Woman in the Dunes

Rod's excellent comment on the film misses: the absurdity, deception & demonic that make it a 'home' you rightly want to escape from. Not simply conservatism. Existentialism! A world drained of meaning means there is no 'world'

Looking Back (2009-19)

How to make sense of this decade?

Through films, books, music? Or life itself, which has veered in a strange direction?

Beginning's End

The end of the road is another road. At the end of the road is another road.

Pensacola

There's this scene in the film Contact where we see a place that is somehow more real because it exists as a memory. It also reminds you how spectacularly beautiful the earth is (as does the picture above). If I was a Buddhist in a previously life that might explain why I'm so drawn to that photograph. What is beautiful always reminds of you something else that is beautiful, perhaps from some former time, by some former self. Muslims would say, I think, that we live in the shadow of the Garden. 

The second picture is a stark warning of the shape of things to come. What happens in Greenland, some say, is a litmus test for the impact of greenhouse gasses on all our lives. 

~

Pope Francis: "In the prevailing culture, priority is given to the outward, the immediate, the visible, the quick, the superficial and the provisional."

Keynes, on the money as usual:

" Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are largely concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexity and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols."  

Perfect rationality, perfect foresight and, therefore, perfect control. Except that's not how things work. Since we live (and die) in time there is no position we can take that is completely outside it. There is no thinking from the point of view of the universe, or a view from nowhere.

The impulse to transcend time is, perhaps, always with us but it leads to delusion if it isn't tempered by the mundane realities of daily existence. If we want to 'intuit unity' then we always resist doing so as well. Everything, you think, lies in the hyphen that at once connects and separates: I-We. A bit like &.

Perhaps the very essence of what is beautiful is drawn from this tension between the ephemeral and the permanent, as if one couldn't exist without the other?

~

Life

Is it possible to fall in love with a film on the basis of a few scenes? Can a few 'stills' be so chiseled, so jewel-like that the failings of life can be overlooked? (An old religious problem: to what extent do representations take us way from life; to what degree do they throw light on it?)

This is not a commentary on post-war Japan and its interminably complicated bureaucracy. The main purpose of the film is certainly not to convey the horrors of a world that is over-run by functionaries and the impersonal. Perhaps only a modern European imagination could really talk seriously about organization and a really old one (Greek) about Labyrinths. No, the portrait of the obfuscations and willed deafness are light and almost comical-perhaps even superficial- to our eyes.

The film's central preoccupation is elsewhere. But how to make a film about life, the living...except by talking about death. There is no heroic striving for immortality against this inevitability but nor is there a passive acceptance of Necessity. Death is, and can only be, something that is ambiguous: Thanatos and Eros.

The film starts off with a depiction of a life that is not lived but simply passed.
(Back in my school days there were the following categories: distinction, merit, pass, good fail, and fail). Everyone goes through the motions and this is what qualifies as doing just enough. A good fail. The whole aim of such a life is to avoid life, to look busy and run down time. What would we do without our clocks and watches! To do nothing 'is' to be nothing. Already, one wonders how deep rooted these ideas -of death and nothingness-are in the Japanese spirit.

The main protagonist of the film devotes himself to his work (which is really making sure that no work gets done). A singular dedication to an ideal, replete with the bourgeois markers of respectability: a hat, a certificate in honour of all those of years of service, are what bind a life and its serial moments together. Otherwise, as Watana-be says in a moment of reflection, I can't remember a single day . After the death of his wife he decides to live a solitary life-ostensibly for the sake of his child , but in reality we learn that this too is a farce, an excuse. For how long can we blame external circumstances for our choices? When all is said and done we are what we choose to be. He is given the nickname of 'the mummy' and this is highly appropriate for one of the world's living dead, for someone who has tried to freeze time.

To escape from the inevitable by creating a routine for oneself. Perhaps the whole of human culture is nothing more than this. Work, too, is one such social construction, as are our intellectual endeavours. As long as one is active one is alive. But in work the aim is not just to feed the stomach. Man shall not live by bread alone. Gradually, he realises that he is being eaten up from within. He has a disease that everyone knows of, but which no-one has to courage to name...

