A NETWORK OF PATHS

On the surface it might seem that I’m working on several different contexts at the same time.  Maybe I am:  the acting methods of Alvina Krause; reflection on my life “trajectory”; theory about liturgy and brain function; social criticism, particularly the issues raised by “Law & Order SVU” and related television serieses now presented in a new “long form” on DVD’s; my friendship with Tim; Blackfeet history; and ordinary things around Valier.  (We had early snow and cold last week, chaperoned by grizzly bears in our yards.)

I keep meeting myself coming and going.  Idea-wise, I mean, with a few virtual grizzlies maybe.  I mean that what lies under Krause’s career is a convinced moral sense of human life that she acquired in a rural place not unlike this one and that might have been expressed as ministry under different circumstances.  Her way of understanding theatre is as a kind of secular church.  She says that when JFK was assassinated she longed for a church, but passed them by, and ended up at home reading Greek drama.  At that time I was teaching in Browning, on the Blackfeet rez, so I just looked at the mountains longer than usual.  Same with 9/11 since I was back here by then.

She asks her interviewer why she never wrote any books, and Dave Press offers that maybe she’s just too physical.  She thinks with her muscles, striding and striking and whirling.  She agrees, ironically citing a book:  “THE THINKING BODY.”   Mabel Todd.  There’s a demonstration of the message on YouTube.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nG1DdSkF4o  In her letter advice to Dave Downs she says over and over,  “Make them DO something.  Don’t let them just talk.  They must get out of their heads.”  Tim says the same thing to me, but this piece in me is lacking.  I didn’t get the gene or something -- so I sit here happily in this chair, writing and writing and writing.  In my head.  But brain theory makes it clear that no one just thinks in their heads: the thinking involves the gut, the molecules in the blood, muscle tension, responsiveness, the senses.

I’ve just watched “An Affair to Remember” with Deborah Kerr who is always acting out an English ideal: the virtuous woman who “saves” the wayward man.  Irene Dunne acted it, Greer Garson, Ingrid Bergman.  Me, too, in the Sixties.  There’s a little of that in AK except that she’s not saving a lover, she’s a teacher inspiring a student to achieve great things.  This pattern is very deep in human life.  I suppose it’s the Madonna thing.  But also very English because there are so many stories about the tough coal country where sons unsuited for going “down the hole” had only one way out: education.  AK acted in “How Green Was My Valley.”  It was one of her abiding texts.  My version was more French, Camille Claudel meets Rodin or Francoise Gilot meets Picasso.  Except on the high prairie.

These stories are patterns that throw people into intense circumstances where it is hard to know what to do and the consequences may be grave.  Or might, indeed, trigger greatness.  Maybe they become more muted later in life.  It helps to find a partner who neither competes nor draws energy as AK did.  (David Downs‘ post today was about Lucy suffering a concussion and AK tending her in the hospital.)  Surely I’m not the only one beguiled by the detective partnership of “Elliot” and “Olivia” in their roles.  Surely I’m not the only one who values scripts that illustrate how two people can stay in a cooperative, equal relationship, esp. when the focus of the stories is on violent, sexual, destructive dysfunction.

Which is in part where the rez comes in.  So many stories of desperate, deranged, impoverished people trying to force others, punish others, suck the blood of others, and all the time the refusal of those with the resources to make the arrangements that might re-pattern everyone’s lives.  And then a few rise above it all, with the help of a mentor, and we are grateful.  A microcosm of the planet.  Grizzlies stalking everywhere: raw predation has been symbolized by bears since the cave days.  And yet bears also swim desperately in the shoreless sea as it becomes more acid.  

The time frame for the study of AK’s teaching acting methods is the same as the early days of television -- about 1950 to 1965.  She does not address television, does not teach acting for a camera.  My very early adult years overlap with her late adult years.  By now. fifty years later, I’m watching brief shocking clips made by feral street boys with little pocket video cameras.  They are like poems, metaphorical.  AK might understand that.  But she says she believes in the live actor, scripted, on a real stage -- other things are fine, just not theatre.  But there’s got to be some underlying force.  I think it is what we call spirituality.  Or life force.  Truth.  Love.  All that jazz and jizm.

