Saturday, June 21, 2008

great ball of fire




Dear Sun,
You're doing a GREAT job!! Keep up the good work.
Happy Solstice!

Love,
Laura

Sunday, June 15, 2008

It's not time yet to sleep

well. i seem to want to write something.
what in the world could it be, I wonder?

not a review.
see this movie. "The Fall". Now. Big.
don't read about it first. log off now.

came home and trolled around for a minute to read a review or two - one that, if I recall, passed off all that (the 28 country, no CGI!?! -, gawd what a world - vision) as grossly over-produced, mockishly acted pap but did successfully describe the interior tale as something that Robert Louis Stevensen might have written had he been a casual LSD user. That gets closer. But even Ebert, who praised, couldn't do it justice. no point in trying. such is the power of this medium so used/pushed/reinvented.

and so I i seem to have that feeling. that 'don't talk to me. i've just seen something great' feeling that i yearn for and feel much too rarely- that: the Whole Point of making and experiencing art: that point, that pinprick somewhere. Existential Acupuncture. here touching off spasms of hallucinations founded in archetype, architecture, landscape, tenderness, innocence, the desire to know and to not know, embellished with fabric, beasts, color, blood, race, water, dust, and passions that keep the whole thing moving - the present in a story, the present we are living, the dying we are living. Fascinating to me the parallels between the psychological forms and functions of archetype and innocence; have never thought of it before.

no comment on the drowning scene - for isweartogod every movie I have seen in the past two years and ten months has one, fuck, or that the main character ______ oopsie. gave away the ending...

Anywho... one of my mom's students said about Homeric epics: the Iliad teaches us we are all mortal and The Odyssey that, even so, we must live in the meantime. It is not yet time to sleep. So this epic - a bit in between.

How hard won is hope sometimes. One of the themes, perhaps.
And here maybe hope isn't even really hope, just the need that is love. or the story that is love that pulls just enough, falls and hits against something else - not nothing.

There was something so subtle here that moved me- I won't be able to get it. Something like: that A L L this that is living in this world (a hand opening is the spinning Sufi dancer is the marriage ceremony is a the parting of veil of jewels is the first moment of dying) - is just the teensiest yet totally realized, totally vast and beautiful wee fragment of the ALL. My creed as a pantheist I suppose: every increment and its possible, myriad resonant meanings (and every space between increments) - divine. At least all there for consciousness. Can't say, of course, what can be accessed without it.
But that's it maybe - just that the material for such enormous vision is available if we are alive to it.

But - when the girl (such a real girl) is pulling our would-be suicide back from 'sleep' - through, (okay - maybe this is what i liked)... through the substrata of story, really through the collective conscience, the outside disturbs the story, and almost the health/fate of the character, much like the REAL car alarm sends the man in my nightmare on his heels before I catch my breath and wake.

don't know what I'm saying here.
but that's where the acupuncture happened - the expanding longshot on the white sand. her pulling on his actual lip. the character of one of his selves falling to his knees. all the others weakening. in that moment: a new, more-than-intimate proximity to the happening of his dying.

i guess too, though i always meant for this to be a not-so-looked at blog...dunno who's reading this.. and I am a broken record...I will always wonder at the experience of ____ dementia: what in the world the filmmaker with elephantitis on the roof of ____ really was. or rather, in _______ anyway, such cross over between the fact of the room and the bed and THINGS and the calling away - a story within a story that was, must have been, by, of, about the body and its mind (or is it vice versa?) and the world of the self within the world of others (or is it vice versa?). no way here to not fall to Faulkner and write and and and and, one layer opening to another and another and circling back to the hard, historical reality of the first.

or to sign off and just let Faulkner have the last word on this from As I Lay Dying:

"It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between."


enough. goodnight whomever.
it is, in fact, time to sleep.