The first sparkling moment comes when he is torn between telling his son about his stomach cancer and patiently keeping it to himself, as he has with everything else. Then in a moment of utter decisiveness (or is it desperation) he rushes up the near vertical flight of stairs, clambering on his hands and feet. But in the dark he comes to an abrupt stop. How to speak the unspeakable? Can the father ever initiate the son into the inevitable? Would it help either of them? If one has to stop to think about an emotion was it a true one in the first place? As he halts the light dramatically fades away and he is rooted to the spot, half way between different worlds, as it were, hesitant and unsure of himself. Can one unwrap the cloth that has bound a soul for so long and then expect love to still flourish? In that moment-which lasts for an eternity- he is made acutely aware of the infinite distance between himself and his own flesh and blood. It is not death but life itself that alienates us from the life of others.

He thinks back to those early years with his son. Has his life with him been anything but a catalogue of unforeseen and unpredictable departures (the death of his wife, the son going off to war, him having to miss his son's operation)? Is life itself anything but a series of departures ? Even the only moment he can remember with any pride soon turns into a reflection on his helplessness before the uncertainties that his son faces. He can, like a mummy, provide security but not love. Later, when he recalls the distance between himself and his son, he says it is like drowning, sinking in sheer darkness, reaching out to cling on to something. We fall into love and we fall out of it.

The next magical scene occurs when he is told by a co-worker over lunch that despite all of his denials he still loves his son. This is, perhaps, the most amazing shot in the whole film. He looks up, shyly, almost embarrassed, and then his face radiates with a smile as he comes to recognize the truth of this. It comes to him like a revelation, a light shone on the dark corner of his musty soul moves to the surface, illuminating the old man's face. This is the beginning of his redemption. The earlier attempt-which had seen him abandoning himself to a night of pure pleasure-was utterly futile and he had known it to be so as well. For what value can there be in fleeting sensations that live for a day then die? He may change his hat, temporarily adopt a new personality, but none of this will do: The reality of poetry is nothing if not lived. One can never drown out the pain and a life without thinking about, working for, others eventually ends up in the intoxication of the self. Melancholy, Kirk Douglas once said, is another name for egotism.

The solution-if it is as solution-comes to him at a restaurant where someone else's birthday is begin celebrated. And we are not surprised by this for we are really witnessing a new birth.

There are other stylistically interesting features-like the way in which the siren goes off at precisely the last time that we see Watana alive. Perhaps the most memorable scene , though, is when after a few frenetic songs have been played and danced to in a night cub Watana starts to sing an old song from the 1910's. Everyone stops what they are doing, at once fascinated and repelled by his hauntingly tragic voice that seems to be coming to them from elsewhere. They are transfixed by his unearthly voice but the song itself is really about the earth and life. A few people move away from him, unable to bear the telling of it. There are some truths that not even song can carry.

It is as if Death himself is singing but a death that is tired of dying and that wants to remind people of life. Up to that moment the people in the nightclub had been dancing crazily to a music that was not their own. When the real beauty of life is in accepting its transience and being finely aware of it, not an overcoming of it or a forgetting of it. But Watana also knows that the bitter-sweetness of life is that life is blind to its own end, that only death can remember what life really is....

glamour

Roxana had recommended this film years ago but only now did I find a copy that was a decent print and that had subtitles.

There are moments of beautiful stillness in the film and a wonderfully eerie sense pervades parts of it as well..but..what? You just couldn't fully relate to it. The Swimmer or John Huston's The Dead seem far more mysterious-perhaps because you were more emotionally engaged-although in a different way.

~~

The thrill is gone (B.B.). Or has it? How we love to be haunted, how things never really end, just take a different form. As a child, it was the Ghost of Motley Hall, and the faintly understood idea that a place could be inhabited by the memories of people-and that people could exist and do exist in the form of a shadowy half-life, unfulfilled by destiny, trying to relive their life again without the failures, unfairness or mistakes- or more simply locked into repeating themselves, hoping there'd be some understanding in that.


"You look familiar...I never forget a face" 

Ghosts are always waiting for someone to kill them, to love them and then kill them.

~~

There is some pleasure in eating an ancient grain, something that has survived for thousands of years. When initially sown the hands would not have known who, later, would be giving thanks.

Some word, too, in our heart survives, though no-one speaks it.

