Here is an abstract drawing with zero inspiration.
Dear diary,
There should never be a rainy day. I don’t mean that we should gift the God of Weather with a bouquet of deicide; I mean that when a species becomes advanced enough to develop, say, tear gas, it should at least be able to tailor a rain-tight suit.
That’s all I want: some stylish boots that are waterproof and which seamlessly integrate with waterproof slacks and a waterproof overcoat; plus gloves and a visor. We must also solve the problem of being able to look out from the face of one’s windscreen without getting wet, but raindrops should not be able to remain on the transparent pane and obscure one’s view — however, I don’t like the idea of installing a mechanical wiper blade; I’d like instead for the material to be naturally water-repellent, so that the individual droplets, upon making contact, immediately hasten to the shield’s periphery, like mice in a room where a cat has just appeared.
I choose cats & mice (the lion of MGM Studios vs. Disney’s mouse), eschewing the example “as ants escaping an anteater”; because every time I’ve ever seen such a sight (an anteater eating ants), instead of fleeing, the ants appear to be rather oblivious to their fate, as tho, to paraphrase Blake, the anteater is a portion of eternity too great for the mind of an ant — admittedly, however, I’ve only ever viewed depictions of this miracle in filmstrips; I’ve never had the pleasure of accompanying an anteater in actual spacetime. To paraphrase Blake again:
The ants and their anteater dined with me (my meal was separate: I had my own check, which I paid for myself; so it wasn’t like a date whose parties are courting each other to wed; it was more like a business assembly, or when diplomats from semi-hostile nations meet to entertain a truce), and I asked the ants how they dared so roundly to ignore that God was intent on consuming them; and whether they did not think that they would certainly be transmogrified & so become the fuel of divinity.
The anteater answered for them: They perceive no God, for this type that I am strawing up right now were born with jointed arms for eyes, which you call antennae, therefore they’re almost literally blind mouths (as the leaders of the church are labeled in Milton’s “Lycidas”, if I am reading it correctly) nor do they comprehend that my plan of world domination has succeeded. They’re not self-reliant individuals with poetic aspirations: they’re more like cells in a brain — an exterior mind without a body — thus, when you ask “Do these ants know how dire their future looks?” that’s like inquiring of your own brain’s cells “Do ye fear your almost certain death-by-vodka”: First, the only sights that brain-cells can see are what your own divine eyes feed them; second, if somehow thy cells could truly grasp their predicament, they’d no doubt thrill to their doom. They would “make love to this employment”, as Hamlet claims about Guildenstern and Rosencrantz; & as Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus always sez: “I had been glad to live and I was glad to die. . . . I slipped into my burial shroud like a girl into her marriage dress.”
P.S.
If I ever were to play myself in a movie, I’d choose an actor that’s far handsomer than me for the role. But what does that phrase mean: “handsomer than me” — which me? The Real Me? (If so, that’s pretty god-damned handsome.) Or do we mean the “me” that is, daily in slow-mo, being bested and eaten by the White Whale?
And how can one play oneself with a separate hired actor? This answer, my friend, is NOT blowing in the wind — I recommend having your cake and eating it too: just bake duplicate cakes, and capture one on film while consuming its twin. (Fire does this every day: the only substance that it could not absorb is God, because it already is God — that is, it plays the Poetic Genius itself, in our latest cut of reality. Exodus 3:2 …the LORD appeared in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.) I repeat: you just take two cakes, and shoot the first while becoming its twin. (Shoot with a camera, not with a gun — that was Jehovah’s mistake, in the Jesus debacle.) Then you can additionally wolf down the filmed cake as well, once its scenes have been edited and the movie is released. Go ahead, live a little — nobody’ll ever bother to check your logic.
But seriously, I’d like someone who looks nothing like me to play me. And the credit shall read “Bryan Ray… as himself.”
I’m thinking of Marcello Mastroianni as the director Guido Anselmi in Otto et mezzo (released in English as 8½), the 1963 cinepoem by Federico Fellini, because that’s what my sweetheart & I re-screened last night. I’ve seen this film a number of times (maybe fifteen?) but the current one finally felt like the premiere. It’s almost as if an audience needs to review the movie perpetually; since only on the first time after the infinite showing, the film comes clear.
The ending made me sob, but not with tears of sadness: it was a blissful sobbing (“Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.” — Blake again) — the conclusion of the picture is among my favorite ever; it’s so beautiful, so human-centered, so life-affirming: it’s such a genuinely happy ending, albeit somber (“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning...” Ecclesiastes 7:4). After the film’s foregoing chaos, from ennui to exuberance, it all comes down to a love of childlike clowning.
The reason I chose to check out this title again is that another director whom I idolize, William Friedkin, did one of those visits to the Criterion Collection’s Closet Library... dang, now I realize I need explain for futurity what the Criterion Closet was:
Around 2019 years after the Creditor Class of Old Rome executed the Alien Christ for urging the Working Classes to organize a Debt Strike so as to annihilate the concept of Sin, there was a company called Criterion which became known briefly for financing the distribution of cinematic poetry on personal media formats, and this latter company would routinely invite famous directors, as well as other artists who work in the movies, to visit their (Criterion’s) cinematic collection: a small closet whose shelves were stocked with various titles — that is, cases that represented and contained copies of movies — and they (Criterion) would document these visits audio-visually and upload the result to Hell. (In other words, they cast these records onto the World Wide Web.)
Anyway, so Friedkin used the bulk of his time in Criterion’s Film Library Closet to give a loving tribute to Fellini’s Otto et mezzo. So that’s what lured me to watch it again; that’s what beguiled me. (God said, ‘What is this that thou hast done?’ And the woman said, ‘The serpent beguiled me.’ [Genesis 3:13]) By the way, here’s what the encyclopedia says about the film’s name:
Co-writer Ennio Flaiano suggested La bella confusione (literally The Beautiful Confusion) as the movie’s title. Under pressure from his producers, Fellini finally settled on 8½, a self-referential title that winks at the number of films he had theretofore directed.
So now I can end this entry with a quote from my other favorite modern film, Wrong Cops (2013):
OFFICER DUKE: “What are you up to these days?”
BOB: “I just signed with a big studio to direct a really big movie.”
OFFICER DUKE: “Cool! Bravo, man — that’ll be great for my business [...] you could hook me up with movie stars loaded with cash.”
BOB: “It’s a numerical movie. There are no stars.”
OFFICER DUKE: “A numerical movie — wow. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds awesome & amazing.”
No comments:
Post a Comment