I've found my way back. After reading his book of essays entitled "Imagination in Place" and his collection stories A Place in Time, and being moved, provoked, inspired, even at times overwhelmed, by both, I meandered back into his neck of the woods, taking out his book of essays Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community and his novel Hannah Coulter.
It seems to me that Berry is scarily right on almost everything he says. Of course, this overstates things. I've read the title essay of his book, and it shook me, re-opened some wounds of mine, and even left me feeling slightly giddy with hope for a better world.
It's important to note that Berry's conception of sexuality is as profound as it is unsexy. Unsexy, that is, in light of how we've come to regard all things erotic. Berry is not a Bible-thumper, but he is a practicing Christian, and he believes deeply in the centrality of sex to the life not only of the family but of the community. For Berry, sex is the kernel from which all life - familial, communal, artistic, you-name-it - springs. In an industrial, modern culture that devalues persons and communities, sex must also be devalued, must lose its sense of propriety, of awe, of dignity, and even of pleasure.
The knee-jerk reaction of the would-be liberal cosmopolitan is that, at the very least, this overstates things. Berry isn't given anything close to his due in liberal circles for many of the same reasons that Chomsky isn't; he is a true prophet, and much of what he says, while true, goes radically against the grain of the cultural elite. He trucks in truths that are elusive, inconvenient, upsetting.
I will admit to being deeply, even profoundly receptive to Berry's ideas, which is not at all to say that I agree with them entirely, or that my receptiveness isn't colored, even deepened, but a healthy amount of discomfort and skepticism. At times, Berry can seem every bit the fusty, musty ol' coot that he seems to imagine himself as appearing to many of his more, shall we say, urbane readers. He seems to have too high standards for the world, to be atavistic, to harken back to some imagined, irrevocable utopia, a veritable American Eden of community and fellowship. He can seem naive, a bit quaint, even perhaps a little daft (although he is always lucid.) At worst, he can seem irrationally prejudiced: that his longing for his lost, paved-over paradise has curdled into bitterness, and his punctilious good manners and wry stoicism are covering for a dangerous, acid resentment that threatens to boil over.
But I don't really think that's the case. Berry can be cranky, but he always seems to be so with appropriate reserve and self-awareness, and always to temper his crankiness, even his palpable anguish, with hope, humor, and affection for what he cherishes and seeks to preserve in the world. His voice, as lonely as it can seem at times among the literary firmament, is not a voice of despair.
I don't know if I go all the way with him on his rejection of all sex that exists outside the sacrament of marriage. (He isn't a demagogue - he is patently and emphatically not one, since he speaks of real causes and effects, not conjured abstractions of Sin and Purity.) He is right to mark the ways in which sex is degraded and degradation has been made to seem sexy, and how that degradation always extends to people and to the culture at large. But I wonder if it's possible to have a middle ground. Can we allow ourselves to be sexual with those who are other than our spouses? What of sexual play and experimentation - practiced since the dawn of humanity, even in some of the local, communal cultures that Berry is fond of citing as examples of belonging and cohesiveness?
It's liberating to read Berry, because he makes me feel sane. But there is part of me that wonders - how do I live? What do I do now?
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
4-23-13: Film Thoughts
Earlier tonight I finished watching Antonioni's L'Eclisse, which I had started a few nights previous. It wasn't as thrilling an experience as I recall it being the first time around, but there is still a familiar charge to the images, and to Antonioni's way with movement and space. Such beautiful, haunting images. And he stages his scenes like dances, the cuts and the movements of the actors & camera.
And yet there is still something a bit staid and stuffy about Antonioni, even despite his occasionally puckish radicalism. There is a bit of the lofty scold in him, at times, looking down a bit too neatly in disapproval of the empty, soulless modern condition. At other times, he just seems lost.
And yet, overall he is an inspiration and a touchstone. But what came later was even more revelatory, and has reignited and re-focussed my own aesthetic sensibility, vis-a-vis cinema. I began to watch Maurice Pialat's A Nos Amours. While I'm not as swayed by his self-conscious effort to avoid sentimentality, his fluid, lapidary naturalism (aided in great part by his subtle yet precise framing and smart, elliptical cuts) is, like I said, revelatory. A very perceptive and deeply sensitive filmmaker that has offered me a way back to my own key interests and concerns.