~~

There are parts of us-our way of thinking-that are truly and astonishingly ancient (as if to say: our affiliating with the animals is carried over into us, even if unconsciously); the light glinting off a mid-morning stream, the last glow of warmth from burnt wood, the stark outline of the branches of a tree as crooked and convoluted as anything on earth...all of that seems vaguely but profoundly familiar. 

Why do we want to be spooked, haunted? Is it because mystery always leaves things open even when it takes the most rigid of forms? Everything is there and not there at the same time. Ghosts remind us of ourselves. 

the wind will carry us

"I’m not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don’t really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful."

"In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and he language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leave; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight." 

---Ursula Le Guin.

~

Gosh, the Iranians sure know how to make boring films! Invariably there's something pretentious about them, a false, self-conscious and deliberate kind of intelligence-a bit like the French in that way.

"Stunning"..a "lyrical masterpiece" etc., etc. Please, do me a favour! Seventy-five minutes in but I don't think I can stomach much more of this silliness. 

Leviathan

This is no country for old men, for those whose time is gone. I was brought up on the land and lived here as the great fish does in the sea, unknowingly, imagining-wrongly, as it turns out-that things would carry on forever. I am the last one here, all those dying generations at their song. I should have listened harder. The days are wasted, the idol of the days...

Forgive me, I was not myself.

All of that happened a long time ago. I was someone else then. You gather, from the great importance I place on what is spoken, the human voice that doesn't change with time or betray you, the way hands or the eyes do, you gather that what is said cannot be unsaid, and is out there in the world. Now, tell me Majnun, those words that are close to your heart.

I thought I could remember you off by heart, take you in, but I got to the first three letters and halted. My tongue was dry. What kind of dream is this? I have only to look this way, tilt my head at a certain angle and the whole world appears empty. I remember. And that sense of us being but small flickering lights in a dark sky has always stayed with us.

Summon some words..how few words we have today! I sit at my room and look out of the window

'Or watch the sad increase
Across the mind...

When the street
Darkens. Among the rain and stone places
I find only an ancient sadness falling...

{Each person dies alone]

And in their blazing solitude...

Having one simple fall
As a candle-flame swells, and is thinned...
the shape of loss.'

In the last days wolves will speak as sheep and no-one will recognize anyone else, no-one will take another's word. Each man will be divided against the other, and against himself. Men in hats will speak with false tongue but when the world ends there will be no tending to what is important and their hats will fly off their pointed heads.

'The storm is here, the savage seas hop
On land and crash thick dams' 

||

Russian

Ways of approaching...

You've watched two films by the much celebrated Pasolini and both have been, to be quite frank, mediocre. There are moments of beauty and tenderness in this one, but overall you have to wonder how much artistic input goes into a film that is full of quotes from the Bible. Yes, the faces are wonderfully expressive but you were hoping for a political/Marxist angle. Perhaps you want to see a film through Muslim or Jewish eyes..

If there was any chance of that then the Gospel according to St. Matthew would have been the best bet (cp. to john, for example). 

On the other hand, it could be the desire to end all politics, competitiveness-as well as the scapegoating of victims that is the cycle of mimentic violence- is what constitutes Christianity's distinctiveness and radicalness. How to live in the world and not be of the world, how to give no thought for the 'morrow. Not by bread alone, and not bread first. No political community is (or can be?) built on love. That kind of inwardness will always set up a barrier to the dominance of the state..the power of the state no longer matters because it isn't real power.

So, in this film there is barely the faintest of hints of Roman occupation. No mention of the zealots. 

In Matthew we see Jesus(pbuh) from very much within a Jewish tradition (Vermes, for example) before St. Paul's understanding of the centrality of 'the risen Christ'takes hold. But what of James, the brother of Jesus or 5:18: not an iota of the law shall be changed? 

||

A far better film was Edvard Munch by the director Peter Watkins. Here the use of words was less direct and therefore employed to greater effect. Which begs the question: what is realism? To depict reality one needs to look at it from an angle-as Tarkovsky does. Ways of approaching. I don't think there can be realism, the 'thing-as-it is, without art, without mirrors, filters.    

black eyed dog

'It says somewhere in the Iliad , Blue death closes his eyes.'

