1/27/22: my stream of consciousness while viewing “What is Cinema?” (2013) #poetry
In Robert Bresson’s “A Man Escaped” the character Orsini is described as very brave. A member of the French Resistance, Orsini was betrayed by his wife and sent to a Nazi prison. When he first arrived at the jail, he was near madness. But eventually he grew beyond hatred and even suffering. He said he still remembered what happened to him, but in a manner as if it happened to another person. Bresson is studying the process by which people get out of prisons in this film, and some prisons are within our minds.
It is fascinating that Orsini did not escape his broken mind and heart in response to his wife’s betrayal by an act of will. He transformed to a kind of enlightenment. He went through a humble spiritual process.
I thought about Orsini in relation to my own madness, hatred and suffering related to cruelties and injustices visited upon me. I have repeated Orsini’s evolution many times. Lost friendships and jobs, initially so painful, became objectified in my mind. I realized in each instance that every break with a person or persons hurt ultimately because of the loss of an illusion. I believed that love existed in situations where in fact it did not.
Orsini was better off without his wife of course. He eventually was executed. She was literally an accomplice to his murder, but that harm is not what initially hurt him so deeply. She rejected him in the cruelest fashion.
When I look at rejection objectively, I see that it is not an action that one or more persons do to an individual. I think of organ donations. If the kidney is not a match for a patient the body rejects it. There are people who we are meant to be with, and people that we are not meant to be with.
The loss of the non-friend, or loveless lover or inappropriate job or community or group is always a good thing. One’s true nature matures and reveals itself, and often has to move on.
This split is always painful at first. No level of enlightenment ever makes it easy. But one always goes on to find one’s match, or finds it is better to be alone, or dies with a sense of peace regarding what has happened.
Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria” follows a prostitute searching for love who is rejected again and again until she learns that her acceptance of herself is her salvation.
Rejection is the breaking of codependencies. The artist, or the fully human person, must be independent and capable of entering into inter-dependent contacts if and when such opportunities arise. Love is inter-dependency. You don’t need another person to survive. You walk with them by choice. The inter-dependent reflect and support each other in their independent solitudes.
I have written extensively about my break with some members of the improvisation community. This break initially caused me great pain, and I wondered why. That very wonder was a sign that I had reached where Orsini was in his full maturity. I was starting to naturally be curious about what happened, and began to look at what formerly was my pain in an objective way.
Why was I in pain?
The improv clique rejected me. They said I wasn’t any good creatively. Why did this hurt? I never thought that they were any good creatively, not then or now. I found their work to be sloppy, cynical and dumb. So why did I care? I thought they loved me. And as I review my life, I see that they never loved me. They didn’t even like me. I was never one of them. I was too smart and serious for them. I did not pander to audiences. I tried to get to the truth. They said that they were improvisers, but they were much more influenced by commercial casting directors for entertainment and advertising projects. They actually weren’t improvisers at all. They were hacks. Commercial artists hate the real thing. I am far better off being apart from them.
The improv clique said that I always ‘came back’ and hung around. They slandered my reputation and portrayed me as a bum and hanger on, who never had money and was looking for a handout, trying to be a parasite on their venues and projects. I am a lawyer, and a college professor, and a writer with an independent income. I came back to them to try to work on my idea, not to become part of theirs. They were very toxic in their comments, but I was never deterred in my work. Why did this bother me? Well, it hurts to be slandered. It feels like a physical assault. So apart from the inappropriate nature of their hack approach to a false creativity, these people were also bad people for me to associate with at all. We all need to spend time with people who respect us and treat us well. Relationships endure anything but disrespect.
The improv clique attacked me when I was visiting, on a weekly or biweekly basis, a dying member of their cohort that I thought was my friend. I found it extraordinarily cruel that they mocked and hazed me under these circumstances. Of course that hurt too.
