An Un-reading of My Work

Every moment consumes a life

Swells, bursts, recedes

Resides in every mind and wraps all matter

In its dissolving rind

The small things that you do

Indicate the ebbing tides of drifting instances

They pass forever and return

Somehow

Often seen as chance or fate,

Patterns are left open between those

Afraid to call each other strangers

-And there it is

Your gesture which recalls

A million moments I misplaced

Somewhere between yesterday and…

And what does my posture say?

My body has a memory for things left behind as well,

Moments stacked on moments left in moments beside themselves

I resist this cultivation of repetition,

Still heedlessly igniting a wordless oral history

Most likely drowned out by my immediate preoccupations

There’s clarity and there is disorientation

In the moments of myself I see in you

Part fraction, mid artifaction

A trace that speaks of more than it can say

Its strange how much more optimistic you can feel sometimes when the sun comes back from hiatus, although I guess its no great biological mystery. I can probably thank this new found energy for my project to vitamin D, that and the coffee bender I’m on right now. Chemical effects aside, I think Art and Fear has noticeably changed my outlook on my project, despite the fact that the book had a knack for making me self-consciously feel like a complete cliché on every page as I have probably had every fear the book addresses.

One of the greater challenges for me, not just of this quarter but probably since forever, is to not get ahead of myself and worry too much about what the artwork means and to let myself trust the process more. Trusting process I think lies at the heart of Art and Fear. The fears that are discussed in the book all relate to the ways in which artists lose faith in process and the book really only presents one compelling reason to keep faith in process, that nothing will happen if you don’t keep faith.

Pervading the entire book is a seemingly disheartening view that most artwork is meaningless and no one cares whether or not you make art. This seems to be an important first step in removing one’s ego from the issue of making art. To shift the focus from achievement to process, “ask your work what it needs, not what you need.” And this is actually quite freeing, in the sense that making art is never the last word on your worth as an artist. But the book is speaking to people who are compelled to make art, which ultimately makes such realizations only partly effective in separating the process from the artist’s desires. The book says as much: “vision is always ahead of execution – and it should be.” This paradox is not directly addressed perhaps to avoid unending existential tangents.

The same question arises when Art and Fear argues that artists and audiences have different concerns, that of process and product respectively. At the same time the book criticizes postmodern art for not engaging more with the world outside of its community. In fact the book goes as far as to argue that good art is only made in relationship to its contemporary environment. Audience certainly plays a key role in what it means to be contemporary. For all of the unresolved tension that the book steers clear of, I have new faith in my project by taking genuine interest in where it might lead me astray.

After falling asleep again at 7:00am I dreamed of walking with two little girls along a street, in a nice looking town, lined in large old houses with tidy yards. From the looks of things it was spring, because the grass was lush, most trees had barely produced a bud, and there were blossoms. Suddenly I see a man hanging from a tree in someone’s front yard. The proper authorities already seem to be present and looking into it, so I quickly take the girls back in the direction we came from. As we turn away I realize there is more than one body hanging in the yard on this beautiful morning and they all have black bags over their heads as if executed. In our calm but brisk retreat the smallest girl chants to herself, “we are to young to se that.” We come across another house with a beautifully unkempt garden, over-run with mud and moss and pink blossoms. Cutting through this yard we find, to my dismay, another faceless body swinging amidst the falling petals.

Nothing to do but to hurry forward.

Then we come across two unconscious bodies, a man and a woman, on the covered porch of the house. I tell the 4 or so children to wait… have they been multiplying? I climb the paint chipped steps to check the bodies’ pulses and then the dream decides to play a trick on me, the unconscious bodies snap awake with electrical whirring sounds. Somehow I know that they are robots, despite their fleshy appearance, and I tell the kids to run. I try to lead the robots away by dashing around the house and up a gravel alley. The man is hot on my heels but where’s the woman? I wake up.

Is this a nightmare? I guess so. But what stays with me is the vivid fidelity of a quiet town bursting with the liveliness of spring. I only remember the invading insertions of horror as if I saw them out of the corner of my eye.

It’s probably because its 1:00am, with my usual defenses down, that I am struck with such hope and sadness after finishing The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao. I hesitate to say that the ending was profound, or rather endings (Tolkien would be proud). Though I hesitate to call anything profound nowadays. But the ending has struck such a chord within me, that I find my exhausted self not wanting to sleep. Once Oscar died I found myself wondering, despite the refreshingly honest tone of the book, if any of Oscar’s life could be considered wondrous. But the book kept one last trick up its sleeve by withholding Oscar’s letter until the end.

            It’s almost cheesy but Oscar’s new found appreciation for life “The Beauty!” re-contextualizes the martyrdom of his death for me. Looking at the pen-ultimate ending, in the quote Oscar picked from Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan says “Nothing ends, Adrian, nothing ever ends.” For all the nihilistic connotations this line has, with the fate of the curse and the futility of choices, there is also a relativistic view of existence. Without ends, lengths of time are irrelevant which is what Ybon reminds Oscar when he shares how he waited “so god damn long” to get laid. She says to call the wait life. Oscar found wonder in his life outside of fantasy, in the intimate moments he shared with Ybon. It seems to Oscar that all his suffering doesn’t matter in the end, he died for his own happiness, which is more than Yunior can claim, saying to himself at his most indulgent low, “You win Oscar, you win.”

If time is relativistic and Oscar’s life is defined by what little happiness he managed to find, then it truly was a brief and wondrous life.

In many ways, the strategies of Mrs. Dalloway reflect the strategies I am trying to employ in my film. Virginia Woolf seems to effortlessly weave together a multitudinous collection of experiences, memories, and impressions from multiple perspectives. She accomplishes this through employing poetic prose that illustrate the mysterious yet undeniable connection between our subjective thoughts and the physical/visual world. The green dress Clarissa mends reawakens Richard’s contempt for her life style; the pen-knife Richard toys with reminds Clarissa of her annoyance to his oblivious attitude. This is not only done convincingly with each of the book’s central characters but also with people who seem to be there only by happenstance, such when the airplane flies over London and we are privy to the brief musings of a those who see it.

Any detail can ignite within us an emotion or recollection because, as isolated as we may feel from each other’s subjective experience, we all draw understanding from the same universe that produced us all.

I too want to incorporate this polyphonous view in my film. In some ways I have simplified the task and in other ways I have complicated it. Since my script focuses on the shared history of two siblings, the subjective comparison on a shared world is almost literal. However, where Woolf blends emotion and perception with poetic pros, I want to do the same with projected images retrained dailogue, which at the moment feels more opaque (although a certain amount of inaccessibility is permitted if not required).

Where character and visual impression cohabitate so well in Mrs. Dalloway, I’m developing them separately. It will take time before I can start to blend them, which in short means that my project is a fragmented mess at this moment. I remind myself that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing and that I should not shackle myself to the high standards of matching the level Woolf’s composition.

I’m still trying to access the multitude of perspective within myself.