micronotes on 21 films

i walk out of two movies (a quiet passion and benediction) in one week, both by terence davies - the first from tedium and to honour the emily he's wanting to honour, the second just from tedium

 

the comedian in annette irritates too much and sleep has her house requires a better larger screen and more darkness so i turn to le quattro volte which delights - vuk the dog in the first phase won a 2010 palm dog award but the goats and ants should have won palm goat and palm ant awards too

 

in each of its four phases something dies a whonym a goatkid a tree charcoal and the films wondrous partially because it accomplishes a rare feat in this world of hyper whonym supremacy in that i feel more empathy and sadness as the goatkid and tree die than the whonym whose death is timely, overshadowed by soft comedy

 

autumns almanac, damnation, the man from london - difficult beautiful films, all flawed pirouettes around satantango

 

altered states - a ridiculous melodrama with all the cheap cliches of amerikana - the devils is likewise but becomes better through its content and setting

 

life of brian (rewatch) - still holds with so many gags that work the equal many that fall flat don't matter that much - the external controversies over sacrilege by religious groups sadly hilarious

 

marketa lazarová czechoslovakia 1967 joins the seventh seal sweden 1957 and andrei rublev russia 1966 as one of the finest medieval films

 

exit 8 - not scary or fun, moving or engaging

 

il buco - its scene near the end of the film, just before the bottom of the cave, squiggling through a narrow passage over 600 metres into the earth - far more terrifying than anything in exit 8

 

into great silence - a bit silly, too much the contrapunt to wall street and so bound to the same sphere - i'd rather the monks than investment bankers - the monks are clearly far less destructive, but their cloistered innocence seems the bifurcated necessity to bifurcated political exigencies

 

the obvious injunction is that we're to admire respect even envy these hermits' lives, yet where's the dirt of the politics, the interiorities ... where there's no mud there's no art and quite possibly no god - what would we be admiring or respecting other than a marketed abstraction

 

and while i'll give sleep has her house an opportunity - these nature solitary films seem too romantic - a kind of religious porn - for those who're detached from inhabiting nature and solitude themselves and so bring it as a microdose of packaged distant otherness

 

then the sea that thinks comes along and says - or the tree it thinks it's thinking says - i am more monk that those monks because i dont try to do ... or maybe not because i don't but just as i don't

 

i dont   this donting is our doo

 

the 2000 dutch films a sieving of nature through whonym consciousness, rather than cloistering nature repressing it channeling it into aggression domination subjugation oppression it stays within its within and allows itself to be blown around in the nature that's been absorbed - through nature's external absence it becomes manifest in minds that avoid doing anything with it other than describing its meteorologies in langwiches that emerge from their experience being possessed by nature - this avoiding describing possessing absorbing we could call art and the sea that thinks not only an amusing friendly example but along with naked lunch one of the better explorations of being debecoming becoming debeing a writer, of being seduced into that swamp sometimes called langwich

 

the wolf house spectacular - a perfect transmutation of horror and suffering, a vital noble application of imaginative energies

道生中的死亡

 

上士闻道勤而行之

中士闻道若存若亡

下士闻道大笑之

 

before i began memorizing the daodejing in english some 20 years ago dao seemed to me something of a distantly enticing joke, having finished memorizing dc lao's translation and roughly two-thirds through memorizing the chinese dao now seems sometimes here sometimes not sometimes false dead flat sometimes alive vital true, but vignette 41 says that the best student practices dao diligently and walks it - it's fickle for the average and risible for the poor student

 

so if things keep going in the same direction maybe in another 20 years i'll be a good student or maybe dead, which for me may or may not be the same thing

 

死而不亡者寿

 

death and life being what they are - in each other and not apart - should they be forced apart things become unnatural decontextual destructive and this is where we are today in our interwoven civilization across the world and often within our interiorities, we've split the adam (אֲדָמָה earth) and so ourselves

 

朴散则为器 

 

when the uncut block (朴 pŭ) breaks up (散 sàn) it becomes tools (器 qì), as we've split the atom (άτομή uncut) so we've become tools of our splitting

 

to return death to life, to seek death in life, is not to continue increasing our warring, carnism, testosterone and its devotees, bifurcations - but to die ourselves while not dying

 

强梁者不得其死

 

yet the violent have no capacity for their death, their only capacity is for death - its projection, abstraction, externalization, objectification

 

名与身孰亲

身与货孰多

得与亡孰病

 

which is the greater calamity - your name or your meat, your meat or your assets, your capacity or your death - dao doesn't know, nor does life - and should i - but that these are eternal unresolving pivots on the forever tottering ambivalence of the day places death in life as life in death, yin in yang as yang in yin, you in me as i in you

 

故坚强者死之徒

柔弱者生之徒

 

therefore by separating life and death the hard and strong are death's disciples, by dying and not dying the pliable and weak are life's disciples 

 

不笑不足以为道

 

if no laughter it would be insufficient as dao - yet there is a laughter with as walking grows even as the laughter evaporates

rambling daos and moving pictures

spaces exist for the precision scientists, the scholars and conventionally studious journalists, to provide commentary according to their expertise - if we find analogies in the art world we could call such commentary realism and realistic representation like everything has its uses and nonuses. but we don't reify the method or knowledge, even as we attempt not to reify anything. our approach is not to try to be scholars, journalists, scientists - for we aren't made for these roles but other equally necessary tasks - neopostimpressionists and patarealists - these other methods and knowledges too, while less certified by the dominant maturities and forces, have their nonuses and uses. the people get scared that if you accept knowledge outside of science and its family you have automatically moved into faith, disinformation, radical relativity, nonsense. but this is largely due to the people having forgotten the arts of listening to the earth and the silences. so we, the doofam, occasionally here provide postneoimpressionistic meditations, patarealistic commentaries, dada devotions, abstract fluxy rehyperoutsider adventures and explorations. they aren't designed to be literal or true, they also aren't designed to be false or unnatural

and as we keep saying nonsense and madness have their truths

 

we draw from film - particularly the global arthouse genres - and dao - particularly the daodejing yet also the zuangzi, we draw from them as a wandering awed chronoconfused penitent might from a well, for sustenance to continue repenting, revering, wandering, perplexing

 

we distinguish here revering and reifying as the latter wrongly objectifying subjectivity and the former walking in rightful dread and respect in relation with the energies pervading the cosmos of which we are only infinitesimal aspects

 

you can here as elsewhere correctly accuse us of ignorance, we call it too ignorance but we also call it the inevitable limits of an abject seeker and see ignorance as our inevitable condition

 

soon some rambles and putterings on 道 and 死