Can’t the painful part stop? I’m 66 years old. Certainly these splits have happened to me before in many different settings. I’m not sure, but I don’t think it gets any easier. There may be a shorter recovery time, and a greater understanding of the nature of things, but humiliation and slander and malice and envy and even ignorance directed at you hurts — no matter how often you have endured and transcended them previously, and how unsurprising they are given your experience relating to human nature.
Bresson, in “A Man Escaped”, makes an equivalency between ‘escape’ and the Christian notion of being ‘born-again’. Bresson was a Catholic filmmaker. I think we endure crucifixions — great pain, and then reflect upon and process what happens — Holy Saturday — and then we are redeemed … our sins and the sins of our oppressors are forgiven and we go forward in the fullness of humanity — creative and open to real love, discerned from illusion.
What I have written thus far is what cinema is to me. It is something to contemplate. My inner world encounters something new in my outer world, and both of those worlds change.
I look forward to what I might learn and how I might change from watching “What is Cinema?”
******
Cinema is something to be reflected upon. Questions not answers. Cinema is an invitation to the viewer to make art himself, at least this viewer. For that reason, it doesn’t matter if the movie is “good” or “bad”. A movie tries to tell the truth. It may hit or miss. It is a chance to reflect on the truth referred to, accurately or inaccurately.
Cinema, other forms of art, and everything that happens in my life, all have the same function for me.
This movie uses music to entertain the audience that I find distracting.
Cinema is like a dream The dream of the collective. Dreams show us in symbolic form realities about ourselves that we are unconscious of … art points the viewer to that which is unseen …
Everything I see are objects of contemplation for my art.
This movie is calling on me to fill in a lot of blanks. It ain’t Bresson.
One guy wants cinema to have story. I like when it says something. But if it doesn’t, I will. I will anyway.
This movie is for people who want to make movies. I do’t want to make movies. For me, it seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble — for me. I can say all I want to say right here on this page (or screen).
Meaning … meaning … meaning … everything else is secondary …
Hitchcock talks about style, but I think he is really talking about interpretation. All art is interpretive. When you read a piece that I write about a movie, you are really considering an image of my experience, and then you create an experience of your own. If you are an artist, you’ll make an image of your experience. If you aren’t an artist, you are a consumer of art, and perhaps that experience, like all experience will color your future.
I identify with Bresson. I feel that we are similar.
I think my notes here are more useful than this movie.
Now it’s a clip show. Is this stuff just what the director admires? What he could get? Who cares?
Bresson — ‘without transformation it isn’t art’. I’ve said that. I swear … I really relate to this guy. Bresson says art has to be a new thing. If it is art it is unlike anything else in the manner of its expression. And timeless in what it has to say (I added that).
Altman … another great one. I’ll put it in my words … art leaves a trace. Elaborate structures that disappear, but live on as a thought, a feeling, a stirring of the soul … and if it’s effective, the viewer is more consciously him or herself. All my words here in this fragmentary paragraph inspired by Altman.
Creation happens in the unknown.
I’ve said it often … art happens when you don’t know what you are doing.
Leap!
This movie moved into a few profound sequences now.
A critic tells you what he thinks. An audience tells you how they feel. I make art. I don’t write or talk about movies.
The movie talks about changes in technology … digital etc … that’s not my focus. I don’t care when a movie was made. I am interested in meaning. Everything else is just tools.
Mike Leigh … another great one … independent integrity … he is pretty articulate about his process … most of them aren’t. Writing and talk are different art forms than filmmaking.
“The camera is more than a recorder. It’s a microscope.” Great line. Art is a microscope.
“Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures”. Beautiful.
“Art has to be reinvented”. Yes, always. Every time.
“We have an idea in our head, and that idea changes. And if it doesn’t, we are making the wrong film.” Wisdom.
What is cinema? Cinema is one of the objects that I look at as I make my writing. That’s my answer.
1/26/22: my steam of consciousness while viewing “A Man Escaped” (1956) # poetry
Bresson is interested in telling “true stories without adornment”.
