55 feels a bit too long, no? Where do we go from here? Nowhere. Back to the womb. The eternal reoccurrence of all events. A mathematical certainty: the Poincaré recurrence theorem. Replay the same game. No Nietzschean heroism needed. It wasn’t terrible. It was just never terrific without someone to love.
Category: Philosophy
The Connection
“If you fail to feel the pain of others, you do not deserve the name of man.” – Saadi Shirazi, translated words of Bani Adam inscribed at entrance to UN headquarters.
Ray Carney on Cassavetes
“In Cassavetes’ work, personality is plot; behavior is narrative. Living does not involve doing anything but being something – a much harder task for both a character and a viewer to deal with.”
Cassavetes
“Other films depend on a shorthand, a shorthand for living. You recognize certain incidents and you go with them. People prefer that you condense; they find it quite natural for life to be condensed in films. They prefer that because they can catch onto the meanings and keep ahead of the movie. But that’s boring. I won’t make shorthand films. In my films there’s a competition with the audience to keep ahead of them. I want to break their patterns. I want to shake them up and get them out of those quick, manufactured truths.”
Art
“Art is a lie, a lie that makes us realize the truth.” Picasso (maybe)
Muriel, or the Time of Return
Where does reality reside? In our memories alone? The fragments of our daily lives broken and reassembled into a coherent whole? We usually construct the story centered in first-person: This happened to me; this is the story of MY life. An illusion, though perhaps a necessary one given the elusive nature of what we mislabel “the events of our lives”. In truth, nothing ever happens to us as there is neither a happening nor an us, but a trace, a remnant of what has elapsed. Time erases us long before the action arrives to cleave to our bodies. Events are superficial and cannot penetrate. The action is determined, but the contours of our being are left undetermined. The decentralized rhythm of existence conjoins a greater totality within the duration. Not my broken pieces. Our broken pieces, synthesized into a totality we struggle to comprehend.
Muriel perfectly conveys this deeper reality. From the edits, the disconcerted shifts of time and tempo and emotion, to the dialogue shifting between the objective (the trite and commonplace observations that we tell to mask our deeper feelings), to the subjective, the unconscious, the longing, the haunting memories that evoke loss, grief, regret.
As Resnais explains: “A classic film cannot translate the real rhythm of modern life. In the same day, you do twenty-six things, you go to lectures, to the cinema, to your party meeting etc. Modern life is fragmented. Everybody feels that; painting, as well as literature bares witness to it, so why should the cinema not do likewise, instead of keeping to the traditional linear construction?”
And like a shroud or a tapestry hung above the scenery, appears the angel, Muriel. The haunting figure of a murdered woman, an Algerian girl tortured and raped by Bernard and a companion, hovers over our world like an omen, a judgement, a collective death sentence, but also hints at, if not the possibility of salvation, perhaps the miracle of atonement.
Uncommon Qualities
“Oddity though he was, Norman was himself and seemed incapable of being anything else. That was very rare.” The Uncommon Reader.
Question: Does reading allow us to become better versions of ourselves or someone else?
Amelie
Amelie is my hidden gem. Hidden, not in the sense of film obscurity or lack of critical appreciation, but the understated power of its magic. Amelie is not a child, though she retains a youthful way of looking at the world, a kind of purity of vision that most of us lose the ability to retain, not from cynicism, though it can feel like that, or from trauma, though that too can impede progress. But progress to what? Not adulthood. Amelie does not need a man to make her grow up. This film is not about growing up. What Amelie lacks is authenticity, the power of self-generation, a kind of fixation on others around her which allows her to act as Angel/Devil dispensing a kind of divine justice on the undeserving world. Her morality doesn’t apply because all the other characters are sub-morality. They do not fit together, but happenstance can make them fit together for awhile. She is God to all but lacks the ability to set her own life in motion. But she knows the reason for her failure. She is unloved. Her lack of love and her lack of authentic life are one and the same.
But what a dangerous world this creates, for her and for us. Most of us talk in terms of self-empowerment, self-actualization as if this is some innate power within us all. A question of will power, of mind over matter. Others rarely factor into this ideal, and then only tangentially where idealized romantic/domestic life is seen as a way to complete ourselves. But we are not masters of our hearts. The power to grow, to self-actualize depends on this external force known as love. In truth, our condition is far from ideal and we are subject to the whims of happenstance. But we can believe there is an Amelie for us, a God with the power to remove the sting of loneliness and take our first tentative steps towards the authentic life.
The Mollusks
Every movement in life is a success. Yet it also involves a setback, an arresting of its own movement, a closing off of itself. By differentiating itself into material form it loses contact with the rest of itself.
Bergson IV
One or many durations? We can take the idea of a virtual coexistence and extend or apply it to the whole of the universe. “This idea, no longer simply signifies my relationship with being, but the relationship of all things with being. Everything happens as if the universe were a tremendous Memory.” It opens the door to “a radical plurality of durations…(where) the universe is made up of modifications, disturbances, changes of tension, and of energy, and nothing else.”
In what way can we say objects endure? Not in and of themselves, but in relationship to the whole of the universe.
Now we get at the heart of his critique of Einstein. For Bergson, “there is only one time (monism), although there is an infinity of actual fluxes (generalized pluralism) that necessarily participate in the same virtual whole (limited pluralism).”
The Hack 