Friday, March 28, 2008
Dying to know me…
Probably because of some deep and penetrating correspondence with a friend, who is currently in India, I lay in bed last night and considered the conundrum regarding why thinking about existence seems to be such an elusive pastime. I see Julian Barnes has brought out a book, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, but, according to the reviewers, he has done a pirouette around death, maintaining it as the empty fulcrum of his dissertation on how well he might be prepared for it. I WILL read it when the right time comes (not THAT time - the penalty shoot-out, I mean the right reading time). I was discussing with my friend how, through meditation, we attempt to achieve a death-like state, more than le petit mort of the orgasm, but a sort of total unknowing, of our existence. We often consider death to be on a par with pre-being. The abyss from which we flew, at conception, is paralleled by some with the ultimate nothingness into which we fall, wingless, at death.
To me there is no real resonance between the two. Whilst coming into life gives us a multitude of canvases whereon all things may be painted, the final acts are ones where these canvases are scrumpled up and our exhibition space is closed down. We never have to come to terms with original being. It just is. The completion of life is different. As I said at the beginning, it is hard to train the mind to reflect with absolute rigour and focus upon the end of being. If you experience it like I do, the more you try to pin down its amoebic formlessness, the more it shapeshifts, leaving the pins holding only themselves.
Religions race in at this point, blowing the trumpets of redemption or forgiveness or believable, to some, gnostic ladders into the unknown. Many of us grasp them in relief because it stops us having to battle with the awesome business end of life. So, generation after generation has little of worth to pass on to its offspring about how they might manage the conundrum better than us.
Probably because of some deep and penetrating correspondence with a friend, who is currently in India, I lay in bed last night and considered the conundrum regarding why thinking about existence seems to be such an elusive pastime. I see Julian Barnes has brought out a book, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, but, according to the reviewers, he has done a pirouette around death, maintaining it as the empty fulcrum of his dissertation on how well he might be prepared for it. I WILL read it when the right time comes (not THAT time - the penalty shoot-out, I mean the right reading time). I was discussing with my friend how, through meditation, we attempt to achieve a death-like state, more than le petit mort of the orgasm, but a sort of total unknowing, of our existence. We often consider death to be on a par with pre-being. The abyss from which we flew, at conception, is paralleled by some with the ultimate nothingness into which we fall, wingless, at death.
To me there is no real resonance between the two. Whilst coming into life gives us a multitude of canvases whereon all things may be painted, the final acts are ones where these canvases are scrumpled up and our exhibition space is closed down. We never have to come to terms with original being. It just is. The completion of life is different. As I said at the beginning, it is hard to train the mind to reflect with absolute rigour and focus upon the end of being. If you experience it like I do, the more you try to pin down its amoebic formlessness, the more it shapeshifts, leaving the pins holding only themselves.
Religions race in at this point, blowing the trumpets of redemption or forgiveness or believable, to some, gnostic ladders into the unknown. Many of us grasp them in relief because it stops us having to battle with the awesome business end of life. So, generation after generation has little of worth to pass on to its offspring about how they might manage the conundrum better than us.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Cancers may be cured - but we will still die
Arthur C Clarke died this week. I remember going to the Edinburgh Festival to see 2001 in the sixties. It was a premier but whether world or British I can’t remember. It was too earnest a gathering to have druggies sitting in the front row, being blasted into a semi-religious trance by the kaleidoscopic drift down to the planet at the end. One of my favourite images in film is the last man, sitting in a minimalist white, echoing room, turning to look at us, as we enter that space. Clarke gave us a lasting glimpse of the irrepressible place of religion in human affairs and the consequent conundrum of identity. The druggies loved the monolith in 2001 because it epitomised the otherness of spirituality, far more, perhaps, than temples, churches and shrines. It was a religious artefact for the modern age. Scientology took root among some because Hubbard, its father figure, a Sci Fi writer of no particular repute, saw the connection between space travel, aliens and desperate seekers after the truth of existence.
As anyone reading these blogs will have gathered, I love science fiction because it can provide left field perspectives on issues which rear up in front of us to such a degree that we can’t see round them. I am reading a 1930s dystopian novel by Karin Boye, called Killocain. Here’s a quote:
“My Chief,” I interrupted, impatiently, “I’ve already taken the liberty of ordering five test persons from the Voluntary Sacrificial Service. They’re waiting outside in the hall.”
The ‘I’ here is Kallocain, himself, the main protagonist of the story, a scientific experimenter who has discovered a truth drug which the State may be able to use to uncover dissidents. The guinea pigs are healthy people who see the Voluntary Sacrificial Service as a noble career in the preservation and furtherance of the State.
On the news, as I had just put the novel down, was a big story about cancer clinics being set up all over Britain where experimental drugs can be tried to see their efficacy against cancer. The programme is NHS and Cancer Charity supported. Those with terminal illness and a short sentence of life, can volunteer for radical, untested treatments. As the doctor being interviewed, said, “It speeds up the whole process…”
No doubt most of us would want to try something, rather than rot away in a miserable chemo-therapeutic semblance of normality. There is a belief, inbred in us, that miracles can occur. We will queue up for such a possible reversal of the ticking clock. We wish to pervert the course of justice, where our sentence has been meted out by a white coated specialist. But there is something disturbing about it, nonetheless.