A prisoner of the Nazis in the French resistance.
Bresson was in the same circumstance as his protagonist in “real life”.
Joan of Arc
Was Bresson martyred for loyalty to God?
Without adornment
A minimalist
Where is the art?
Nothing imagined, no style which draws attention to itself
There is the style
The truth honestly and directly told
is a manner of high art.
The clarity, the serene calm, the focus on the object, the rigor of the observation, the courage, the empathy which studies every detail, the courage to speak without self-censorship, the breadth and depth of study to see every aspect of the story in the context of all human history, art, philosophy and theology
That is the stuff of art
at least the stuff I notice now
Looking at Bresson is like looking at the stars
It inspires awe and curiosity
The man wants to escape oppression
He takes great risks
He would welcome even death as the means to his freedom
Think of the Nazis
They were paid, and promoted, for their cruelty
Are they such an extreme metaphor for how things are?
Subtitle: “The Wind Blows Where It Wishes” (from the Bible)
Bresson knows that we have no control over what happens to us
and all control in how we respond
Mozart did the music
I guess I’m not the only artist who wants to surround himself with masterpieces
The Nazis demand that the man does not escape
In this circumstance a man’s raison d’etre is in his defiance
The oppressor beats and then leaves you alone
GO SIT THERE
SHUT UP
DO NOTHING
SIT AND ROT
Left alone, a person can die of despair
or make art
and plot acts of resistance
A person can be imprisoned politically
and/or
psychologically
Oppression is a form of attempted murder
Which can only be successful if the oppressed person cooperates with his enemy
They can even kill the body, but they can’t kill your essence
unless you let them
Oppression makes the oppressed necessarily suspicious
Wary of each other in the world
and intimately experienced in the true nature of hope
not sunny optimism (Obviously)
but aware
that life always has a chance
even in the most dire circumstances
Real risk
Trusting strangers
Freedom is a matter of life and death
New friends arrive
A sense of small victory
Ambition to get away
and win the war
It is this way for everyone
French Resistance prisoners
People with abusive bosses
Folks damaged by toxic relationships
Saintly mules abused by sinners
In art, the artist finds solidarity with other oppressed people
and those who have escaped
The process of liberation is the education of the artist
Bresson likes using narration
I feel a commonality with him in many ways
He who escapes never accepts defeat
He will never bow
Pride is not a sin in these times
The artist unconsciously prepares himself
notices everything
It is all intuitive preparation
every true moment follows a gestation period
Something directs us to what we need to know
Bresson is fearless in his honor of the truth, he never caters to the audience
but gives it precisely what it needs
I rewind and review time and time again
You can’t miss a frame
He presents a moment by moment exposure
Of what it is to be held down and away by someone else
and what it is to get away
and be free
Freedom does not involve endless possibilities
It is a matter of fulfilling the promise of one’s essential nature
The oppressor actually performs a service
In pushing back against the oppressor
The oppressed gains form and defintion to who he is
False imprisonment, like its cousin, murder, is a usurpation
It tries to deny God the accomplishment of the fulfillment of His creation
NO ONE CAN DO THAT TO YOU AND GOD UNLESS YOU LET THEM
Our opportunities and inspirations come in moments of chance and idleness
A spoon becomes a chisel
The magic of the escapist
He digs through prison walls
Progress is slow
Craft is developed in response to the necessity of telling your story
and living it
The pain of the inevitable losses
fallen comrades
is overcome with work
One’s action becomes silently dedicated to the ones who didn’t make it
and the ones who might still have a chance
now and in the future
The escapist must disregard the fears of people he cares about
Luck
Luck is the unseen hands of God
God furthers all who serve his purposes
Why bother?
Bresson’s answer (and at least part of mine)
“To fight. To fight myself, to fight the walls, to fight the door.”