'Won't you come and say
If you know the way to blue'

|| ||||   |

The life that went under; cold crystalline sea, diamond of foregtfulness. 

In the evening shade, by the trees, when I didn't speak, then I was true. 'Sadly, a long time ago/my voice fell mute.' Blue is the light that doesn't reach us. In the south, it is said, black becomes lighter, a shadow in summer, a word in parenthesis [ ].

Stage directions. The life of many.

[Exit]

A Late Quartet

 A subtle, intelligent picture with a suitably resonant title,...
---P. French, The Guardian.

How to write about music? How to film it? Is there a decent film that really gets to what music is about? If there is, then this wasn't it. 

Let's start with the subtle bit. This is a crass, cliche-ridden, trivial and grossly childish film. At times you wondered if it wasn't a parody. Keep on mentioning the Op. 131 enough to convince yourself that you're cultured, with delightfully refined sensibilities. You're clearly a league above the rest of the poor sods in hicksville. 

It's not just the wooden performances that grate; it's the fact that the roles assigned to each character are what one might expect from a person with an accounting-mindset, someone who is keenly aware of which formulas will strike the right notes for the upper middle classes: list the character traits of musicians you think will resonate with (or at least be understood by) popular culture. Keep it basic, don't allow any complexity to rear its ugly head. Tick the boxes. The cool, heartless foreigner; the melancholic dark-haired woman; the childish, bumbling fat man ("let's play it by heart"). All very fine and well, but why bring in the music to this story? This could have been the story of any group of four unintelligent people.

A brief affair with a tasty Spanish Flamenco dancer (who is, of course, up for a passionate one-night stand or more because she's introduced to Bartok). If only! (I hear some readers say).

As an aside: why must there be the obligatory sex scene? I don't know how the film ends but if Hoffman had any sense he'd quit the quartet and the Op. 131 and hook up with Passionate-Spanish-Woman. After all, didn't T.S. Eliot say...

And the cliches keep raining down. He explains to his wife that he is "sorry" for this one, grave mistake in a bit of hammy acting that is unsurpassed throughout this quite dire film- which is saying a lot. Then he asks, like a whimpering fool, "do you love me?" To which she replies: "I don't know". 

It seems like no-one really knows anything in this film. Seriously, why bother?

At this stage I gave up, my patience stretched to the limit. One hour of absolute shite when I could have been watching the Arsenal.

"A suitably resonant title"? No kidding, bro'!

French also wrote a review of the appallingly fake film about life in a monastery.

He writes: 'Of Gods and Men is a profound, immaculately acted movie. Its words are carefully considered, its images eloquent. The subject matter is urgently topical, the themes raised eternal and universal'. 

To which one must reply: nonsense on stilts!

...

It takes a bit of time
It takes a bit of time getting used to the strange techniques Peter Watkins uses in his film, Edvard Munch. After a while, though, the questions blend in with the narrative. There is a delay in time's passing. A few images return, again and again, as if Munch could never escape them. Sometimes one wonders who is speaking, or whose thoughts are being expressed..and you think to yourself: does it really matter? What thoughts or words belonged to anyone? 

He paints a hand and a face, the only receptive flashes of life in all the darkness. He erases all surrounding details, all that will fade, searches for greater individuality in the expression itself. He wants to forget, to remember, to name a feeling with the precision of a master. There is a moment and there is nothing to say or no-one will understand, today, the day after. Is it mysterious, the life not lived? The thin lines that briefly connected us, like a floating bridge. The storm-light is still with us in the morning and there's a brightness in the dappled shade still; it reminds him of a coin that she let slip from her hand.  

Awakenings

I think the first ten minutes of Awakenings are probably the saddest ten minutes of film you can remember. Of course, you'll always remember the compassionate smile of Robin Williams (though you prefer to remember him for his wackiness in Mork & Mindy)but it's DeNiro who steals the show.

But what is it? The fact of a life that is destined never to grow, that is somehow caught like the winter light in glass? The sudden entering into a different set of rituals..rituals of slow decline, a human being gradually becoming less of a human being as he is deprived of the changing seasons, turning points, various levels of awakenings? His friends are told something is wrong and he has a dim understanding that he's being dragged down and will never be part of their world again? School will go on, some kids will move out of town, time will flow, some will get married, die of heartbreak, fall, sing, but for him his life is locked in that one still moment-and it is not a moment of great beauty or grace or illumination.