Perhaps what we need, more than anything, is a belief system which focuses on how to make life worthwhile, whatever is happening to us, no matter how tough, how appalling, how out-of-our-hands; worthwhile, second by second. A sort of zen wonder at how fantastic it is to exist – and to know it.
Arthur C Clarke died this week. I remember going to the Edinburgh Festival to see 2001 in the sixties. It was a premier but whether world or British I can’t remember. It was too earnest a gathering to have druggies sitting in the front row, being blasted into a semi-religious trance by the kaleidoscopic drift down to the planet at the end. One of my favourite images in film is the last man, sitting in a minimalist white, echoing room, turning to look at us, as we enter that space. Clarke gave us a lasting glimpse of the irrepressible place of religion in human affairs and the consequent conundrum of identity. The druggies loved the monolith in 2001 because it epitomised the otherness of spirituality, far more, perhaps, than temples, churches and shrines. It was a religious artefact for the modern age. Scientology took root among some because Hubbard, its father figure, a Sci Fi writer of no particular repute, saw the connection between space travel, aliens and desperate seekers after the truth of existence.
As anyone reading these blogs will have gathered, I love science fiction because it can provide left field perspectives on issues which rear up in front of us to such a degree that we can’t see round them. I am reading a 1930s dystopian novel by Karin Boye, called Killocain. Here’s a quote:
“My Chief,” I interrupted, impatiently, “I’ve already taken the liberty of ordering five test persons from the Voluntary Sacrificial Service. They’re waiting outside in the hall.”
The ‘I’ here is Kallocain, himself, the main protagonist of the story, a scientific experimenter who has discovered a truth drug which the State may be able to use to uncover dissidents. The guinea pigs are healthy people who see the Voluntary Sacrificial Service as a noble career in the preservation and furtherance of the State.
On the news, as I had just put the novel down, was a big story about cancer clinics being set up all over Britain where experimental drugs can be tried to see their efficacy against cancer. The programme is NHS and Cancer Charity supported. Those with terminal illness and a short sentence of life, can volunteer for radical, untested treatments. As the doctor being interviewed, said, “It speeds up the whole process…”
No doubt most of us would want to try something, rather than rot away in a miserable chemo-therapeutic semblance of normality. There is a belief, inbred in us, that miracles can occur. We will queue up for such a possible reversal of the ticking clock. We wish to pervert the course of justice, where our sentence has been meted out by a white coated specialist. But there is something disturbing about it, nonetheless.
Perhaps what we need, more than anything, is a belief system which focuses on how to make life worthwhile, whatever is happening to us, no matter how tough, how appalling, how out-of-our-hands; worthwhile, second by second. A sort of zen wonder at how fantastic it is to exist – and to know it.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Juno what I think?
Juno, the film, is about teenage pregnancy. It divides critics. There are those who find it awkward and clunky and others like myself who had a real laugh and thought it very wittily written. Talking to people who hated it and restraining myself from adversarial passion (something I have to guard against) I tried to be the researcher I’m normally paid to be. Listening, eliciting, clarifying, corroborating. And what do you know, out of the data sprang a central theme, just as it is supposed to in my own research methodology books.
People liked her stepmother. They liked her father. They thought her boyfriend was played to a brilliant dumb T and her ebullient girlfriend was fine. What they didn’t like was her. The pregnant one played by Ellen Page. She irritated some. She just wasn’t believable said others. Nobody speaks like that. She’s far too knowing for a sixteen year old. She’s so weird that you can’t identify with her.
Now many, if not all, these critical beings go happily to super hero movies or Woody Allen comedies or the Truman Show/ Groundhog Day/Inside John Malkovich surrealities and chatter happily about ‘genre’ and how they like it because it does what it says on the big round flat metal can. Juno, on the other hand, apparently, is not enough of this world. Art, since the Dadaists, has been as much about the improbable as the real and every day and film is a wonderful medium for exciting our attention about what might be.
It seems to pass the detractors by that Ellen Page plays a smart oddball and creates a role model for young women to be different, uninterested in anorexia as a fashion statement, uninterested in bronzed, loudmouthed, made-to-order boys, uninterested in most of the values of her sub-prime, credit-crunchy culture and, finally, wants to find her own way, no matter what obstacles social expectations throw at her.
Which is why I liked it so much. I may not have daughters but I am looking to my grand daughters to pick up on her batty intelligence and run with it.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Premature Burial: how does it feel?
There are some films that you know are probably very good but you are prevented from going to them by a deep inertia caused by fear. You are unwilling to expose yourself to a meditation on a possible state of being which is so appalling that you go rigid at the very thought. And this state of being could be just round the corner for any one of us. It is not a rare condition. It could be Alzheimer’s or a stroke or a crippling accident or sheer senility.
