[Image by Jan Piller at redbubble.com. Click the image for the original/to purchase.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Taking a walk with you
lacking the wit and depth
that inform our dreams’
bright landscapes,
this countryside
through which we walk
is no less beautiful for being only what it seems.
rising from the dyed
pool of its shade,
the tree we lean against
was never made to stand
for something else,
let alone ourselves.
nor were these fields
and gullies planned
with us in mind.
we live unsettled lives
and stay in a place
only long enough to find
we don’t belong.
even the clouds, forming
noiselessly overhead,
are cloudy without
resembling us, and, storming
the vacant air,
don’t take into account
our present loneliness.
and yet, why should we care?
already we are walking off
as if to say,
we are not here,
we’ve always been away.
(Mark Strand [source])
…and:
Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being [source])
Not from whiskey river — Brita is a photographer specializing in portraits of writers, and Bill is Bill Gray, a reclusive novelist:
Brita lay nearly flat in the long tub, hearing someone chopping wood just below the window. Steam rose up around her. First the crack of the ax, then the soft topple of split logs. She felt a small dim misery stealing through her and wasn’t sure what it meant. If there was any day in her recent working life that might be called special, this was it. Not that she thought any longer of building a career. She had no career, only writers hunched in chairs from here to China. There was little income and only passing public mention of the scheme. Pictures of most of the writers would appear exactly nowhere, often in obscure journals and directories. She was the person who traveled compulsively to photograph the unknown, the untranslated, the inaccessible, the politically suspect, the hunted, the silenced. So it was a form of validation, a rosy endorsement, when a writer like Bill offered to pose for her. Then why this strange off-balance mood? She ran more hot water. She knew it was him down there, breathing hard, chanting with the effort. First the crack, then the soft topple. Keep a distance. He is on some rocking edge. The temperature of the bath was perfect now, almost too hot to bear. She felt sweat break out on her face and she moved more deeply in. Isn’t this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? Steam hung in the room. The heat was profound, deep-going and dulling and close to stopping the heart. She knew he was strong, saw it in his hands and girth, that dockworker’s density of body. She reached for a towel and wiped her face and after a while she stepped out of the tub and went to the window, using the towel to rub vapor off the glass at face level. How could she keep a distance if she’d already taken his picture? This was the partnership, the little misery. Bill was tossing split logs toward the corded wood set under a sagging canopy at the site of the house. The announcement of my dying. She had to rub away vapor several times, standing by the window looking down.
(Don DeLillo, Mao II)
(According to some interpreters of Mao II, Bill Gray is meant to resemble J.D. Salinger, although when I first read the book I thought he was a Thomas Pynchon figure — his books sound to me more like Pynchon’s than like Salinger’s.)
The first ten-plus minutes of the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi. According to Wikipedia:
The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means “crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living,” and the film implies that modern humanity is living in such a way.
Koyaanisqatsi‘s score was composed by Philip Glass. That alone pretty much guarantees that the score, as well as the film itself, will be a tone poem, the music a sort of hymn to tremulous, uncertain balance.
DarcKnyt says
Are you feeling out of sorts, off-balance, John? Me too.
I’ve got some sort of antsy, edgy feeling I can’t identify and can’t lay to rest. It’s annoying and nerve-wracking. Your situation may be different, but I can relate to being sort of off-kilter.
Now … if I can figure out why, I’ll fix it.
Froog says
Isn’t a sense of unease or restlessness at this time of year likely to be tied to the change of the seasons, the sudden cooling of the weather, the shortening of the days, that “siren of sullen mists” autumnal melancholy?
I didn’t realise Koyaanisqatsi had its own website. It’s another one of those films I took delight in showing to Chinese university students – as an imagination-stretching experiment. As I usually did on this course, I spent 15 minutes or so at the start giving a mini-lecture on the concept of the film and some interesting background information about it, including of course Glass’s score. I mentioned his name three or four times, and even wrote it on the blackboard. I encouraged them to take notes. They were already familiar with the fact that about once a month I had a little pop quiz on facts about the films I’d shown them, which was going to be part of their assessment on the course. Three weeks later, not one of them – not one out of about 180 – could remember the name of Philip Glass. And this was a school usually rated in the top 5 or 6 in Beijing, and thus probably in the top dozen or so in the whole country. My experiences in the Chinese education system have been mostly rather depressing.
John says
Darc: Off-balance sometimes seems like my default setting.