Human beings love to carve into wood: their names, a heart, the name of the beloved...and hope to return to it one day, assuming it will last, imagining that the passing of time can be reversed, brought back.

'Och springs us from the domestic into the disconsolate. It is a common, almost pre-linguistic particle, one of those sounds (that in the words of Robert Frost) 'haven't been brought to book..living in the cave of the mouth. ..If 'ouch' is the complaint of the ego, 'och' is the sigh of ultimate resignation and illumination. Here, an on the countless occasions when it has been uttered by men and women inextremis since time immemorial, it functions as a kind of self-relinquishment, a casting of the spirit upon the mercy of fate, at once a protest and a cry for help.'

the inessential

Two films, both entertaining , but both lacking something.  McCabe and The Long Goodbye. As with the fiction, which you don't think you can read any more unless it really gets down to the bone, there's a limit to your enthusiasm for films. Larry's Party, for example. Enough writerly material to keep you going but at the end of the day you have to ask yourself: so what? 

You want a book or a film to illuminate some part of your life, bring half-understood things out of the shadows or make you see something in a new light. What you don't want to see is acting, or writing, or "ideas" or any attempt to seem profound. This is, of course, very much an age thing since with time it is harder to tolerate bullshit. Eventually, reality will catch up with you, no matter how many evasions. 

Is there a way in modern life to reach truth or goodness without suffering?

If you cannot see beauty or truth in one's life do you inevitably have to fall back on the mind, the imagination? An imagined beauty? Is art, then, just a high-brow mirror image of popular culture's familiar escape routes? 

McCabe: the west as it really was: muddy, cold, a shambles, full of stupidity, pettiness, made up of village bumpkins, whores, gamblers, goofs, tricksters, dealers and hustlers; a veritable Russian drama without the aristocrats.

Talking of Russia...Ivan's XTC sounded like a great story but the acting is so hammy, so awful that you're tempted to give up on it. If you don't want to see acting you equally don't want to see the lack of any acting! And yet, there was something that drew you in. 

Which leaves you with Bergman's Smiles and Frances Ha.

Much is being made of the renaissance of television with series like Breaking Bad, the Wire, the Sopranos, Sherlock, the Killing...all of which are very popular amongst a certain class here. With life and work catching up on you it's simply impossible to indulge in such luxuries. Are you becoming a Benthamite? Do you want to calculate the precise scale of pleasures from a book, the opportunity costs? No, it's not that, but at a certain age you have to work out-but not too tightly- what's essential and what's secondary. At this stage in your life you don't want to just read about goodness.

The Swimmer

Time is an unbroken line, an infinitely outward extending line. We race with one another, headlong into it, aware that the past can never be retrieved, or never consciously brought back from the depths. All time does is flow, taking us with it. Time as the relentless subtractor. In other words. Time is death, the Fall, quick or slow, never to be redeemed.

But what if, opposed to this modern view, time were circular, always bringing us back? What if time is a condition of life itself, an unending series of possibilities opening up before us? Each birth is a rose against the thorn of time. Insofar as we are modern we have lost the sense (or value) of the timeless and the older, cyclical views of time themselves appear dated. Time marches on (at war with who?), and all we have is this sense that it is taking us away from who we really are-not leading us to a clearer or more complete image of ourselves. Time is a broken mirror. 

Watched The Swimmer again yesterday with some friends (in one of the auditoriums). For Cheever everything is about the moral quality of the light. In the film we see Neddy himself becoming darker with time. In the end he doesn't even have the strength to haul himself out of the pool; he treads heavily, his face bowed down, broken, defeated by the realization that the life he thought he had was all a pretence, a show, a false coin. At the beginning he is all smiles, the symbol of youth, vigour, freshness (he even finds a dark cloud beautiful) but by the end he is almost like a wounded beast, struggling for all his worth for some comfort, solace, some way back "home"... 

There is a way out, I know-a phrase, a memory, an anecdote, a word-but I am unable at the moment to find it.