To exult and fight
“For the Greater Glory of God”
The Jesuits had us write that on the top of all of our papers and tests
And I guess it took
“Fight, fight for everyone else”
One man makes a spoon into a chisel, and another makes shoelaces into a noose
That is every person’s choice
Time numbs the wounds of abuse
The wounds take us to the threshold of madness
and then
Art heals them
Time dulls hate and even suffering
Art uses hate and suffering
as instruments of escape
Months of patient work opens doors
Bresson the Christian Existentialist
The plan unfolds … structure and improvisation are one
Bresson knows that we have to execute God’s plans
It would be too easy otherwise
Life is great because it is hard
Its difficulty makes masterpieces possible
Some doubt the escapist and some want to come along
When you get to the point when you forgive and forget
Your past troubles seem like they happened to someone else
Now you are making art
How dirty, small and ugly is the world our captors force upon us
how could we not escape
Bresson equates escape with the Christian idea of being born again
The artist transcends the world’s oppression
dies to the world and comes to birth from within
the truth, the will of God displaces the meanness, injustice and misery
Hope is doing the right thing even though you know you could fail, or even die
It is the very act of hope that redeems
Hope inspires others to hope
Success and failure are the provinces of the oppressor
The born again artist traffics in hope
And on the eve of his escape suffers doubt
And his peers parrot the misgivings back to him
The oppressor escalates the oppression
Prison will yield to execution
Art is made in crisis
Doubts are no longer an option
The stress makes the escapist manic and depressive
A nervous breakdown is a rebirth
Unlikely partners arrive
A window of opportunity
Arrangements are made to be sure your story is told, win or lose
And then you and your partners jump
Your meticulous plans
and your flexibility in face of surprise
Your prepared openness
and the adventure finally begins
The Escape Artist
Your virtuosity gives you
FREEDOM
And in freedom, finally, you become Bresson in full
Nothing holds you back now
and your sufferings are those of other people
A Man or Woman Escaped
Bresson showed us the essences of the processes of life
It’s all true
It all applies to everyone
Faith isn’t a choice
You just know and trust what you know
The oppressor has to disappear
And you make it so
The final initiation is making the oppressor disappear
1/26/22: This is a repost of a fine concise statement about outrage in my writing, and in my life. If it were just an airing of grievances, it would be petty. But it is important. I explore my wounds with the same intensity that I explore my exaltations. The reader can explore my ordinary life and responses to the infinite expanse of life in general, and explore their own.
9/23/21: An Ode to My Mature, Righteous and Poetic Anger #poetry
A great friend and reader (and excellent writer in his own right) writes, “Often, reading your work, I feel that excitement warming, “… here he goes, we’re circling an insight …” Or I feel the danger of your anger, your willingness to expose an arrogant, lesser mind. I’ve admitted, at times, I worry for you, but also I exalt.”
I ask him , “Why do you worry for me?”
Before he can answer me, I tell him (and you) why I am not worried.
I have a kind of objectivity in my anger. It starts out personal, but I work it out , largely through writing. I then look at the hideous behavior and feel moral outrage … at first in being small maybe, and then I get through it.
1/25/22: Inventory of Outrages
Yesterday, I did an inventory of masterpieces that I have contemplated and written about. Today I will be sharing an inventory of outrages … negative responses to destructive things.
Art looks at the masterful — excellence and virtue, and also looks at the sins and caprices of Man, the actions that we take that alienate us from what is traditionally called God.
I thought that I wrote about the mean, inhuman things to purge them from my own soul, but the unconscious purpose was more important than that. The dark can not be left out of any portrait of ‘God’, man and the world.
The Seven Deadly Sins are (with corresponding opposing virtues in parentheses):
Pride (Humility)
Greed (Generosity)
Lust (Affection)
Envy (Enthusiasm for Excellence)
Gluttony (Temperance)
Wrath (Patience)
Sloth (Industriousness)
My pieces considering negative objects of contemplation are shared today on the blog below. I did not include the early years of the blog in this inventory. They may be a separate project. But I came across this early piece that I thought was perfect to be included in today’s inventory.