Have you read the Harry Potter books? There’s a particular sort of creature in them; these creatures are called dementors. Taking off from that word, I sometimes refer to The Missus as “my own little personal disruptor” — she loves (I don’t think that’s too strong) the idea of keeping me from complacency and, er, balance. Which is a good thing I suppose from the outside looking in; in the other direction it’s a quite different experience!
Froog: Of course with that siren-of-sullen-mists business, I went straight to Google. I have NO idea where you got it… the closest I’ve found (so far!) was in a book of poetry (Songs and Sonnets) written by one Helena Coleman and printed in 1906. One of the poems is call “Dawn”:
I guess this is her? If so, where on Earth did you ever cross paths with her poetry???
(I did get a hit, according to Google, on what seems to be a quotation from the Aeneid: “In the autumnal stillness, when the cold, sullen mist that rises from the earth lies like a weight on the heart…” That seems closer, and certainly more up an old classicist’s alley. But I couldn’t find the full citation at the page which Google links to. Even Google Books let me down!)
Just out of curiosity, how old would those students have been? I got much the same response from US 15- to 16-year-olds when I was teaching, before Koyaanisqatsi came along, whenever I tried sharing anything even mildly esoteric.
(reCaptcha: nauseous train)
Froog says
Sorry to confound you so, JES. I was – unconsciously! – conflating Keat’s ode To Autumn (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”) with a poem on autumn by John Clare…. which did indeed prove to have a very low profile on the Web, although I eventually tracked it down through Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8pmcl10.txt). I had thought its opening line was “Siren of sullen mists and changing hues”, but apparently it’s “fading hues”, which is better, I suppose. Also, in some early editions, it appears to be spelled ‘Syren’!
Siren of sullen moods and fading hues,
Yet haply not incapable of joy,
Sweet Autumn! I thee hail
With welcome all unfeigned;
And oft as morning from her lattice peeps
To beckon up the sun, I seek with thee
To drink the dewy breath
Of fields left fragrant then,
In solitudes, where no frequented paths
But what thy own foot makes betray thy home,
Stealing obtrusive there
To meditate thy end:
By overshadowed ponds, in woody nooks,
With ramping sallows lined, and crowding sedge,
Which woo the winds to play,
And with them dance for joy;
And meadow pools, torn wide by lawless floods,
Where water-lilies spread their oily leaves,
On which, as wont, the fly
Oft battens in the sun;
Where leans the mossy willow half way o’er,
On which the shepherd crawls astride to throw
His angle, clear of weeds
That crowd the water’s brim;
Or crispy hills, and hollows scant of sward,
Where step by step the patient lonely boy
Hath cut rude flights of stairs
To climb their steepy sides;
Then track along their feet, grown hoarse with noise,
The crawling brook, that ekes its weary speed,
And struggles through the weeds
With faint and sullen brawl.
These haunts I long have favoured, more as now
With thee thus wandering, moralizing on,
Stealing glad thoughts from grief,
And happy, though I sigh.
Sweet Vision, with the wild dishevelled hair,
And raiment shadowy of each wind’s embrace,
Fain would I win thine harp
To one accordant theme;
Now not inaptly craved, communing thus,
Beneath the curdled arms of this stunt oak,
While pillowed on the grass,
We fondly ruminate
Oer the disordered scenes of woods and fields,
Ploughed lands, thin travelled with half-hungry sheep,
Pastures tracked deep with cows,
Where small birds seek for seed:
Marking the cow-boy that so merry trills
His frequent, unpremeditated song,
Wooing the winds to pause,
Till echo brawls again;
As on with plashy step, and clouted shoon,
He roves, half indolent and self-employed,
To rob the little birds
Of hips and pendent haws,
And sloes, dim covered as with dewy veils,
And rambling bramble-berries, pulp and sweet,
Arching their prickly trails
Half o’er the narrow lane:
Noting the hedger front with stubborn face
The dank blea wind, that whistles thinly by
His leathern garb, thorn proof,
And cheek red hot with toil.
While o’er the pleachy lands of mellow brown,
The mower’s stubbling scythe clogs to his foot
The ever eking whisp,
With sharp and sudden jerk,
Till into formal rows the russet shocks
Crowd the blank field to thatch time-weathered barns,
And hovels’ rude repair,
Stript by disturbing winds.
See! from the rustling scythe the haunted hare
Scampers circuitous, with startled ears
Prickt up, then squat, as bye
She brushes to the woods,
Where reeded grass, breast-high and undisturbed,
Forms pleasant clumps, through which the soothing winds
Soften her rigid fears,
And lull to calm repose.