Home is the invisible axis, the still point of the heart from which all time is measured. The warmth fades from his body, slips from his hands. The green translucent waters of childhood are now replaced by the fallen brown leaves of autumn. Somehow the idea comes to him that all the swimming pools, the moments of his life, are connected as if really just parts of one river-and that connection goes by the name of his wife, Lucinda. Along the way he his friends will line the banks of this great river; he is noble, different, grand. The depth of life is found in the fact that there are no second chances, that history doesn't always lead us forwards. 

This is it. You had your chance at the good life and you blew it. The light is pure and very elegiac. I see it now, as if it was before my very face. The eighties, the nineties..there are no words for time gone, no matter how much you struggle; the imperfections absolved by summer light or simply forgotten, make their way back, press up against your cheek.

You stand in a line in your forest green blazer, your dark grey flannel trousers, counting the money with one hand in your pocket. You sit slouched on a plastic table, your head heavy with sleep, waiting...eight, ten hours for a flight out of here...when will this journey end? 

There is no-one serious left. The world is full of politics, shallow schemers, reality shows. Late at night the dark winds seem to be lost and there are so many re-runs on television that one has lost the sense of what's "live" and what's recorded. The wide net, all this casting out of words into those empty lives. Where are those subterranean waters that will take me back to the centre? Where is that summer's day when I shot a gun and hit the target and Andrew O'Brien said, exasperated, "beginner's luck!"?

Why do we think luck will stick with us, drag us with it to safe waters? For what is given us in the beginning can be lost, and only a late ace can turn the hand.  

the suburbs

There is a small brick station, lost, blind behind the leafy trees. If you walk hurriedly by it on a blustery Monday morning you might mistake it for a post office or a 1930's municipal building in a state of disuse or disrepair. There are so many stations like that, half in the countryside, linked to the city like an open wound. One day you will get on the central in the dark and stop at every station, walk up the stairs into the light and look at all those small worlds I'm not a part of.

The spiritual history of the suburbs: ice-cram vans prowling on empty summer roads, lemonade and ice clinking in tall glasses, cricket on the radio,  the dull aftermath after Wimbledon, the early arrival of a brief September light enough to chill us in the shade, remind us that all this cannot last. The grass growing thicker by the hour, the last war veterans sunning themselves, their facial expressions having been fixed many years ago, cats and dogs deep in their dreamworld, a young girl just breaking out of hers.

At night a drunk utters his first coherent words of the day, a silver-backed fox slinks through the broken wooden fences out into the sloping gardens and fields, the perfume of the flowers brushing against her, past the constant roaring drum of the motorway traffic. The last song is playing at the straggling party down the street, the plates heaped up next to the remains of the barbecued meat and fish, the bones, the toothpicks, the stained paper tissues that had looked so pure when tightly packed together, the clocks that have croaked, the exhausted, childish giggling, the bodies loosened, hands autonomous of the mind-and it is still not clear at this hour who will sleep with who.

"S", who has worked hard to get here, looks out of his bedroom window in partial disgust at what he sees below him. He looks out at them as would his ancestors, ancient Russian Jews, with great pity and remorse. "Is this a life?" He feels the warmth of the presence of his wife and children sleeping cozily behind his back in a parallel world.

In winter the suburb is Japanese. It is quiet and formal...The last true rituals are played out, the big metaphysical questions worked out in the tawdry details of wrong turnings,  chances that have slipped by. How did I end up like this, my hands so unsure? The summer of my childhood, it seems like a minute ago, less...these patterns, these arrangements, stitched together..what do they all mean? Here we are, a name on a map nobody wants to read. The old gods, Pan-Shiva, weigh down on us like the spirit of the dark forest. You wait, each day, for the threshold, for some great turning point in your life, an event that will draw a line under your past. Jesus-Christ.

In the late afternoon the tinkling sound on the rail tracks like the jangling of keys, the train that passes us by, floats, curves way out from the ghost station, our abandoned little frontier outpost, this temple to some forgotten god. No-one gets off, no-one gets on. We have no idea of the journeys other people make, their easy-going accommodation with the world and with risk.

My life, folded like a Japanese flower, simple and ornate,already a thing of the past.