Copyright 2022 Richard Thomas
Dear Father Jenkins, the President of the University of Notre Dame,
I read that you were petitioned by many not to invite the illegitimate, immoral, and soon to be proven criminal and even treasonous President Donald Trump to speak at ND’s May 2017 Commencement Ceremonies. You agreed not to invite Trump and invited his complicit, dissembling, and immoral in his own right, Vice-President Mike Pence instead. That’s too clever by half, Father Jenkins. You disgraced yourself today.
Free speech doesn’t mean the University has to give stupidity and immorality societal authority. Let Pence pass out leaflets on the quad. That’s constitutionally protected. A university — especially a university like Notre Dame that claims to be so superior in the art of developing students’ personal characters AND minds — should have intellectual and moral standards. Have you been thinking TOO MUCH about money, Father Jenkins? Is all the high-minded rhetoric just marketing? Stop worrying about…
1/25/22: my stream of consciousness while viewing au hasard Balthazar (1966) #poetry
The mule is baptized
The great Bresson
The reincarnation of a great Catholic Renaissance painter
The essence of Catholicism is beautiful
Beyond the nuns with rulers and pedophile priests and self-righteous Notre Dame conservatives
Catholicism the humanist religion that welcomes its expression in art
I don’t have faith
I have experience
The essence that the word ‘God’ refers to is palpable and ever present
It isn’t a matter of religion, or even spirituality if you wish
It’s a matter of physics.
Children baptize Balthazar
They anoint him a child of God
and almost immediately he begins to be abused.
The genius of Bresson has humanity reveal itself in how it treats this mule
The Seven Deadly Sins are (with corresponding opposing virtues in parentheses): Pride (Humility) Greed (Generosity) Lust (Affection) Envy (Enthusiasm for Excellence) Gluttony (Temperance) Wrath (Patience) Sloth (Industriousness)
Godard said that this movie shows all of life in ninety minutes
Ebert said that Bresson does not include one shot that shows the mule’s point of view
I say that Bresson doesn’t anthropomorphize the mule
This isn’t a Disney nature film
The pretty girl loves the mule
The animal dully reacts when she kisses his snout
We interact with the world
for an audience of one
God sees all
God and Bresson
Bresson’s style is substance
he tells a simple deep story
like in Church when we were kids
but we are adult now
God has the answers for how we should proceed
Be good
The pretty girl’s father’s vanity gets in the way
Other characters have other failings
Bresson doesn’t get trapped in psychology or sociology
He knows everyone has a theology
whether they know it or not
It’s not about being respectable
It’s about being human
The boyfriend’s jealousy gets in the way
He is jealous because the girl loves the mule
How stupid!
How galling is the stupidity of the egoistic people consumed by envy
He sets the mule’s tail on fire
Cruelty comes easily to him
The girl’s “love” of Balthazar is her longing for a better world
But like Leda and the Swan … she wants to be raped and to escape rape
And if you read that with feminist reservations, think beyond gender
because God does …
The girl desires the purity of the mule
and is drawn to the boy’s aggressive lust
We are all like that
Every one of us
We want Paradise
and we want the Fall
The boy toots a horn after he fucks her
A conquest
Off camera, we know that she is damaged …
and satisfied
Bresson is steeped in secular art, religious text and art, and mythology
He believes in what he has worked to understand
Ingmar Bergman didn’t get this picture. The human being interested him, not the mule.
He didn’t see that Bresson felt the same way. Some artists work from the inside out and some from the outside in.
Bergman revealed a weakness looking at Balthazar. Things had to be Bergman’s way.
I am no longer an improviser.
I don’t believe that something can be wonderful right away. Wonderful comes from calm observation and reflection.
I don’t believe that creativity involves saying, ‘yes, and’. Creativity involves saying yes and no, making considered determinations of value.