Wild sorceress! me thy restless mood delights,
More than the stir of summer’s crowded scenes,
Where, jostled in the din,
Joy palled my ear with song;
Heart-sickening for the silence that is thine,
Not broken inharmoniously, as now
That lone and vagrant bee
Booms faint with wearp chime.
Now filtering winds thin winnow through the woods
In tremulous noise, that bids, at every breath,
Some sickly cankered leaf
Let go its hold, and die.
And now the bickering storm, with sudden start,
In flirting fits of anger carps aloud,
Thee urging to thine end,
Sore wept by troubled skies.
And yet, sublime in grief, thy thoughts delight
To show me visions of most gorgeous dyes,
Haply forgetting now
They but prepare thy shroud;
Thy pencil dashing its excess of shades,
Improvident of waste, till every bough
Burns with thy mellow touch
Disorderly divine.
Soon must I view thee as a pleasant dream
Droop faintly, and so sicken for thine end,
As sad the winds sink low
In dirges for their queen;
While in the moment of their weary pause,
To cheer thy bankrupt pomp, the willing lark
Starts from his shielding clod,
Snatching sweet scraps of song.
Thy life is waning now, and silence tries
To mourn, but meets no sympathy in sounds.
As stooping low she bends,
Forming with leaves thy grave;
To sleep inglorious there mid tangled woods,
Till parch-lipped summer pines in drought away,
Then from thine ivied trance
Awake to glories new.
Froog says
I can’t remember if those Chinese students of mine were 2nd or 3rd year undergrads. Aged about 19 or 20, anyway; which, given the decelerated pace of intellectual and emotional development which the Chinese education system seems to produce, probably does equate to about 15 years old in the States.
Happy Mid-Autumn Day! (The mid-point of the 8th lunar month in the Chinese calendar, full moon, a big traditional holiday.)
The Querulous Squirrel says
I love the quotes as usual and thank you for reminding me of one of my favorite movies. I think it is time for me to see it again.
Jules says
Mao II sounds great. Eisha once gave me a Don DeLillo novel (Underworld) and told me I had to read it…Ten years later (or something like that), cringe. But I still have it and will….
Yours in Koyaanisqatsi …
fg says
Watching and listening to your Koyaanisqatsi link I wonder if you had problems with your students picking up on this work because they were not yet of an age to be frightened of death?
Just a thought – regardless of nationality (though it may well be that different cultures “grow-up” faster than others) I think this work plays on our awareness of our mortality.
Maybe?
(I have written a little about this, prompted by a rather profound little conversation with my father when I was about ten or eleven.)
John says
Froog: I believe that may the longest poem by John Clare I nearly finished reading. :)
When I was scouting around for the source of your allusion, the really striking thing was how many hits I found for the phrase “sullen mist(s).” Even allowing for duplicates, I didn’t expect more than six thousand — it’s such an odd image. And I see now that yes, it showed up in a Keats sonnet, “Written on the Top of the Ben Nevis.”
(I will not look up “the Ben Nevis.” I will not look up “the Ben Nevis.” I will not…)
Squirrel: I don’t know why I’m not surprised that Koyannisqatsi is among your favorite films!
Jules: Mao II is wonderful. Er, not that you have any other reading on your plate or anything…
fg: Insightful of you to have connected the students’ age and one of the film’s themes. I’d like to imagine that that was the reason.
I don’t suppose I could find online, could I, at least an excerpt of what you’ve written about this?
Froog says
I prefer Clare’s shorter stuff too, JES. I was just worried that your obsessive streak would get the better of you and you might go off looking for the text if I didn’t quote it for you in full.
I never knew Keats had been on ‘the’ Ben Nevis. I may have to go and look that up.
FG, I believe children are commonly reckoned to achieve an understanding of death somewhere around the age of 10 (I guess you may have an abstract notion of it before that, if pets or family members have died; but this is where it starts hitting home that it’s going to happen to you too one day). And surely, for many people anyway, it’s quite a consuming obsession of the dark early teen years? So I would have thought the notion of decay and mortality underlying a lot of the imagery in Koyaanisqatsi would make quite a strong connection with kids of that age.
Is ‘fear of death’ somehow different from ‘knowledge of death’? I don’t think it was for me. But perhaps for some people the fear doesn’t kick in while it still seems a very remote prospect.
John says
Froog: Regrettably, you’re probably right about running off to hunt down the full text. (In the event, I ran off anyway to hunt down more about John Clare. :)