Sunday, March 9, 2008

THE GRAVITY OF THINGS

“How poignant the late afternoons of autumn!  Ah! poignant to the verge of pain, for there are certain delicious sensations which are no less intense for being vague and there is no sharper point than that of Infinity.”
 From Charles Baudelaire (c.1931) ‘Artist’s Confiteor’ in Paris Spleen

An encounter with Infinity Itself, Wanaka, March 2008, JBowring

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Tuesday, March 4, 2008

A MOMENT IN AUTUMN

Hugo de Folieto, a monastic theologian from around the 12th century,  wrote that black bile “reigns in the left side of the body; its seat is the spleen; it is cold and dry.  It makes men irascible, timid, sleepy or sometimes wakeful.  It issues from the eyes.  Its quantity increases in autumn.”  And so autumn begins, and brings with it a shift in mood, a tiring fluey cold, and a certain introspection.  Perhaps more than any other season it provides those Proustian triggers, and small films start to play inside the mind.  Films with no titles, no credits, but occasionally with a sound track.  They have that flickering quality of film - of celluloid, of the pre-digital era.  More often than not monochromatic, like the films we watched as young kids in primary school … a small tin shed with a concrete floor  …  watching films like Wayleggo - a 1960s film about sheep stations  high in the Southern Alps (’Wayleggo’ being one of the instructions that shepherds use for their dogs, meaning something like, that’ll do boy, come away), a memory of vast landscapes of waving tussock.  Sometimes we were allowed to watch a film backwards, as it spooled back onto its original reel, and certain quirks of motion revealed themselves, a defamiliarising moment, a little ostranenie in 1960s small town New Zealand…

And that cerebral cinema?  Now playing: a memory of seeing a wild boar hanging in our woodshed, having also seen at some stage around then, a rifle, and realising with a great sense of gravity, how those two moments connected.  Innocence pulled suddenly backwards, like a receding wave, with all of the seething sound that accompanies it.  And another filmic fragment,  like an out-take from Steven Spielberg’s Duel… of driving home down the coast road in the pitch black that can only occur far, far from civilisation.  And realising that something was following us in the dark.  It was barely discernible.  We’d slow down, it would slow down too.  Eventually my father stopped the car, and It stopped too.  Another car, without headlights, was following us closely, like a blind person holding the arm of a sighted person, through the treacherous winding road, where we seemed so very far away from every single thing ….


The coast road, Kaikoura, in the 1930s.  (Christchurch City Library)

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Saturday, March 1, 2008

IN SHORT

“In short, what melancholy obfuscates is that the object is lacking from the very beginning, that its emergence coincides with its lack, that this object is nothing but the positivization of a void or lack, a purely anamorphic entity that does not exist in itself. The paradox, of course, is that this deceitful translation of lack into loss enables us to assert our possession of the object; what we never possessed can also never be lost, so the melancholic, in his unconditional fixation on the lost object, in a way possesses it in its very loss.”
Slavoj Zizek (2000).  Melancholy and the Critical Act.

alt : http://www.youtube.com/v/M_e7iicBaJo
Theo Angelopoulos The Weeping Meadow   Music: Eleni Karaindrou

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