(Lines from John Burnside. Film: The Swimmer)

~~~

The short story is a gem but the film, well, now, that's another story. As with John Huston's The Dead the film version outdoes the short story in darkness, strangeness. It's the perfect summer day, but already there is a dark cloud up above, heading this way... 

the unreal

Against my better instincts I watched SpringBreakers. I can't imagine many worse films and yet, for all that, I watched it to the end. Not just because I wanted to kill time, but what, then?

Why do you think you have an inexhaustible reservoir of good instincts that can be drawn on at will? Goodness is a habit, a way of looking (which means, of course, not looking as well), being surrounded by reminders, refuges, good people. There are stories you don't want to hear, that will do you no good if told to you. One of the biggest cons of late capitalism is the notion that greater availability (of books, music, images, information, etc.,) necessarily leads to greater character, knowledge, depth.The 'globalized' soul that must be everywhere, see everything, taste everything.

One can be drawn to the darkness. That much is obvious. What is less obvious, perhaps, is the appeal of seeming harmless drivel, the background hum that drains meaning away or that produces boredom, a grey indifference. The soul wants to be lost in daydreams, diversions, fantasy; it wants to meander, escape, doodle, take delight in its 'unknowingness', the way in which we slow down, stop, and gawk at the site of an accident, the mangled bodies in a crash, a natural disaster. The paradox being, of course, that this can sometimes serve creativity. What would be without the magnetic draw to what lies beyond us?

But there are ways, then there are ways. It goes without saying that in the absence of organized religion and practices the training of the defences is left, by and large, to the individual and to families. But what they're up against, first of all, is the pervasive idea that to talk of 'defences' in the first place is a sign of repression, dismissed as a throwback to 19th century prudery. This is not, you suspect, a legacy of the 1960s (weren't the '20s similar?). There are probably at once more specific factors and more general factors at play: the dynamics of capitalism and its determination to transgress all boundaries, to erase the very notion of frontiers, barriers; the general human desire, from day one, to resist definition, to break the mould winter has cast).

Spring Break, a rite of passage, a way of "finding oneself" by losing oneself: disrupting the humdrum and predictable patterns of one's life and cracking them open. We're drawn to Utopias where personal responsibility floats away ("lighten up, dude"). Is Utopia always an island, a pleasure island? [In a post capitalism world, a communistic fiction, there is no more labour or toil, just fishing and reading books..at last, art for art's sake]. Is there always a juvenile element to them: to distance oneself from the all-seeing eye of one's parents, God and society. No-one will judge you because you will just be a gleaming body under the sun, a body whose desires know no conflict, restraint, or guilt. I want it and I want it now, glide over here...

The film itself is full of the most awful cliches. I can't believe it wasn't made by a ten-year old.. Much is made of the slow-mo of heaving bosoms-no doubt a cynical attempt to bolster sales-but the real core of it, the nihilism, is portrayed in so fake a manner that you wonder just how superficial and nauseating can Hollywood get.

I could have-and should have-been reading Transtromer in that time. Cool, dispassionate, eagle-eyed...more an image-maker than a wordsmith (at least in English translation). Which makes you think: we suffer not just from an excess of images but, also, from a lack of the right type. There is a kind of nihilism involved in the proliferation of images, in the attempt to erase our judgement by saturating our senses, inch by inch. It is, paradoxically, akin to the nihilism of the iconoclasts. There are deserts in California, there are deserts in Saudi: a false austerity and a false infinity, both unbalanced, signs of disequilibrium, the cave in the heart and the virtual world equally unreal.

Today, more so than at any other time, we need ikons, or what Simone Weil once called 'bridges'.

The light and the dark

I'm posting this wonderful short film here but I know when I cross the frontier, when I'm back in the dark land of the pure, I won't be able to see it again. I'm not sure, but isn't that the same actor from the Poseidon adventure (one of my favourites..."God doesn't like quitters!")?

At the National, looking at Turner's swirling vortex of clouds and the solid bridge the light from outside suddenly clouds over. So rare for something outside to affect one's inner feelings since the 'holy' places are usually insulated from sound or light reaching us from beyond the main doors. All you bring with you is your own life and your tattered memories. But that sudden shift in the play of light-which is characteristic of the north- allowed you to see lots of small figures in the painting who wouldn't have otherwise been visible. Or at least they wouldn't have caught your attention-which is really another word for visibility.