I do believe in one aspect of improvisation. Improvisation is a theater of externals. We reveal ourselves in how we relate to people, and objects between us, and the space around us. Our souls are extensions beyond our persons. This aspect of improvisation is based upon theology and not facile trickery.
Bresson had Catholic dogma. Paul Sills had Martin Buber. Sills, as I’ve written before, was frustrated by improvisation. Buber was taking him further than Spolin, but business considerations never allowed him to let Spolin go. Sills was like Moses. He watched approvingly as others left improvisation behind.
Improvisation is a phase, not a destination.
Bresson’s work is thought out, and still retains its spontaneity and air of discovery … as thought always does.
The greatest music is both jazz and classical.
Bresson just shows you what happens in a scene. He never adds a comment. He let’s the scene speak for itself. The scene makes the comment. You make the comment. Bresson calls on you to be the artist … to look at life and learn.
Sin is folly.
The Seven Deadly Sins are (with corresponding opposing virtues in parentheses): Pride (Humility) Greed (Generosity) Lust (Affection) Envy (Enthusiasm for Excellence) Gluttony (Temperance) Wrath (Patience) Sloth (Industriousness)
‘Hasard’ means luck
Life happens to us
What’s up to us is what we do with what happens
An alcoholic gets an inheritance
He promptly gets drunk and dies
Balthazar has been a pet, a beast of burden, a runaway, a circus animal, worked to death … and a saint …
men said what he was
and he never renounced his essential nature
He couldn’t
He’s a mule
We choose
A character states his theology when asked if he believes in anything, “I love money. I hate death.”
His God and his Satan.
The sweet girl who loved Balthazar becomes a prostitute not for money but for warmth and kindness
and transformed the man who worshipped cash
She has a perverse awakening … a sad ending for Leda …
No … not sad … she embraces rape and Paradise …
She loves a good man as an act of will
Not passion
She chooses to accept the sinful world
and engage it with the serene acceptance of Balthazar
I don’t think that I understand everything that is happening in this movie
But I see what Bresson is doing
A priest says “You must forgive … everyone … “
Only someone who has forgiven everyone
like Bresson
can describe our sins so clearly
After the storm, the skies clear
and the painter sits at his easel
Balthazar the saint walks in a funeral procession …
Yesterday, I did an inventory of masterpieces that I have contemplated and written about. Today I will be sharing an inventory of outrages … negative responses to destructive things.
Art looks at the masterful — excellence and virtue, and also looks at the sins and caprices of Man, the actions that we take that alienate us from what is traditionally called God. I thought that I wrote about the mean, inhuman things to purge them from my own soul, but the unconscious purpose was more important than that. The dark can not be left out of any portrait of ‘God’, man and the world.
The Seven Deadly Sins are (with corresponding opposing virtues in parentheses):
Pride (Humility)
Greed (Generosity)
Lust (Affection)
Envy (Enthusiasm for Excellence)
Gluttony (Temperance)
Wrath (Patience)
Sloth (Industriousness)
My pieces considering negative objects of contemplation are shared below. I did not include the early years of the blog in this inventory. They may be a separate project.
5/18/21: The Father (2020) — Merrily (?) Merrily (?) Life is but a … #poetry
My mother died a year or two ago in the fall. I can’t remember the specifics easily. We all retreat to the mist … and return in our dreams … Brigadoon. She had dementia.
I see my mother in this movie. I see me too. I like the way Anthony Hopkins dresses — isn’t that funny? I’m into old man chic. I like his white hair and stomach. I like the standards of old age. I was born to be old. This is my favorite time of life. The comfort, the intolerance of fools, the irascible demand to be oneself, to say and do as you please … the end of all bullshit … the freedom … retired from society … society cares less about you now … less about what you think, what you do…
PARIS, FRANCE: Picture dated 28 April 1983 of French film director Robert Bresson, who died 18 December 1999, aged 98, his wife announced 21 December 1999. Bresson directed the first of his 13 full-length films in 1943, among them the famous “Journal d’un cure de campagne” (diary of a country priest). (Photo credit should read GABRIEL DUVAL/AFP/Getty Images)
1/24/21: My Masterpiece Inventory #poetry
I want to view more masterpieces. As regular readers know, I don’t write reviews. I use movies, TV, theater, books and other media as jumping off points for broader and personal essays. Today, I re-post pieces that contemplated what I consider to be masterpieces in an effort to take an informal inventory of how I am doing in my project to contemplate things that are worthwhile.
