Last evening I jotted down my first thoughts in a hasty blog post (not a movie review) about the film Once Upon a Time in the West. Then, when I awoke from my beauty nap today, I gasped. The reason that I gasped is as follows. I had forgotten to add one thought to the tirade of thoughts that I wrote yestreen. The present post will preserve that missing thought for futurity.
The missing thought
What I forgot to write yestreen is that the movie Once Upon a Time in the West centers on the emerging railroad: the film's dramatic events are anchored to the idea that the completion of the train station & railroad tracks will change society's structure so drastically that everyone—heroes as well as villains—will either need to find new footing or be lost in the upcoming world. This idea attracts me because it reminds me of our modern world's relation to the internet.
I come from the book-lover's standpoint. I love the kind of mental movement that my mind experiences when I read poetic texts: the way that the poet's words meld with my own thoughts and become a strange new consciousness. While a poem is being read, it's almost as if a mind that is distinct from both poet and reader exists in the space between the twain — a mind which isn't altogether attributable to the poet or the reader but to BOTH POET AND READER. That's what I call harmony. (This, by the way, is the type of phenomenon that I find most often in the best poems of Walt Whitman, which is why I read him so much and call him my favorite poet — especially in 'Song of Myself' I find this magic.)
Now that I re-read what I wrote in that last paragraph above, I wonder how I was planning on joining that to the idea of the railroad and the internet...
Oh!—now I remember. I was going to say that the railroad threatened the continuation of both a certain kind of gunslinging villain AND a certain kind of humble, "honest" citizen. (Excuse my putting the word "honest" in quotes — I just don't believe that anyone is wholly honest; but the word is said to have its use; and, therefore, with a measure of cynicism, I tried to employ it.) Likewise I think that the internet threatens the continuation of a certain kind of visceral, athletic, body-oriented type of consciousness as well as the abovementioned, high-minded "harmonization". (I put that 'H'-word in quotes, too, just to be fair.)
Archilochus was a warrior poet from ancient Greece; which is to say, he was a soldier and he wrote poetry. (I love his poems, by the way.) I don't think that he would have liked the world as it appeared after the railroad OR the internet.
Maybe it doesn't matter what any of us thinks of the world, however. And maybe I'm wrong about what the man's opinion might have been. But I just can't imagine Archilochus clicking the 'Like' button.
CONCLUSION: I tried my best
There: I attempted to jot down the thought that got away from me last night. I don't think that I nailed it, but at least I tried. Now, below I'll share an image showing some of the incoherencies that I scribbled on the back of a Post-it note while watching the movie.
Post-it notes are supposed to be plain paper on which a person can write things; and the back of the paper is sticky, so that a person can stick the note on a particular surface and it will remain upon that surface until Christ comes back to Earth in the form of the Devil (or vice versa); but the note's adhesive is not so strong that one must use a pry bar to conquer its tenacity: no, the thing usually comes off with a gentle tug. The only reason that I am sharing the above image is that it is an example of what happens when one has scribbled thoughts upon every single Post-it note in the stack and thus must continue to write on the back side of the very last note (which is not really a note at all but more like the back cover of the Post-it book) in a way that nature did not intend for any creature to do.
P.S.
This afternoon I read Serge Fauchereau's poem 'Despite the system of dual keys...' translated by John Ashbery. Also, I finished Furniture Beat 000017, which I tried to make resemble the kind of music that plays in the background when you are fighting the boss creature in an old video game.