To Inhabit A Work Of Art
6-17-06 I Need Change Of Worlds To Be Alive
A reason I often find movies so compelling is my hunger literally to inhabit a brand new world. I've lived in this zone now for more than 20 years so my eyes and ears and nose are seldom surprised by the place-----only rarely when I see a truly beautiful woman. That can rock me back on my heels & strike a blow to my interior. But it almost never happens. I read an authentic story or see an undissimulating movie & I'm instantly transported to a new place. New streets, new houses, buses, cars---and a complete field of entirely new women, faces, persons. Without novelty you're dead-----at least I am. No wonder all those marriages go to hell. They die of boredom---the repetition becomes deadly. Movies have become for me an easier read than books. Zingo. Push the button. We're on! And if it's no good bring it straight back to the store & get a new one until you find a true Winner. A truly good movie instantly takes me out of my skull boredom into its enchanted world. It inhabits me as surely as I inhabit it---the true work of art. Here I must say programmed television is a fraud and a disaster. Almost never a genuinely novel movie or program. This is a wasteland of gutless cliches with mindless anemic sit coms & other shallow shows. The great Dutch-German philosopher Schopenhauer once wrote, 'the locus of the Will is in the genitals.' And if this is so there are no balls and there is no vagina in American industrial t.v. And cable television is also a vast empire of mediocrity.
I love Place in the movies. Can't explain why. I love those long highways or city streets. I love that fact & also the power of the metaphor. The long long long boulevard stretching all the way across say the city of angels-----or, some country road just any place that goes on & on to the very end of the camera shot. An endless seemingly straight line. Yes-----infinity, I suppose. Endless Life. Immortality. That sensation of going on forever I feel watching the car traverse the terrain with its man & woman inside headed out to Eternity. I note this often even in mediocre films----as if this is a universal theme & backdrop universally shared by minds great & small, by both the brilliant genius and the common plodder. The long Road---the infinite Journey always grabs me, as, it occurs to me, few others watching the same movie even note it they are so busy plotting. It's been said (by John Gardner) there are only two genuine stories in all of literature. A man goes on a journey. Or, a stranger comes to town. That's all she wrote in the department of tales. To me these two in fact look like parts of the same one taking the obverse shape of eachother. Maybe this is the very thing that makes such an indelible imprint on my psyche the minute I see the street the boulevard or the country road and its travellers. I feel the force of the Archetypal Occasion: Man (me) is going on the Journey of his one and only Life. And then what happens?
RLG Copyright 2006
A reason I often find movies so compelling is my hunger literally to inhabit a brand new world. I've lived in this zone now for more than 20 years so my eyes and ears and nose are seldom surprised by the place-----only rarely when I see a truly beautiful woman. That can rock me back on my heels & strike a blow to my interior. But it almost never happens. I read an authentic story or see an undissimulating movie & I'm instantly transported to a new place. New streets, new houses, buses, cars---and a complete field of entirely new women, faces, persons. Without novelty you're dead-----at least I am. No wonder all those marriages go to hell. They die of boredom---the repetition becomes deadly. Movies have become for me an easier read than books. Zingo. Push the button. We're on! And if it's no good bring it straight back to the store & get a new one until you find a true Winner. A truly good movie instantly takes me out of my skull boredom into its enchanted world. It inhabits me as surely as I inhabit it---the true work of art. Here I must say programmed television is a fraud and a disaster. Almost never a genuinely novel movie or program. This is a wasteland of gutless cliches with mindless anemic sit coms & other shallow shows. The great Dutch-German philosopher Schopenhauer once wrote, 'the locus of the Will is in the genitals.' And if this is so there are no balls and there is no vagina in American industrial t.v. And cable television is also a vast empire of mediocrity.
I love Place in the movies. Can't explain why. I love those long highways or city streets. I love that fact & also the power of the metaphor. The long long long boulevard stretching all the way across say the city of angels-----or, some country road just any place that goes on & on to the very end of the camera shot. An endless seemingly straight line. Yes-----infinity, I suppose. Endless Life. Immortality. That sensation of going on forever I feel watching the car traverse the terrain with its man & woman inside headed out to Eternity. I note this often even in mediocre films----as if this is a universal theme & backdrop universally shared by minds great & small, by both the brilliant genius and the common plodder. The long Road---the infinite Journey always grabs me, as, it occurs to me, few others watching the same movie even note it they are so busy plotting. It's been said (by John Gardner) there are only two genuine stories in all of literature. A man goes on a journey. Or, a stranger comes to town. That's all she wrote in the department of tales. To me these two in fact look like parts of the same one taking the obverse shape of eachother. Maybe this is the very thing that makes such an indelible imprint on my psyche the minute I see the street the boulevard or the country road and its travellers. I feel the force of the Archetypal Occasion: Man (me) is going on the Journey of his one and only Life. And then what happens?
RLG Copyright 2006
posted by rlg at 6:23 PM
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