The results of the inventory are encouraging. I began considering masterpieces in early 2021 with my piece considering “Manchester by the Sea”. Early in the evolution of the blog in 2016, I wrote my personal thoughts and responses to “Nashville”, “Mr. Turner” and “Rules Don’t Apply”. There were many pieces that I could have included in my masterpiece file that I arbitrarily concluded were very good but not at the level of masterful excellence. Many are actually masterpieces, but I had to limit somewhere.
The blog basically says yes and no in its choice of subjects. I look at things that are instructive about life and art, and things that are destructive of life and art.I have a good start in my goal to consume great art, and hopefully make some along the way.
The blog began (and remained briefly) a personal marketing tool, and then morphed into an opinion page related to the Trump farce/tragedy and the death of theatrical improvisation, murdered by the institutions and individuals who had the responsibility of its care and expansion, while servicing my students as a teaching tool, next tried to deliver my art in entertainment milieus … a misbegotten effort from which I learned a lot, then turned into a personal journal, then experimented with poetry and essay and seems to have come to rest in a state that I simply call “my real writing”. All of the phases with the exception of the final phase of my “real writing” would rise and fall like tides … it wasn’t a linear progression. The writing reflects choices in my life. I no longer am interested in mere opinion. I have left the improvisation community and my interests turn elsewhere. I no longer teach. I have no interest in performing and certainly not performing in any entertainment environments. I don’t market myself anymore, putting my faith in real connection instead of forced partnerships. Each “no” improved my life and writing. And my two “yeses” art and ordinary life inform all that I do. The blog when read chronologically is an interesting study in transformation. The two most empowering things that I have ever done were studying for and passing the bar exam on the first try, 25 years after I graduated from law school (when I was 50, 16 years ago), and writing my blog (since 2015). The bar made me think I can accomplish anything. I not only passed but was scored in the 88th percentile on the practice exam (the scores of the actual test aren’t published) — 25 years after my indifferent and mediocre law school career. The blog showed me that I could teach myself to be a writer of high quality — in my own way — the way of art.
I have high artistic aspirations for my writing, and they are not mere optimism. I prove to myself that I can do things. I can write.
So yes, I want more masterpieces in my life, including ones written by me. I have posted links to the pieces that I have written sharing my reflections while viewing masterpieces below.
1/23/22: my stream of consciousness while viewing “The Trial of Joan of Arc” (1962) #poetry
The equivalency of art and martyrdom might strike some as strange, but only those not yet acquainted with the sacrifice of art and the joy of sainthood …
Robert Bresson … knew nothing and just started to look …
he’s
Catholic
Minimalist
Existential … meaning that he is focused on the creation of meaning, he considers the realities of being alive
Direct
Sincere
He’s like a scientist as all artists are
None of the entertainment bullshit
He explores the truth
He rejected acting … he felt it was phony …
He’s serious
What he does is important …
He is deep …
He is challenging …
He is self-determining …
He is free … indifferent to the opinions of the world …
He is generous … he gives us his best defintion of the world …
He works consistent with what he has discovered to be the essence of his medium, film …
In service with what he has discovered is the essence of what it is to be alive …
His material could easily descend into the merely political, psychological or sociological
but it never does …
He makes it alive and present to the viewer, for the viewer to apply to their individual life …
He’s actually not that hard to figure out once you look at him …
but you have to look.
