self-existing magic of things

Still Sundays

October 9th.

Filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky on “self-existing magic of things” and more. Your talent is a body. Marc Jacobs on innovation. 

I find myself intellectually incapable to accept any of the etymologies offered behind “Indian Summer” and google’s curation of history doesn’t satisfy.

October is a solid indigo night, made for returning and leaving at the same time.

Autumn in New York is the muse for so many jazz compositions because only music can capture an indigo night.

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Yesterday I saw a film by Nathaniel Dorsky who has been making and exhibiting films within the avant-garde tradition since 1964. His works have bee shown internationally in museums and theatres and are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Le Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), Image Forum (Tokyo), as well as many universities. Of course, as is typical of how I operate, I did not have any prior knowledge before I met him last night at the New York Film Festival.

The only reason I attended his latest, “The Return,” was because a dear friend in Paris suggested that I would like it.  I also had the opportunity to see “Words of Mercury” by Jerome Hiller. They entertained a small question and answer session to the sold-out and unpretentiously impressed audience. It was a wonderful new experience for me, primarily because I did not walk in there with any preconceived ideas about what I believe and know their work to be “doing” or “saying.”

I was very inspired by Jerome Hiller when he said, “I was not even planning on making a film but just having fun.” Nathaniel Dorsky’s sense of humor was a joy and it was a relief to hear that there is indeed a difference between “having a story and the need for the unconscious to work itself out.” When I heard him say that I felt myself releasing my work-in-progress manuscript from the shackles of a designated deadline. That the unconscious too has a story, perhaps even a more important one than the one you are trying to tell.

“Everyone is getting more conceptual. But I’ve a deep hunger for the tender that is going on beneath, ” said Nathaniel Dorsky at one point. Someone from the audience asked what did he mean by conceptual? Nathaniel offered a joke instead.

I share an excerpt by Nathaniel Dorsky from his short and profound book, Devotional Cinema, which was originally presented as a lecture at Princeton University in 2001:

If you have ever looked at your hand and seen it freshly without concept, realized the simultaneity of its beauty, its efficiency, its detail, you are awed into appreciation. The total genius of your hand is more profound than anything you could have calculated with your intellect. One’s hand is a devotional object.

If film fails to take advantage of the self-existing magic of things, if it uses objects merely to mean something, it has thrown away one of its great possibilities. When we take an object and make it mean something, what we are doing, in a subtle or not so subtle way, is confirming ourselves. We are confirming our own concepts of who we are and what the world is. But allowing things to be seen for what they are offers a more open, more fertile ground than the realm of predetermined symbolic meaning. After all, the unknown is pure adventure.

I believe so many artists, writers, photographers, especially those who have placed the social media noose around their creative necks, are using their process to mean something. The process is important, but it is just that, a process. It is not your product. Or is it? Really?

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Yesterday I asked my mother if there was a way she could rephrase a certain sentence for me. If she couldn’t, I told her, then I highly recommend she not read my words this Sunday for she would find them offensive. She was rather displeased at the language I had used—female anatomy—to describe desperate people, women, especially those one can’t rid, for that is the nature of social media highways: can’t call the cops on people’s neurosis.

I don’t write when I am angry for I know without a shred of doubt I can slit bones with my words. I awoke this morning with agitation evaporated.

This is for you mama, if you read this Sunday. I decided not to degrade women with my words.

Your talent is a body and if you believe your body is a temple how do you offer it for worship? Who comes to worship?  It is not only easy to just employ sultry language as a caption underneath a photo to draw readers on these webs (where there is no quality standard) but after awhile no different than a woman who is available for any man for crack, it gets boring and downright degrading to the rest of us. Same applies for men: if you really need to flex your artistic or intellectual muscle to show how strong you are, maybe you are not. Same applies for showing the “dark” side of our nature through whatever medium. It is only in light can we perpetually see something new. Thought you wanted to make something new, no?  I dare you to see the dark and still light a candle and not run away from yourself, not what you want to creatively project.

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I could easily share a photo of myself here—in this internet space (for print surely could care less, it’s over-saturated and hard to attract real, sustainable attention, where as online we have our little or big audience)—doing splits: people will stop and stare. Is that how I want to ‘impress’? Is that the ‘appreciation’ I seek?

However, one who is a consistent yoga practioner would know, that in hanumanasana pose (the “splits”), you strive to reach much further and farther than seems humanly possible. It’s a pose that reminds you the pain of duality but power to surpass it with devotion to the Infinite.

Or I could just share a photo where you don’t see the obvious when you look at me.

I offer what you may overlook.

                                  Photography by Jamie Berry.

Borrowing the words of artist and filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, it is “the ineffable quality of vision […] expressed by projected light within darkness” that is our task as human beings, as artists. I attempt to share that for it is a challenging yet fulfilling experiment …because the dark is easy, sultry is easy, and for me, personally, intellectually boring.

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Steve Jobs died. Everyone is writing something about him. I am not going to. Instead, I am going to do what he inspired: I am going to make something new.

That being said, I borrow the words of fashion designer Marc Jacobs “Innovation is an evolutionary process, so it’s not necessary to be radical all the time.”

We live in a world where being alone and happy by yourself is a radical act. In Stillness we experience, we are never really alone.

~a.q.s.

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