the wild boys (bertrand mandico, 2018)
"It was like a premonitory hallucination. The most beautiful of hallucinations."
Sometimes I'm reading a book and I find a passage or a sentence particularly insightful and I entertain the possibility of sharing this with other people. But something stops me. What stops me is the notion that perhaps I am so moved/inspired/whatevered by it because I read the words that came before, let alone what comes after, and so I start to roll the idea around of extending the section that I share with people: One line becomes two. Two becomes three. And so it goes. The understanding of the original passage works better when there is more accompanying context. You get it better. But now it's too long. Now there is too much to share. And so I decide that it's probably best not to share it with anyone, and I simply let it sit with me - inside me. The conclusion that I reached here was that there is always more that reaches us, that the small piece that moves us moves us because it is attached to something more, larger.
And then there are other times when I have an exceptionally epiphanous thought, something which encapsulates so much I find it hard to believe that it found its form in my head, and it is with a catch of excitement in my throat as I find myself with an opportunity to share this thought with someone. But when I start speaking it all falls apart. The emotion and upswell that accompanied the thought when it was just inside me is now entirely absent. Now that the thing is outside me, made of nothing but words, it's inert. Dead. Uninspiring. Which gets me to thinking about why I was so moved in the first place by an idea that is dead in the 'real' world - like an element of a dream that chills you to the bone while asleep, but which is dull and leaden when you try to explain it in the waking world - and the conclusion for that line of enquiry was that it was never the words that were reaching me.
I can add to both of these a little by talking about screenwriting. Recently it came to my attention that when I'm writing or reading a script I'm not reading words - I'm seeing pictures, hearing sounds. That's all. But the only method we have for understanding a film before it exists is via the script. And the script is just words. It's not the film. It does a pitiful job of exploring the sights, sounds, and concurrent emotions of a film.
I can in turn complicate this last point by looking at the three William Burroughs books that I read recently, back to back. A torrent of transgression. When you're reading a Burroughs book you become weary of the imagery - it starts to wash over you in a wave - body parts - fluids - monsters - nightmares - sex - abuse - torture - adventure - violence. You can find yourself at the halfway point and wonder why you should continue, or what would happen if you were to skip a page. But for me the overriding sensation is that the book is something akin to an incantation. If you were reading a magic spell out and skipped a word then the spell would not work. Think of Bruce Campbell as Ash bumbling his way through 'Klaatu Baradu Nikto.' If I don't read all the words in the order that they were written then something about the whole will evade me, the spell won't work. I need to read every word of Cities of the Red Night or it won't work.
But why would that be the case when my faith in language is at an all time low? Perhaps it's something akin to the experience of watching the film Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) - a film in which what you see and what you hear are not the same: What you hear is horrific, what you see is tranquil. Where's the connect between these two elements? In your mind, and in your mind alone.
Or perhaps 'mind' is the wrong word to use. Perhaps you would prefer 'soul,' or, if you find that word distasteful, you could replace it with another word - a word which gets closer to what you think it is inside you which is such an innate part of who you are and which is never seen by anyone.
I've talked a lot recently about the state of the world, or rather 'inferred.' I don't want to put my political leanings into the public domain, don't want to join the army of people using words and getting nowhere. But something is rotten. One of those rotten elements may very well involve the part of us that is never seen, may be about the disconnect between the outside/social role that we play and the unseen internal/private character that we know we are. For millennia we've been able to maintain this dichotomy without it having any impact on either sphere - the public or the private. But things have changed. We now have a space which is public/private at the same time - which can be seen and experienced externally, but which is formed from our internal selves. A space which allows us to be as transgressive as we like without impacting our social, 'real' self. I can write terrible things without putting my name to them and no one will know about the terrible things that I said. It's almost as though we give that terrible self of ours another name, such as 'Trevor,' and then blame our transgressions on him.
Perhaps for some there is power and strength in this, but for me there isn't. For me the idea of writing something without signing my name to it is anathema. Additionally, words don't really mean anything to me anymore. They are such a small part of the experience of it all that the idea of having faith in them is something that I can not align myself with. So what do you align yourself with? Nothing? Or everything?
So let's finish with the image of Edwige Fenech in the rain, struggling, everything in slow motion: water falls, grass is trampled, a lip is bitten, but more than just the image, there is also music. You take a bite of a fruit that you don't know the name of, the skin is thick and comes off in shreds, it's covered with a thick layer of hair, and the sticky juice and fibrous flesh clump together and run down your chin in thick globlets, the taste pure umami, not at all what you expected, and It's impossible to tell whether the image of Edwige is a moment of violence or passion, but perhaps we should remember that the border between these two realms is vast and blurs every step of the way, and why, in the end, should we ever feel so confident to say that something is one thing and not another.