And yet there is still something a bit staid and stuffy about Antonioni, even despite his occasionally puckish radicalism. There is a bit of the lofty scold in him, at times, looking down a bit too neatly in disapproval of the empty, soulless modern condition. At other times, he just seems lost.
And yet, overall he is an inspiration and a touchstone. But what came later was even more revelatory, and has reignited and re-focussed my own aesthetic sensibility, vis-a-vis cinema. I began to watch Maurice Pialat's A Nos Amours. While I'm not as swayed by his self-conscious effort to avoid sentimentality, his fluid, lapidary naturalism (aided in great part by his subtle yet precise framing and smart, elliptical cuts) is, like I said, revelatory. A very perceptive and deeply sensitive filmmaker that has offered me a way back to my own key interests and concerns.
Monday, March 4, 2013
3.4.13
Here in Los Angeles. A roller-coaster of an adventure that continues to unfold, or more accurately carom, around hairpin banked turns and sudden drops and risings. Am I making to much of the mania? The mania is in me, is the thing to be clear about. Outside, the world spins utterly quiet. There are perfect moments every moment. People going about their lives, oblivious to all that is afire around them. Everything is oxidizing, and if you just take a moment and look at it, you will see this too.
How to make a film about this sensation?
And yes, it's very scary. I don't doubt that I'll find work, sooner or later. But I am considerably worried that I will find more work that I don't enjoy, that doesn't speak to me as a person or as a being, or an intelligence, or a body, or anything. That I will fall into another compromise with myself, with my desires, my dreams, my sense of right and wrong. I am doing something brave by coming out here. Or cowardly. Who knows? I can't, I won't know, until much later, if ever. We just aren't given to understand these things. If we're very lucky, they say, we get to live long enough to see some kind of pattern emerge, some meaning begin to coalesce, the impression of a leaf on a piece of paper smeared with graphite. An image appears, gradually. What a miracle!
But the world is so big, and I'm so small. There are a million people in the few square miles that surround me, mostly paved, pocked with florets of palm trees. A million lives I'll never know, who will never know me, and why should any of us? Can we feel the awful suffering that exists just down the hall? On the other side of me, someone might be dying. How can God keep track of it all? I know, I know, he's God - right - but does he expand as the world does? Or is being infinite enough?
Early in the night, Nina and I stood on the overlook on Mulholland Drive. The massive expanse of Los Angeles below us, a great and terrifying (and beautiful) electric blanket stretched out forever, its wires and bulbs all frayed and aglow. The sky was murky; even in the dark, you could see that the smog was heavy. There is that end-of-the-earth feeling in LA that just doesn't go away. This, I feel, is an irrefutable claim on urban, even existential grandiosity that trumps even New York. New York, for all of its history, its a tireless booster of itself. It brooks no negativity. It is exhaustingly upbeat. It cannot countenance failure, rejection, or death. It cannot consider endings. But Los Angeles, for all of the shit it gets for being shallow and dumb and ugly, is a place that must face, day after day, its own obsolescense. The way it has just metastasized, spreading its foul wind across paradise, corrupting this hallowed, peaceful, placid land. LA is morbidly obese. It's a bit like Falstaff, jovially laughing at excess and death.
And yet, there is the side of LA that is responsible, that is cleaning up it's act, that is expanding the Metro and putting ever-more-stringent requirements on gas vehicle emissions. Is this quiant, part of the city's own hopeless, quixotic appeal? Or a corrective to the insanity of limitless growth, of blind, irrational expansionism? We'll see I guess, if we live long enough.
How to make a film about this sensation?
And yes, it's very scary. I don't doubt that I'll find work, sooner or later. But I am considerably worried that I will find more work that I don't enjoy, that doesn't speak to me as a person or as a being, or an intelligence, or a body, or anything. That I will fall into another compromise with myself, with my desires, my dreams, my sense of right and wrong. I am doing something brave by coming out here. Or cowardly. Who knows? I can't, I won't know, until much later, if ever. We just aren't given to understand these things. If we're very lucky, they say, we get to live long enough to see some kind of pattern emerge, some meaning begin to coalesce, the impression of a leaf on a piece of paper smeared with graphite. An image appears, gradually. What a miracle!
