Hiroshima

Watched Hiroshima Mon Amour (Hiroshima, My Love) for the first time; it broke my heart.

Without form, technique; content cannot be adequately conveyed in art. Without content of course, it all becomes an exercise in style; pretty and glossy but hollow. Without form (and this does not mean only style), content becomes a high minded bore, tedious even if worthy.

Resnais' film with its exceptional framing, exquisite sincerity, commitment to justice; and the marriage of an extremely unique dialogue/literary process together with the possibilities of cinema blew convention apart. Even though we are nearly 50 years, or 60 years after this film premiered; its form seems shocking even now. Perhaps especially now when cinema seems to have stagnated.

Thematically, the film explored obliquely (and therefore all the more powerfully), the desire to destruct, the equally powerful thread of sexuality intertwined with that destruction, the impossibility of comprehending what is essentially unimaginable even to those to whom it has happened, and the audacity in comparing another's tragedy with one's own minute tragedy. Not making it equal in the process, but understanding that in its most absolute essence, true suffering is shattering wherever it is.

And finally, grief and memory and memory and grief; locked in an interminable cycle. Stunning. 

Poetry

Poetry

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind. 

Pablo Neruda

Ships in the night

Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing; Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.

Tales of a Wayside Inn. Part iii. The Theologian’s Tale: Elizabeth. iv; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Adrienne Rich

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.

Allegory of the Cave

Today I saw a dance performance that for me, reinvigorated contemporary dance. Criticisms of modern or contemporary dance have often been that it lacks rigour, and achieves only theatrics, instead of emotion through controlled movements. But today's performance, seemed to blow away all previous tired dance performances I have seen, seemed to make laughable every other dance company's effort to be original and most importantly, the dancers themselves, whose hearts flew on their sleeves, transcended the form to achieve something truly and profoundly moving.

Plato's cave allegory is a parable that shows clearly how truth and the perception of truth are vastly different, and that as we move away from the shadows and into the light; along with enlightenment comes sadness, wisdom and ultimately knowledge. This 'theory of the forms' is repeated in many myths and religions; from the Egyptian Book of Knowledge/Book of the Dead, to Eve and the Apple etc. The ideas encountered are the cost of knowledge, the fall of humanity, the loss of innocence, the concept of ignorance as imprisonment and the tragedy of experience that cannot now be unknown.

To see all these ideas expressed through dance, which felt new, original and visceral was astounding. Light, sound, movement, expression and passion coursed through the performance which was both controlled, but was so expertly controlled that it seemed genuinely spontaneous and free.

I felt my heart sing. 

a pale horse

I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat upon him was Death; and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

Revelations, Chapter 6, verse 8

"In a democracy, we get the government we deserve", Alexis de Tocqueville.

"The devil came here, and it smells of sulfur still" - Chavez, at the United Nations General Assembly, 2006

Hardly

While I

Saw morning harden upon the wall

Unmoved, unknowing

That your great going

Had place that moment and altered all

Excerpt from The Going by Thomas Hardy