The basic pattern of evolution -- which is only unfolding life finding its way -- is a mainstream with side-channels where circumstances allow development of something a little different.  For a while after AK was pushed out of her lifelong teaching in Evanston, she felt excluded from mainstream theatre, maybe headed for extinction.  In a few years she had reinvented herself as a lecturer and visiting professor and BTE had formed.  Then clearly she was able to contribute something unique and valuable.  It’s an obvious truism that detours turn out to be valuable paths.   This sort of thing was happening to a lot of us in the late Sixties and early Seventies, so many new horizons as to induce vertigo.  But AK was a good gardener, which saved her.  Except she never wrote a book. She was too busy nurturing people.  

The work of a writer, an actor, a minister, a therapist, a teacher comes out of the authentic reality of the person, so to some extent a person who teaches these things must address the essential nature of the person who comes to be taught.  Shallow, greedy, needy people cannot provide the understanding that will attract and guide others.  Fifty years ago, when I was an undergrad, the goal of a university used to be to create good human beings, ethical and resourceful.  Now the idea is to run up a huge debt in order to make sure that no student will shirk the task of making a lot of money.  What of substance might be taught is, well, open to negotiation.  You don’t need university for that -- ask Tim.

"GLADIATOR": A Reflection

I’ve just been reading Bruce Sterling’s very basic and direct list of eighteen things that are making conventional publishing difficult if not obsolete. Sterling comes from the world of cyberpunk and Wired where he has a blog, or did. This list is quite brilliant, not at all exhaustive, and worth an essay for every point. (see http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/)

But it doesn’t really address what a writer/creator/artist/photographer does internally -- that doesn’t change from one art form to another. I’ve been fascinated to work with Barrus, who doesn’t flinch away from any of this stuff and yet is quite old-fashioned, almost child-like, in the same way that Bruce Sterling and his “culture” are. I take Ridley Scott to be in some way part of this same context, even though the movie I’ve most recently seen (and seen and seen and seen) is "Gladiator.” If there is a genre called “Steampunk” -- which Sterling addresses -- then what do we call "Gladiator,” which has a cyber-aspect all displaced into the production where it consumed the energy of a major team? The story is based on one stubborn expert (in war, not computers -- I’ve only this year understood that the strategy of clustering warriors under a canopy of adjacent shields is move with a name that helped the Romans win against Germania, who were un-disciplined in that sense). Is it “chariotpunk”? Caesarpunk? Battlepunk?

Quite a bit of the team's attention was given to avoiding cliches from the Fifties Roman spectacles, what I call “Victor Mature” spectacles. He also impersonated a lot of 19th century Indians. I think we go to these two periods to understand our own times, trying to figure out heroes, specifically. “In Search of Dignity” by David Brooks in the NYTimes today suggests that “the old dignity code that George Washington once followed has not survived modern life.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opinion/07brooks.html?th&emc=th ) One could sort the good guys in this movie, not by their hats, but by their dignity level. The worse the guy, the more undignified.

The real kernel and key in terms of creation, says Ridley Scott himself, has nothing to do with genre or technology, but rather are formed between the environment and the physiology, which meets the world with its senses and constructs as much as derives a “world view.” This happens very early, possibly before birth, and certainly by age three or four. Very bad deficits are possible in both the growing brain/mind and in the tragic world. Some can never be repaired or conpensated for and the coldest view is that beyond a certain level of damage, the individual should be discarded. If we meet individuals who are very impressive or bring us to high levels of achievement, we build them into our internal systems. Something is happening to take Russell Crowe’s inner system as a person to undignified behavior, but not Ridley Scott’s.