But the world is so big, and I'm so small. There are a million people in the few square miles that surround me, mostly paved, pocked with florets of palm trees. A million lives I'll never know, who will never know me, and why should any of us? Can we feel the awful suffering that exists just down the hall? On the other side of me, someone might be dying. How can God keep track of it all? I know, I know, he's God - right - but does he expand as the world does? Or is being infinite enough?
Early in the night, Nina and I stood on the overlook on Mulholland Drive. The massive expanse of Los Angeles below us, a great and terrifying (and beautiful) electric blanket stretched out forever, its wires and bulbs all frayed and aglow. The sky was murky; even in the dark, you could see that the smog was heavy. There is that end-of-the-earth feeling in LA that just doesn't go away. This, I feel, is an irrefutable claim on urban, even existential grandiosity that trumps even New York. New York, for all of its history, its a tireless booster of itself. It brooks no negativity. It is exhaustingly upbeat. It cannot countenance failure, rejection, or death. It cannot consider endings. But Los Angeles, for all of the shit it gets for being shallow and dumb and ugly, is a place that must face, day after day, its own obsolescense. The way it has just metastasized, spreading its foul wind across paradise, corrupting this hallowed, peaceful, placid land. LA is morbidly obese. It's a bit like Falstaff, jovially laughing at excess and death.
And yet, there is the side of LA that is responsible, that is cleaning up it's act, that is expanding the Metro and putting ever-more-stringent requirements on gas vehicle emissions. Is this quiant, part of the city's own hopeless, quixotic appeal? Or a corrective to the insanity of limitless growth, of blind, irrational expansionism? We'll see I guess, if we live long enough.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
9.23.12
Today at the baseball game, I noticed the way in which the crowd was prompted to excitement by the electric banners and signs that take up so much space in the stadium. There's something weird and wrong about this; it is a tail-wagging-dog kind of moment. Are we not paying spectators? Is part of what we're paying for, then, is being told when to cheer? Zizek, I believe, spoke cogently about this phenomenon, using the example of the laugh track during sitcoms. He said that sitcoms don't use the laugh track to prompt and audience to laughter; they are, in effect, laughing for the audience. That we have subcontracted out our pleasure to the show. We don't even watch for pleasure anymore; we watch for the comfort of not having to worry about whether something is funny or even pleasurable.
Is this thinking too deeply into the question? The game was still splendid fun. Nina and I had a blast. Milch might say that we (and the rest of the audience, and the players as well) were able to transcend the tawdriness of the commercialism and the machine-cued chants, and perhaps he is right. Certainly it felt, at the time, like our pleasure was authentic. And yet automated excitement is still problematic, and it still has an effect. This wasn't a raucous game by professional standards, but it was nowhere near as febrile and electrifying as a championship High School basketball game. It's unlikely I'll ever attend a sporting event as charged with energy as those games were.
There are some interesting articles in The New Republic, by Davids Denby and Thomson, that seem to be making forecasts of varying gloominess on the current state and likely future of Cinema with a capital C. There's some stuff to be examined and unpacked in there.
Is this thinking too deeply into the question? The game was still splendid fun. Nina and I had a blast. Milch might say that we (and the rest of the audience, and the players as well) were able to transcend the tawdriness of the commercialism and the machine-cued chants, and perhaps he is right. Certainly it felt, at the time, like our pleasure was authentic. And yet automated excitement is still problematic, and it still has an effect. This wasn't a raucous game by professional standards, but it was nowhere near as febrile and electrifying as a championship High School basketball game. It's unlikely I'll ever attend a sporting event as charged with energy as those games were.
There are some interesting articles in The New Republic, by Davids Denby and Thomson, that seem to be making forecasts of varying gloominess on the current state and likely future of Cinema with a capital C. There's some stuff to be examined and unpacked in there.
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