Haunted by What’s Inside

From whiskey river:

People talk about the discontent in the world and about existential anxiety as if it were something new! Everyone at every period in history felt it. You have only to read the Greek and Latin authors! It is not true that the individual with his emotional life no longer feels himself the center of the world! What do you think really interests people from morning to night if it isn’t their feelings, their work and love — especially love.

(Alberto Giacometti)

Not cited at whiskey river, but the above quotation continues:

…They read the newspaper maybe ten minutes a day, they see that a satellite is orbiting around the moon, and then they immediately start talking again about work, and love. And not only that: often somebody will commit suicide because of love problems. And that means that if an individual would rather die than live without a person he loves, then the power of emotion does still dominate the world.

(cited by Reinhold Hohl in Giacometti: A Biography in Pictures)

Back to whiskey river:

Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life
I

Is there something down by the water keeping itself from us,
Some shy event, some secret of the light that falls upon the deep,
Some source of sorrow that does not wish to be discovered yet?

Why should we care? Doesn’t desire cast its
rainbows over the coarse porcelain
Of the world’s skin and with its measures fill the
air? Why look for more?

True, the light is artificial, and we are not well-dressed.
So what. We like it here. We like the bullocks in the field next door,
We like the sound of wind passing over grass. The way you speak,

In that low voice, our late night disclosures… why live
For anything else? Our masterpiece is the private life.

III

Standing on the quay between the Roving Swan and the Star Immaculate,
Breathing the night air as the moment of pleasure taken
In pleasure vanishing seems to grow, its self-soiling

Beauty, which can only be what it was, sustaining itself
A little longer in its going, I think of our own smooth passage
Through the graded partitions, the crises that bleed

Into the ordinary, leaving us a little more tired each time,
A little more distant from the experiences, which, in the old days,
Held us captive for hours. The drive along the winding road

Back to the house, the sea pounding against the cliffs,
The glass of whiskey on the table, the open book, the questions,
All the day’s rewards waiting at the doors of sleep…

(Mark Strand, Blizzard of One)

Finally, a scene from one of the most haunting films ever made about the exquisite power and terror of what’s inside: from 1967, Sweden’s Elvira Madigan, starring Pia Degermark and Thommy Berggren as two star-crossed lovers. (This video’s language is the original, undubbed and un-subtitled Swedish. I don’t think you need to know what the words mean to know what’s being communicated.)

Bonus: Just because once has seen Elvira Madigan — especially when young — it’s impossible ever again to hear Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C without thinking of the film… which is why you almost always see this work referred to as the “Theme from ‘Elvira Madigan.'”

(Click Play button to start; volume control via the little vertical bars at the left.)