Whether you read Poe or Lovecroft or Crowley or Kafka, you are aware that the pit is a form of interment and the pendulum continues to tick. Being buried alive has a pedigree of crazed fear that must reach back to the dawn of sentience. To be still alive and yet incapable of drawing attention to your flesh and blood, your neurally networked reality seems an extreme too far.
It is this jumble of gibbering horror which lies beneath the urbane decision not to go and see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Only the title seems wrong. A little too whimsical, despite the film’s extraordinary range of emotional enquiry from the crudely sardonic to hardly bearable pathos.
The story, if you are unaware of it, is about a man who has a stroke which severs, effectively, the upper cortex from the rest of the brain. In awful brief, he is left with an eyelid that he can mobilise. We, the audience, communicate with this eyelid and when it rises we can enter his thoughts, memories, feelings and his commentary upon his condition. We eventually see him write a book about what has happened to him as his remarkable nurse calls out letters of the alphabet and he gives a single blink for the one she must choose. He died a few days after the book was published.
The strong beam of light in this film, the searchlight that almost blinds its two-eyed mobile watchers, is this. Existence is unbelievably precious. We only value our consciousness when we are about to be deprived of it through death or are bereft of it through desperate circumstance. We are alive. It’s a thing of wonder. We must exploit it to the full, just as the great hero on which the film is based did, in the terrible circumstances in which he found himself.
It is a film which is magnificently life-affirming.
There are some films that you know are probably very good but you are prevented from going to them by a deep inertia caused by fear. You are unwilling to expose yourself to a meditation on a possible state of being which is so appalling that you go rigid at the very thought. And this state of being could be just round the corner for any one of us. It is not a rare condition. It could be Alzheimer’s or a stroke or a crippling accident or sheer senility.
Whether you read Poe or Lovecroft or Crowley or Kafka, you are aware that the pit is a form of interment and the pendulum continues to tick. Being buried alive has a pedigree of crazed fear that must reach back to the dawn of sentience. To be still alive and yet incapable of drawing attention to your flesh and blood, your neurally networked reality seems an extreme too far.
It is this jumble of gibbering horror which lies beneath the urbane decision not to go and see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Only the title seems wrong. A little too whimsical, despite the film’s extraordinary range of emotional enquiry from the crudely sardonic to hardly bearable pathos.
The story, if you are unaware of it, is about a man who has a stroke which severs, effectively, the upper cortex from the rest of the brain. In awful brief, he is left with an eyelid that he can mobilise. We, the audience, communicate with this eyelid and when it rises we can enter his thoughts, memories, feelings and his commentary upon his condition. We eventually see him write a book about what has happened to him as his remarkable nurse calls out letters of the alphabet and he gives a single blink for the one she must choose. He died a few days after the book was published.
The strong beam of light in this film, the searchlight that almost blinds its two-eyed mobile watchers, is this. Existence is unbelievably precious. We only value our consciousness when we are about to be deprived of it through death or are bereft of it through desperate circumstance. We are alive. It’s a thing of wonder. We must exploit it to the full, just as the great hero on which the film is based did, in the terrible circumstances in which he found himself.
It is a film which is magnificently life-affirming.
Labels: Coma, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Alzheimer's
Monday, March 03, 2008
There will be blood then? Not really.
Well I saw Daniel Day Lewis et al in the Rive Gauche arts cinema in Perpignan this afternoon knowing all the hype, the Oscar, an interview with the King of Guignol, himself, on television but with the sinking heart of one who fears the worst. I wasn’t far wrong.
Those who have compared There Will Be Blood to Citizen Kane want to examine their capacity to differentiate that latter, flawed masterpiece from something which is not much more than an average celluloid vehicle for overacting. The relationship between Lewis’s character, Daniel Plainview and the fire and brimstone priest, Eli Sunday played by Paul Dano begins unevenly, totters along hysterically and ends in total bathos, the latter being brained in the bowling alley symbol of Lewis’ oil-based wealth. Compare it to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford wherein the death of James (Brad Pitt) at the hands of Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), despite being forecast by the title, is full of tension and wonderful, complex portrayals of human frailty, throughout.
Both are long films. Both are quasi-historical philosophisings on the shaky foundations of modern America and both rest on central male relationships. But I’ve written at length about the outlaw film. What about the oil one?
It all comes down to whether you find DD Lewis and Dano believable as characters because the plot barely sustains interest. Lewis dotes on his son but rejects him for a period when he is blown deaf by an oil rig eruption. He kills an imposter who claims to be his brother because the man fooled him. He is blackmailed into being ‘saved’ by the priest in a full blown exorcism which Plainview goes along with in exchange for the rights to run a pipeline to the sea. He takes his son back and then when the boy is older and married and wants to go off and be his own man, he rejects him in a nasty prosy speech which should have stayed on a page somewhere: the whole being an attempt to encapsulate the morally bankrupt industrial empire building of late 19th century America.
The mining sequences are over long and consequently lose their dramatic potential. The character studies are grossly OTT with little light and shade or complexity. The soundtrack is a constant distraction. The rest of the characters are shadows on a cave wall.
It all goes to prove that films that in some way appeal to a history as young and terrible as America’s can be pure box office. The more outlandishly Punch and Judy, the vision, the better.