Sometimes I'm reading a book and I find a passage or a sentence particularly insightful and I entertain the possibility of sharing this with other people. But something stops me. What stops me is the notion that perhaps I am so moved/inspired/whatevered by it because I read the words that came before, let alone what comes after, and so I start to roll the idea around of extending the section that I share with people: One line becomes two. Two becomes three. And so it goes. The understanding of the original passage works better when there is more accompanying context. You get it better. But now it's too long. Now there is too much to share. And so I decide that it's probably best not to share it with anyone, and I simply let it sit with me - inside me. The conclusion that I reached here was that there is always more that reaches us, that the small piece that moves us moves us because it is attached to something more, larger.
And then there are other times when I have an exceptionally epiphanous thought, something which encapsulates so much I find it hard to believe that it found its form in my head, and it is with a catch of excitement in my throat as I find myself with an opportunity to share this thought with someone. But when I start speaking it all falls apart. The emotion and upswell that accompanied the thought when it was just inside me is now entirely absent. Now that the thing is outside me, made of nothing but words, it's inert. Dead. Uninspiring. Which gets me to thinking about why I was so moved in the first place by an idea that is dead in the 'real' world - like an element of a dream that chills you to the bone while asleep, but which is dull and leaden when you try to explain it in the waking world - and the conclusion for that line of enquiry was that it was never the words that were reaching me.
I can add to both of these a little by talking about screenwriting. Recently it came to my attention that when I'm writing or reading a script I'm not reading words - I'm seeing pictures, hearing sounds. That's all. But the only method we have for understanding a film before it exists is via the script. And the script is just words. It's not the film. It does a pitiful job of exploring the sights, sounds, and concurrent emotions of a film.
I can in turn complicate this last point by looking at the three William Burroughs books that I read recently, back to back. A torrent of transgression. When you're reading a Burroughs book you become weary of the imagery - it starts to wash over you in a wave - body parts - fluids - monsters - nightmares - sex - abuse - torture - adventure - violence. You can find yourself at the halfway point and wonder why you should continue, or what would happen if you were to skip a page. But for me the overriding sensation is that the book is something akin to an incantation. If you were reading a magic spell out and skipped a word then the spell would not work. Think of Bruce Campbell as Ash bumbling his way through 'Klaatu Baradu Nikto.' If I don't read all the words in the order that they were written then something about the whole will evade me, the spell won't work. I need to read every word of Cities of the Red Night or it won't work.
But why would that be the case when my faith in language is at an all time low? Perhaps it's something akin to the experience of watching the film Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) - a film in which what you see and what you hear are not the same: What you hear is horrific, what you see is tranquil. Where's the connect between these two elements? In your mind, and in your mind alone.
Or perhaps 'mind' is the wrong word to use. Perhaps you would prefer 'soul,' or, if you find that word distasteful, you could replace it with another word - a word which gets closer to what you think it is inside you which is such an innate part of who you are and which is never seen by anyone.
I've talked a lot recently about the state of the world, or rather 'inferred.' I don't want to put my political leanings into the public domain, don't want to join the army of people using words and getting nowhere. But something is rotten. One of those rotten elements may very well involve the part of us that is never seen, may be about the disconnect between the outside/social role that we play and the unseen internal/private character that we know we are. For millennia we've been able to maintain this dichotomy without it having any impact on either sphere - the public or the private. But things have changed. We now have a space which is public/private at the same time - which can be seen and experienced externally, but which is formed from our internal selves. A space which allows us to be as transgressive as we like without impacting our social, 'real' self. I can write terrible things without putting my name to them and no one will know about the terrible things that I said. It's almost as though we give that terrible self of ours another name, such as 'Trevor,' and then blame our transgressions on him.
Perhaps for some there is power and strength in this, but for me there isn't. For me the idea of writing something without signing my name to it is anathema. Additionally, words don't really mean anything to me anymore. They are such a small part of the experience of it all that the idea of having faith in them is something that I can not align myself with. So what do you align yourself with? Nothing? Or everything?
So let's finish with the image of Edwige Fenech in the rain, struggling, everything in slow motion: water falls, grass is trampled, a lip is bitten, but more than just the image, there is also music. You take a bite of a fruit that you don't know the name of, the skin is thick and comes off in shreds, it's covered with a thick layer of hair, and the sticky juice and fibrous flesh clump together and run down your chin in thick globlets, the taste pure umami, not at all what you expected, and It's impossible to tell whether the image of Edwige is a moment of violence or passion, but perhaps we should remember that the border between these two realms is vast and blurs every step of the way, and why, in the end, should we ever feel so confident to say that something is one thing and not another.