The achieving artist/author/etc. will probably not have been very damaged, because that would deny access to meaning or “means” to express that meaning, nor are they likely to have a receiver of meaning. We don’t know what their “meaning world” might be like. (On the H-list about animals, people are arguing about whether Temple Grandin can really understand a cow’s mind because she is autistic.) But part of the protective smoke screen around any artist trying to deflect interference might be the appearance of being undignified and out-of-control. So we don’t know whether Russell Crowe the actor is really acting badly, or just presenting that appearance to back people off.

An artist/author/director is someone who can work with layers: the actual narrative plus the issues of how that should be represented, ordered, modulated, emphasized, and otherwise realized. This is vividly shown when the CGI people demonstrate their "layers" of fantasy. Some people do this quite consciously, making lists and talking it out, and trying little models or doing research. Others trust their subconscious mind (which is probably multiple in what it does) and simply accept the product, as though it were a dream. Still others delegate a few layers to others.

For "Gladiator", a great deal of the controlling image (which can be more helpful than a written statement because it carries more information) was from Victorian Romantic paintings from that other period fascinated by the Roman gladiators. Carefully researched and beautifully excecuted, these paintings strikingly narrated the scenes and were posted on the walls by the teams, both as resources for building and clothing and for ideas about lighting and composition, which combined well with Scott’s habitual vision of scale, darkness, light shafts and unexpected angles. (There were no industrial fans this time -- maybe the catapults are the equivalent.)

I’ve been watching all the versions of “"Gladiator"” and the interviews about how the effects were achieved. Two major efforts on effects were dropped despite their power. The titles were actually cast in bronze, a beautiful font photographed with dust blowing over the letters, but it took too long. A sequence with a rhinoceros in the Coliseum was just too much, better suited for a comic book. (Er, graphic novel? What is a storyboard but a graphic novel?)

The most remarkable aspect of this movie is that although Ridley Scott had the concept and a “plot starter” from historical incident, the script was only about a fifth done when the cast began to shoot. When the actors, who were very powerful and emotional people, found this out, they panicked and tried to take control, each owning their own parts and, to some degree, the whole plot structure. Scott was able to tolerate this, use it, develop it, and eventually meld it into something far more compelling than it would have been had a true auteur insisted on only his own vision. I love this idea of development by process. It’s not for the faint-hearted. He didn’t shut them out or throw them out or replace them -- he drew them in.

Just previous to "Gladiator" and in nearly the same filming location (Malta) Scott had shot “White Squall,” which has a similar hero-and-loyal-followers-meet-catastrophe structure, except that instead of tigers the danger comes from fire hoses in a huge water tank to simulate a deadly sea squall. It has none of the depth or darkness of "Gladiator". Of course, the period of the sea story is the conformist end of the Fifties and the Caesars are merely domineering fathers, but I suspect that some of the problem was an obedient young cast working from a complete script. The risk, ambiguity, and unknown outcome of the larger film took it to another place entirely.

REFLECTION ON A REVIEW OF A REVIEW OF GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

“Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life” by Gerald Martin.
“The magic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez": A Review by Marcela Valdes,” the books editor of the Washington Examiner.

(This whole review was in the LATimes. I just want to pick out some quotes to note but I got the review through a forward from Powells, so I don’t have an url.)

"Everyone has three lives," Gabriel Garcia Marquez once told Gerald Martin. "A public life, a private life and a secret life." I would add to those three a virtual life so deep that it is in the developed structure of the brain. I’ve never read any Marquez, partly because so many Boomers -- including my younger brother -- have tried to MAKE me read his books, esp. “One Hundred Years of Solitude”

Here’s the fame of that book caused: “One night, as they attended a theater performance, a spotlight flicked on and followed them to their seats. "Bravo!" someone yelled. "For your novel!" another woman chimed in. A moment later, the entire theater was on its feet and gave the 40-year-old a spontaneous ovation. "At that precise moment," a friend recalled, "I saw fame come down from the sky, wrapped in a dazzling flapping of sheets, like Remedios the Beautiful, and bathe Garcia Marquez in one of those winds of light that are immune to the ravages of time. "”

Well, that’s why some of us write. How can we help wanting to sail before “winds of light”? And yet, we are the same person before and after writing a book. What is it that people react to?

