A Psychic Documentary
I often think of the timeless movie of only black and white photographs and a narrator. La Jette, by Chris Marker (1962), which would later be fairly licensed to Terry Gilliam and he would make 12 Monkeys.
In La Jette, the frozen but succeeding images step out of black and white frames and animate in our minds. Our narrator is strapped to a chair. Totalitarian scientists are searching for means to escape their current fall-out.
They carry out experiments of time travel on the man in the chair. He is the vessel that can dream his way back. He carves himself a dream-like escape route through memory, and we follow a cognitive map through photographs as memory with the narrator as he relocates his heroine, harbinger of death but of infinite relief.
Chris Marker's images and story create a doorway that opens as a "story of a man marked by an image of his childhood."
And the snake swallows its own tail.
Mostly, I am a quiet one. But when I am struck by ideas and there is lightning in my veins, I do not guard my tongue.
Admittedly, all my life I have been some intense and rapid fever dream of potential trapped. I want to outlive my own death wish. I want to know and share everything, all at once.
In disbelief I have watched my ideas set off running without me. In the talons of friends or lovers. I watch them go. From the bones of woe, I assemble another creature anew. To make my unique more strange and my soft more sweet.
When I was young, I ran away to another country and married. While working in Gotland, he asked if I wanted to take over his screenplay. I agreed and wrote hundreds of pages, manifestos, and compiled research. When we divorced, a cease and desist came to my door. It was revealed he had copywritten my summary and my labored additions.
Our poor world doesn't require people to be malicious but to respond to its scarcity. It is mechanical not personal. We've been incentivized to treat one another as input sources.
I threw it all away. This erasure of contribution would play itself out again with those I trusted. In big and small ways. Some working in the industry and others just swaggerless disciples of capital with better resources for execution. We are rewarded for the speed of turning concept into commodity, even if vision was taken. Empathy or integrity are economically inefficient.
Did this regime of reproduction all start in 1917 when "R. Mutt" took a porcelain urinal in exhibition and titled it Fountain. Is this when the commodity function of an idea came to the fore?
Have we entered an era of hall of mirrors and digital simulacrum, where value is tied only to the social validation of the copy?
Could I find a way to create a break in automatic cultural repetition? I've wondered if my need for othering myself is part of an affliction.
Philo Vance was the detective creation of S. S. Van Dine first published in the mid 1920s. The Benson Murder Case, 1924, as Vance delivers in his inimitable way: "That's your fundamental error, don't y' know. Every crime is witnessed by outsiders, just as is every work of art. The fact that no one sees the criminal, or the artist, actu'lly at work, is wholly incons'quential."
I share all of this only to constellate its importance to the creation and destruction of the story I am writing, as it also creates me.
“The stars are matter. We're matter. But it doesn't matter.” - Don Van Vilet
I wandered the path of accident. I found and lost family, love, and home. I stumbled into different landscapes, faces, languages, and animals and outran them all. Always dreaming of escape. Inside of me there is an unnamed ghost of fire.
"Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." -Bhagavad Gita
This is written on Sylvia Plath's grave.
No mud, no lotus.
