Expanded and Revised On January 30, 2012
The Essence Of A Face We Cannot See Beyond The Barricade of Language
I once asked someone more knowledgeable about metaphysical matters what the definition of "essence" was. He compared it to perfume. When a perfumer takes various material plants, compounds and liquids and distills them into a singularity that transitions into a medium that can transverse the atmosphere, invisible, viable , a non verbal distinction. The matter we were discussing was human essence, the spirit...
On another occasion I was reading a book about exobiology whose attribution has escaped me and one of the examples of a exotic form of life could only be detected by scent. Another was the dense analysis of the metaphor of the seed written by Rodney Collin in a small pamphlet in relation to this planet being a nursery that is a womb. In all of this is the subject of this post, the travails of essence in the material world.
In Sanskrit, one associates this with the Bindu Chakra. Again, words, terms, associations that become a script of the inexpressible whose actors remind me of the cinema of imagination.
Two of the many themes of these posts that are a subject of fascination to me are non verbal communication and metaphor. These themes are the instruments in an orchestra. The composition of this score as it is played are the variations of these themes that are interwoven into a a keyboard as they well upward from my imagination. We swim in fantasies that cannot be expressed in what we imagine ourselves to be, versus what we are We imagine the world as it has imagined us. Image-Imaging-Imagination.
Lost in translation.
Last night I made another ill fated attempt to digest more of Ibn Al Arabi's "The Disclosure of God"which is so ripe and densely packed, that I often have a premonition that my head is going to explode. I only made it as far as one sentence.
Imagination links the physical body and the soul.
I sat in the chair and placed the book down beside me. Being tired, I made my way to bed. Everyone else had long since done so.
A Strange Photography
I had a dream that was silent. Only images. The scenes in this film moved between parallel universes. Each universe had a unique set of characters and situations.What one set of characters did did effected the other in another universe. The "script" of this dream succinctly illustrated it was all one story in sum total. The themes of each set of characters together and individually are the instruments in an orchestra. The composition was arranged by imagination.To see what does not exist as it exists in another state, without sound, intermediary interpretation,the babbling of busybody language. Images from intuition The curse of language, the constrictions and writhing of structures, strictures and silent murder. A dream as a cage imagined through language as societal consensus.
A Price That Cannot Be Paid
I sit here typing as form of exorcism using language and as I do, I think on summaries, endings, alternate takes on my life. It occurred to me that if someone asked my what I had been in search of during this transient existence, I would have an answer. I was in search of something rare, something beautiful.
It had been women, art, literature, the Midwest prairies, a fleeting glance. Images of spirit that elude logic, rational considerations, language.
Kenneth Tynan in writing of the forgotten Louise Brooks, writes:
"Brooks reminds me of the scene in Citizen Kane where Everett Sloane, as Kane's aging business manager, recalls a girl in a white dress whom he saw in his youth when he was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry. They never met or spoke. "I only saw her for one second," he says, "and she didn't see me at all - but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."
An exposure is made of shadows and light, the glimpse of a spirit, reflecting from everywhere and nowhere in particular, traced by the passage through one imagining alternate endings, a second take, a plot twist that has receded back into from whence it came, nameless, obscure and yet it calls your name, it pulls you backward as if you were an amnesiac secretly in search of a clue.
The Silent Cinema of A Imagined Life
http://www.freewebs.com/everybreeze/tynan.html
Through A Lens, Darkly
In this sense, yesterday I ordered a new copy of Carl Dreyer's masterpiece, "Joan of Arc, a silent film.
Over the decades Dreyer’s film was a victim of religious and political censors, two fires that destroyed valuable prints, unauthorized cuts, and zealous editors working against his wishes to modernize the film. An original, uncensored cut was found miraculously in a Norwegian hospital for the mentally ill.
Enter another image...of Antonin Artaud who sees the subject matter of this post very clearly.
"In the cinema I have always distinguished a quality peculiar to the secret movement and matter of images. The cinema has an unexpected and mysterious side which we find in no other form of art."
– Antonin Artaud
If you look at the gentleman who ushers in Joan ( in the excerpt I posted below), that is the self same Artaud, the father of surrealism, who bent language, regarded as a visionary of madness and whose name and legacy has been buried, forgotten.. much like the history and acknowledgement of this film. To create a new language to express the human condition by expressing what cannot be seen, speaks for itself.
