Life: a constellation of vital phenomena — organisation, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.’
---Anthony Marra.
You watched the first reel of Jonas's Walden again and were reminded of how dazzling it is--a line from A.B. says that for Hopkins a tree would be "dazzling"--There is the interplay between written text, spoken voice and images. Is that not a world in itself? There is the graininess of it, the momentariness of the images, real life and reel life, something that is private that will become public: the old problem: art and life. There is the solitude of the artist capturing moments in the lives of his friends. There is the roar of sound, the dizzying stream of blurred images, life all around us whizzing by..then there it is stalled, slowed down, peace is found,a child touches a flower and wonders, just as millions of other children do all around the world, just as millions of other children have done since time immemorial. And wondered to themselves: what fragile beauty is this, that speaks no name?
There is the ideological stance-which must also be made in these times: how to escape the possibility that art, any art, will be swallowed up whole by industry, the market, and then churned out into commodified pieces with string and price tag dangling from them? Can the private realm, the sacred, the slow inherited ways of living a human life resist or will they be broken and broken down?
The opposite possibility: that you will enter the rarefied air of deliberate obscurity, fake elitism and snobbery to keep them off the scent. Meaning and the higher life ("contemplation", say) can thereby survive untarnished...the romantic disdain for the world, its love of boundaries and for outsiders.
Is there a middle way, a way of being at the centre and still not compromised, a way of returning to life, of making use of the ordinary circumstances one finds oneself in? Nothing mystical here, don't overdo it. How to write, write home.
~~~
Don't know why, but it's nice reading Alan Bennett's diaries. There's something about the English not being too clever that appeals (as opposed to that awful European intellectuality). They're light, casual, gossipy and funny.
'A cameraman's experience of the world is more various than almost any other profession I can think of , and also more oblique. It's what would make a cameraman a good character in a play, and a useful one (all worlds known, all walks of life visited) in a thriller.'
~~~
For the life of me I can't get the tenses right: the right words for future, for the past. What kind of failing/falling is that?
There is the beautiful two minutes or so, 'Tim's place' (youtube, but no for us here in the land of the pure), that makes you think of some sort of Jewish affinity but also, more brokenly, of your own home after the rains and when the light breaks through, making everything in the world sparkle again, as it did when you were a child.
---Anthony Marra.
You watched the first reel of Jonas's Walden again and were reminded of how dazzling it is--a line from A.B. says that for Hopkins a tree would be "dazzling"--There is the interplay between written text, spoken voice and images. Is that not a world in itself? There is the graininess of it, the momentariness of the images, real life and reel life, something that is private that will become public: the old problem: art and life. There is the solitude of the artist capturing moments in the lives of his friends. There is the roar of sound, the dizzying stream of blurred images, life all around us whizzing by..then there it is stalled, slowed down, peace is found,a child touches a flower and wonders, just as millions of other children do all around the world, just as millions of other children have done since time immemorial. And wondered to themselves: what fragile beauty is this, that speaks no name?
There is the ideological stance-which must also be made in these times: how to escape the possibility that art, any art, will be swallowed up whole by industry, the market, and then churned out into commodified pieces with string and price tag dangling from them? Can the private realm, the sacred, the slow inherited ways of living a human life resist or will they be broken and broken down?
The opposite possibility: that you will enter the rarefied air of deliberate obscurity, fake elitism and snobbery to keep them off the scent. Meaning and the higher life ("contemplation", say) can thereby survive untarnished...the romantic disdain for the world, its love of boundaries and for outsiders.
Is there a middle way, a way of being at the centre and still not compromised, a way of returning to life, of making use of the ordinary circumstances one finds oneself in? Nothing mystical here, don't overdo it. How to write, write home.
~~~
Don't know why, but it's nice reading Alan Bennett's diaries. There's something about the English not being too clever that appeals (as opposed to that awful European intellectuality). They're light, casual, gossipy and funny.
'A cameraman's experience of the world is more various than almost any other profession I can think of , and also more oblique. It's what would make a cameraman a good character in a play, and a useful one (all worlds known, all walks of life visited) in a thriller.'
~~~
For the life of me I can't get the tenses right: the right words for future, for the past. What kind of failing/falling is that?
There is the beautiful two minutes or so, 'Tim's place' (youtube, but no for us here in the land of the pure), that makes you think of some sort of Jewish affinity but also, more brokenly, of your own home after the rains and when the light breaks through, making everything in the world sparkle again, as it did when you were a child.