Other Marquez books include: Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), A Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of the Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989) and his 2001 memoir, "Living to Tell the Tale." “As Martin observes, ‘he has told most of the well-known stories about his life in several different versions, all of which have at least an element of truth.’ It has been Martin's Herculean labor to unearth the real story.”

Why do we so lust after “the real story” when the message of the writing is that a person has multiple lives, depending on how you look at it and from which point in time and from which person’s perspective? There ARE some things we can pin down: birth place, education, work history, relatives.

“‘Gabo’ was born in 1927 in Aracataca, a small town of fewer than 10,000 (mostly illiterate) people in the Banana Zone of Colombia.” That might be useful information if you knew what Aracataca was like by visiting there and talking to the people. But how many stereotypes immediately leap to mind after reading the phrase “mostly illiterate” or “Banana Zone”? We don’t think of these places as the birthplaces of authors.

“The key person in his life was his maternal grandfather, Nicolas Marquez Mejia, a prosperous jeweler who fought in Colombia's most devastating civil war, the War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902), and rose to the rank of colonel. (He was also famous for crafting little gold fish.)” A jeweler/soldier is indeed a unique combination of assumed characteristics. Was it attention to detail that united the two roles, or an understanding of value, or worldly awareness? “Little gold fish.” I’d love to see photos.

“Gabo lived with him until he was 9, when his long-suffering mother and his erratic, philandering father swooped down and reincorporated him into their impoverished, peripatetic nuclear family.” Having an idyllic life that is then broken off seems to be a good way to create an artist of some kind, who will forever try to recapture those early images of happiness. Yearning for a lost past, esp. when the break comes when one is still a child, just at the point where scientists tell us the human brain is taking a leap forward in complexity and awareness, pulling in a massive integration of forces at that time, is a powerful experience. Probably it is “organic,” recorded in the structure of the brain.

“The magic, Martin reveals, came from Gabo's grandmother, Tranquilina, a superstitious woman who organized her daily activities according to "atmospheric signals": thunder, black butterflies, dreams, passing funerals. Thus, little Gabo was nursed on opposing philosophies, his grandfather's ‘worldly, rationalizing sententiousness’ and his grandmother's ‘other-worldly, oracular declarations. ‘” The reconciliation of paradoxes can drive a person to deeper, or higher, more meta-level thinking. It’s interesting that these two forces, present always in most human thought, are gender-assigned in this way. (For Louisa May Alcott it was the father who was the dreamer and the mother who was a practical realist.)

The reviewer picks out his “hostile relationship with his father, his early introduction to prostitutes (at age 13), his experience as a brilliant scholarship boy in frayed hand-me-down suits, and his chivalric courtship of Mercedes (which lasted more than a decade and began when she was 9 years old).” I don’t how unusual these experiences are. I see them repeated in European movies all the time.

There’s more. I was reading this having just read J. G Ballard’s sequel to “Empire of the Sun,” which is called “The Kindness of Women,” and then have begun “Crash” which is represented as a meditation on carnegraphic relationship between humans and machines -- merged by brute force and erotic possession. Clearly his interest in the problem and his unique approach come out of his biography: plane crashes, bomb impacts, murders, and then in civilian life forever-after a near-magical obsession with car crashes. Ballard was interned at about the same age as Marquez being removed from his grandparents.

I’ve always been interested in this age, just before adolescence which fascinates us so much, but when I tried Googling about it, I didn’t find much. There is something about the smooth-bodied child who can think like an adult that grips our imaginations. It is about that time we form our aspirations: “hoping for fame to come down from the sky, wrapped in a dazzling flapping of sheets, to bathe us in one of those winds of light that are immune to the ravages of time.” Maybe to blow us back to the pearly world where we were cherished. But we never admit that. It’s part of our most secret lives. We might not even let ourselves know.