Life under the bridges. If you had any skill you'd roam around Lahore and try and capture that: the selling of cheap wares, the scramble to keep your head above water, the poor kids playing pool on a wobbly table, the grime and filth of it all, the heaps of blue plastic bags, the world-weary dogs on their last legs...

The old form of life that continues no matter what speed others move at, no matter how rapidly society hurtles into the future. The long view. You go to a local park and see young mothers scolding their kids, whilst others are reduced to baby speak. Some things never change. The great constants of life are like a  circle that everyone walks into now and then, whether they know it or not. Gatherings, sociability, the discussions about how the world is going to hell in a hand cart, the cost of eggs. Everyone learns the secret somehow, is initiated into it.

Adam Gopnik's Winter book arrived today. The books I'm looking forward to are by Larissa M (on extreme morality) and Susuan B's biography of Walser. Both due out soon, perhaps. That's it, I'm out of money for any more books. You stock up as if you were preparing for a long and arduous journey, as if there was no way back. Books, mackerel, dark chocolate, Stilton or Gorgonzola, Gingko. But there is. This play of darkness and light knows no end or bounds. Without it there is no song of longing. But with every journey completed you are less of yourself. 

Spring Break

Spring break in London was always a moment of panic, a time when you suddenly realized that winter was over and exams were just around the corner..another year about to be wasted. Back in the land of the pure, the break is a time of quiet reflection, a time to catch one's breath, do some reading, spend more time with family, and in general not take time too seriously...drift a little while or, rather, drift at your own pace, as the world floats by, humming Otis Redding's Dock of the Bay...

Have you ever considered any other freedoms?
---Brando.

Someone commenting in the Independent wrote this:

'I thought it was a brilliant film in its deconstruction of the "party" genre by presenting us with a grim reality that spring break is built on loneliness, a violent drug trade, predatory male violence, and delusions of grandeur.' 

A particular notion of the self in the social sciences has come to dominate: disengaged, disembedded, free from the constraints of tradition, religion, society state and family. The individual is always someone who breaks free from the shackles (is the ultimate individual the outlaw, the renegade, the misunderstood genius who stands outside society's norms and who is 'before his time'?).

Of course, this view of what constitutes a deep sense of the individual, one free from the mechanical following of imposed norms, rules, is itself part of a tradition. One strand of religious thought has always suggested that 'exile' and 'exodus' are the natural (or at least the highest) expression of our humanity: the rebel with a Cause. Neither Greek nor Jew, neither of the east nor the west. But is that the same as being without any orientation whatsoever? 

Romanticism and late capitalism are strange bedfellows but is there a shared idea of the free-floating self who creates his own identity, and who heroically casts off the bonds to find, discover his or her "true self"?  The restless self, the self as 'a project', disdainful of all that is merely 'given'. All that is solid melts into air (why do you think of Caspar Friedrich when you say that?).

Haven't seen the film and doubt I will, but what struck you was the notion that there could be, paradoxically, a ritual that is supposed to initiate you into some version of freedom. 

'To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time...the stabilizing old narratives of religion and divinely ordained social order were undergoing dismantlement by science, technology, and the political aftermath of the Enlightenment.'
---J. Franzen.

There were these lines by Schuon on the Red Man, in his beautiful book, The Feathered Sun, about how the loss of character is a terrible Fall. Orientation: a sense of "up", a sense of "down" (Milosz).

Rowan Williams's fab. lecture: here

tinker, tailor, ...

"This is about the life of the book – and the future of the defiant craft of the illustrator and his pencil, "the hand of the artist", as Selznick puts it, in a computer age, and of materiality in a time of virtuality."

By sheer coincidence, the book you picked out yesterday was Tinkers by Paul Harding. It was either that or Esmeralda (D.D.)...too expensive by far, or Savage Detectives (no time to read). So, given M. Robinson's endorsement, it had to be this (only later did you realize he was her student and the cynicism started creeping in). Anyway, the reviews for Bolano were worse: this shows that literature is still alive...blah, blah. Don't care if it is, really. Or if it is dead. The voice of the American Salesman. Oh well, guess it can't be avoided and so go along with it.

Let's see.

And maybe the singing detective, not savage?

To turn back the time. Now, there's a skill for you.