We watched Saturday Night Live last night. Dreadful. What are these people thinking? What do they care about? They don’t care about being good … at anything. Ninety minutes of cheap attention getting. Every second … the sketch comedians, the musicians, the commercials.
Why do I watch this shit? I want to turn off my mind, I guess. But the result is always the same. It makes me tired and depressed. Bresson engages me, I have to work at his work …. it makes me tired in a different way, a good way, a clean way … and I feel stronger and more alive for the experience.
I have to make some changes. Throw all the bums out. SNL isn’t alone … so much bad TV and bad movies, so many banal social media posts … so many people who just aren’t good enough …
Joan of Arc was rejected by people who weren’t as good as she is … good deal …
Bresson takes his time … nothing is wonderful right away …
Years to raise money …
slow dense scenes ….
reverence …
The assholes put you/me/her on trial
She/i/you are defiant
(I’ll switch to ‘she’)
She cries alone and suffers
She questions the legitimacy of their authority
She refuses to fully cooperate
A voice told her to speak boldly
She does everything in service of God’s will
(Bresson took all of the dialogue from the transcripts of Joan of Arc’s trials … )
The bastards resolve to burn her at the stake before they complete their kangaroo trial
Joan of Arc fought for the real Church and the real France
The ideal is the real
Society betrays the nation and the church
The artist (like the saint) hears the voice of God and speaks to the people
And those who hold power and control the people conspire to kill her …
I take this kind of thing seriously
In this section the clerics’ tribunal makes a bunch of false accusations …
I know why they hate me … I expose them both in my very person and deeds and in my direct and spoken challenge …
The assholes want a confession … this is the juncture when shame is inappropriate …
They call her a liar …
She does not argue; she stands tall
Her accusers recognize her strength
She is dignified
She warns her accusers of their harsh fate if they murder her
God’s voice told her that her martyrdom will result in her joy in Paradise
God’s voice is her teacher
I am proud of the many times in my life that I’ve been told to shut up
I learned relatively quickly not to listen
She even sacrifices receiving God’s sacraments to honor the will of God
Her accusers are traitors to France, allied with the British enemy
She serves God before the church
God before everything … that’s where art comes from …
Worldly powers are threatened by sainthood and art
They know saints and artists are more powerful
and end all tyrannies
if they let them
What they don’t know is that it is impossible to stop saints and artists
even if they kill them, their influence always wins the day
Joan has doubt
This is the most perilous moment
more than the fire at the stake
If the saint or artist betrays themselves
they cease being saints or artists
for a time anyway … it’s part of the story …
a lot of pain in the story
Bresson may have hated acting, but the actress playing Joan gives a great performance
But i think its because she doesn’t act
She gives us a blank page to write our thoughts and feelings upon
They have to humiliate and demand that she bows
They ask her to recant her life
And she does!
(My greatest pain is from the moments that I have recanted … more than anything else … my life got better when I got pissed off …)
Of course, they respond with cruelty when she gives them what they want
Everything about them is for the assertion and maintenance of their power …
She can’t help but tell the truth when they go too far
They call her a “relapsed heretic” and in condemning her they are instruments of her redemption …
Notre Dame is not Notre Dame
Second City and improvisation aren’t either
or the Law
or UIC
or Loyola
or so many false friends
or every place anywhere and at any time that weren’t what they say they are
They burned me at the stake
time and time and time again
and I died victorious
and went to Paradise …
Writing …
I never bought into write so many pages a day stuff. My feeling is just show up. I consider my time ‘not writing’ the hours in between hitting the keys, and the years before I started in a systematic way , to BE writing , as much as the composition phase. I’ve been engaged in the act of writing my whole life. I think you, dear reader, may have too. You can be all of the other things and be a writer. You should be actually. The stuff of your life gives you something concrete for your dreams to alight on.
Joan was concerned with God and the people, and not the powers that be.
The equivalency of art and martyrdom might strike some as strange, but only those not yet acquainted with the sacrifice of art and the joy of sainthood …
The Rick Blog 