The difference between a living creature and an inanimate object is that the world is constantly passing through a creature, rushing in at one end and out at the other, and while it is in the creature it changes. The earthworm is the most obvious example because it eats the dirt it crawls through and then leaves behind “castings” that have improved the dirt, made it richer and more fertile. Humans take in the world through their senses as much as their mouths and when it comes out -- if this creature is truly creative to the degree it can be -- it is art. Or possibly religion. The world is then richer and more fertile.
Some people do not accept this point of view. They are like children with workbooks and must have lines to color within, stickers to put in the right place, lines of connection to draw between things that are defined as related. They are teacher-pleasers. Their religion is prescribed and they must follow it or be in trouble. So when Wojnarowicz shows ants crawling on a crucifix, they find it a violation. Ants are something to get rid of, signs of poor housekeeping -- one doesn’t want bugs. A crucifix is something to honor, something holy to be put up high and -- well, not quite “worshipped,” but an object of devotion. So how can the two things be together? When ants are on a crucifix, the dissonance in categories amounts to a heresy -- for them.
When I entered the Browning Catholic church one day, I saw that the life-size version of Jesus on the Cross that Gordon Monroe had made, inspired by the small one Bob Scriver made (I have a bronze casting of it on my bedroom wall), had been given a gold lamé robe. Then I thought of heresy, because the whole point of the crucifixion is that it be ghastly torture -- like being staked out on an anthill smeared with blood so the insects would bite and bite in fiery stings. It was supposed to be after He had risen that He had the royal robes. But one old lady, hearing my concern, said that she simply wanted to honor and cherish what was a real person to her and clothed Him as any mother would clothe her son. Some cultures delight in adding wreaths and crowns.
The mother in “Equus” was also very focused on her son and she, too, found it a heresy when her son differed from her. In fact, she went further and named it Evil. Evil was -- to her -- disobedience, and since her obedience came from God, then disobedience must be Evil. A common human error, to think that they know what God thinks. And yet the boy’s intensely raw sexual obsession with horses -- not fucking them literally, but merging with them by riding nude -- was only a deepening of her own narrowed ideas so that his desperate eating had to be done through a too narrow straw.
The Cinematheque Films story of the last four years has been almost like a film shooting script. It was happening in reality -- the world rushing in at one end and the emails and blogs and videos pouring out the other. By the time I read a post it had been digested to some extent and when I went back to line out the events in what was basically chronological order there was not much more to do. In the early versions I tried to explain and annotate, but by the later manuscript all that had fallen away so that one could simply see what had happened.
Why do young beautiful boys die of HIV-AIDS? It can’t be because they are bad boys. They are not bad except in society’s workbook of lines and stickers. Each must find his own answer by eating the world for himself, getting what nourishment he can with his senses. The answers will be different according to how sharp their teeth are, how clever their tongues are, what they see and hear and remember. “Why are we even here?" they ask. "What is the POINT?” demands one. To eat the world. To participate in creation.
For a while there was a little theological discussion about whether the planet itself could be considered Jesus, because in sophisticated systematics, Jesus was supposed to be the only intermediary between the creation (this world) and the Creator (the next world). It is the earth itself that accepts our bodies and makes them into something new. To a grave, we are the communion, the body of our humanness.
In fact, Jesus is one of a class of “persons” who are able to go to the Other world and return, able to die and then transcend death. Orpheus also belongs to that category and so do the circumpolar shamans who are said to be able to ride their black horses over the valleys of bones and skulls in order to bring back the dead. In the Blackfeet system it is Star Boy or Blood Clot Boy who goes into the sky to live and then returns. But other systems advise us not to want the dead back because that stops the forward flow. It must go on. We only occupy a small part of a torrent of life.
My movie tonight was “Vincent and Theo.” I watched the Altman interview “Film as Fine Art” as well. Altman explained that this version distilled down the story to the essential forces under the facts. Exploring the trinity of religion, art and madness in Van Gogh’s later life, this version also portrays the devotion between two brothers, which is another category throughout mythology. Sometimes the brothers are twins. In some of the apocryphal gospels Jesus has a brother named John whom he often draws to himself and kisses. In this film, all the while the story unfolds, the camera eats the world and lays it out like a communion on the screen.
Some people will find this little essay of mine deeply heretical and others will find it religiously valid. What I want it to do is to jar the boys of what used to be Cinematheque Films out of their workbooks and into eating the world. I would like their story in “Orpheus” to do that as well, because that would bring it to life. The ultimate art form has got to be life.
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