His final work was a radiophonic creation entitled "To Have Done With The Judgment Of God." It was written after several years' internment in psychiatric institutions which roughly corresponded to the duration of WWII. During his stay at the asylum, Artaud's behavior was characterized by delusions, auditory hallucinations, glossolalia and violent tantrums. He underwent a myriad of bizarre treatments for this behavior including coma-inducing insulin therapy and electroshock therapy. "Pour En Finir Avec le Judgement de Dieu" is a heretic's scatalogical tirade at the extreme of the linguistic lunatic fringe. It was perhaps Artaud's electronic revenge against his incarcerators.
It was commissioned in 1947 by Ferdinand Pouey, the director of dramatic and literary broadcasts for French Radio. The work defies description, and although it was actually recorded in the studios of the French Radio at the end of 1947 and scheduled to be broadcast at 10:45 PM on February 2, 1948, the broadcast was cancelled at the last minute by the director of French Radio, Vladimir Porche.
Citing Artaud's scatalogical, vicious and obscene anti-American and anti-Catholic pronouncements as something that the French radio audience could do without, he upheld this censorship in the face of widespread support from many culturally prominent figures including Jean Cocteau, Jean Louis Barrault, Rene Clair and Paul Eluard. Pouey actually quit his job in protest. Artaud died a little over a month later, profoundly disappointed over the rejection of the work. It was not broadcast over the airwaves until thirty years later.
The God of Men and the God who has no face was not to be aired in polite company.
In the actual text of "To Have Done With The Judgment Of God" America is denounced as a baby factory war-mongering machine. Bloody and apocalyptic death rituals are described. Shit is vividly exalted as evidence of life and mortality. Questions about consciousness and knowledge are pursued and answered with more unanswerable questions. It all dead-ends in a scene in which God itself turns up on an autopsy table as a dissected organ taken from the defective corpse of mankind. In the recording all this would have been interspersed with shrieks, screams, grunts, and an extensive vocabulary of nonsense words-- a glossolalia of word-like sounds invented by Artaud to give utterance to the dissociation of meaning from language.The madness of monarchies, of the cross where the victim is worshiped and life is snuffed as a cigarette under foot. then there is silence.
Silence please..roll the film.
His final work was a radiophonic creation entitled "To Have Done With The Judgment Of God." It was written after several years' internment in psychiatric institutions which roughly corresponded to the duration of WWII. During his stay at the asylum, Artaud's behavior was characterized by delusions, auditory hallucinations, glossolalia and violent tantrums. He underwent a myriad of bizarre treatments for this behavior including coma-inducing insulin therapy and electroshock therapy. "Pour En Finir Avec le Judgement de Dieu" is a heretic's scatalogical tirade at the extreme of the linguistic lunatic fringe. It was perhaps Artaud's electronic revenge against his incarcerators.
It was commissioned in 1947 by Ferdinand Pouey, the director of dramatic and literary broadcasts for French Radio. The work defies description, and although it was actually recorded in the studios of the French Radio at the end of 1947 and scheduled to be broadcast at 10:45 PM on February 2, 1948, the broadcast was cancelled at the last minute by the director of French Radio, Vladimir Porche.
Citing Artaud's scatalogical, vicious and obscene anti-American and anti-Catholic pronouncements as something that the French radio audience could do without, he upheld this censorship in the face of widespread support from many culturally prominent figures including Jean Cocteau, Jean Louis Barrault, Rene Clair and Paul Eluard. Pouey actually quit his job in protest. Artaud died a little over a month later, profoundly disappointed over the rejection of the work. It was not broadcast over the airwaves until thirty years later.
The God of Men and the God who has no face was not to be aired in polite company.
In the actual text of "To Have Done With The Judgment Of God" America is denounced as a baby factory war-mongering machine. Bloody and apocalyptic death rituals are described. Shit is vividly exalted as evidence of life and mortality. Questions about consciousness and knowledge are pursued and answered with more unanswerable questions. It all dead-ends in a scene in which God itself turns up on an autopsy table as a dissected organ taken from the defective corpse of mankind. In the recording all this would have been interspersed with shrieks, screams, grunts, and an extensive vocabulary of nonsense words-- a glossolalia of word-like sounds invented by Artaud to give utterance to the dissociation of meaning from language.The madness of monarchies, of the cross where the victim is worshiped and life is snuffed as a cigarette under foot. then there is silence.
Silence please..roll the film.
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