY): At least you were molested. I didn't have sex till I was twenty-five—you were the first one.

That idea: that sexual exploitation and education are conjoined also runs through the Allen canon. In Whatever Works (2009), the Allen character (played by Larry David) marries a childlike twenty-one-year-old, returning to the basic romantic situation that has motivated Allen's work from the beginning, and which you can see even in Annie Hall (1977): A man educates the women he sleeps with. He raises them. Once they're raised, he's no longer interested.

So what are we supposed to do? Every comedian alive, every writer alive, has been influenced by Woody Allen. In a way, the dilemma this poses is nothing new. Artists can be scum. Every grownup knows this. Roman Polanski was convicted of violating a thirteen-year-old girl, but he still made Chinatown. A recent biography of the German essayist Walter Benjamin, a personal intellectual hero of mine, revealed that when it came to his wife and child, he was, not to put too fine a point on it, an irresponsible asshole. The first compiler of the tales of King Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory, was a well-known rapist. Separating the quality of the art from the life of the artist is necessary for anyone who wants to enjoy anything.

But with Woody Allen, such a separation is impossible, because his movies are so thoroughly about himself, and about his own condition, and, as it turns out, the moral universe in which he exists—one in which there is no expectation of justice. Consider the final conversation in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), in which the main character, Judah, tells his story of getting away with a terrible crime, disguising it as a movie he's pitching:

JUDAH: People carry awful deeds around with them. What do you expect him to do, turn himself in? This is reality. In reality, we rationalize. We deny or we couldn't go on living.

CLIFF: Here's what I would do. I would have him turn himself in. 'Cause then you see your story assumes tragic proportions. Because in the absence of a God or something, he is forced to assume that responsibility himself. Then you have tragedy.

JUDAH: But that's fiction. That's movies. I mean, you've seen too many movies. I'm talking about reality. If you want a happy ending you should go see a Hollywood movie.

Only in Allen's case, Hollywood isn't the bringer of false light, but a willing accomplice to darkness. The end of Dylan Farrow's letter, not anything said by Sarah Palin or any other Fox News commentator, is the most stinging indictment of Hollywood I have ever read:

What if it had been your child, Cate Blanchett? Louis CK? Alec Baldwin? What if it had been you, Emma Stone? Or you, Scarlett Johansson? You knew me when I was a little girl, Diane Keaton. Have you forgotten me?
Are you imagining that? Now, what's your favorite Woody Allen movie?

But it's not just Hollywood. It's the rest of us, too. What about those of us who are Woody Allen's fans? What the hell have we been watching all this time?

 Esquire's Woody Allen Profile From 1994

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