Joint-Blog Project: Macro-Poetry

Macro-poetry. An experiment.

Matthew Haigh and I decided to collaborate on a little project together. I have been taking macro-photos for a couple of years now and asked Matt if he would like to take a look at some of them, and add some words - what Matt calls "very quick hot-off-the-brain’s-conveyor-belt splurges of word mess, without edits". Here are the first three. More to follow (hopefully).

Bespoke Toad

Oaken-skulled slink, knot-mouthed, not wet but wood,
flintlock-tongued, thingamajigged, carriage clock-lunged,
the tongue windscreen wiping ripened eyes, glacier-spun;
tilting brass-clad tympanum to hear –
who knows what junk he’s belly-stored to build himself
from, mirror ball-gazed in the brambled chintz.

Sideways Knight

No hip bones to speak of, no wrists – rusted off? –
no head hermit-crabbed or capped
with sea foam circlets to adorn.

Felled reveller, slave to his tipple
(Tiamat swig or tincture),
with deathly brail his trunk

stippled – stone chainmail cascading down a casket
chest. He dusts the coastline with glass
gauntlets, his bus-stop-in-the-dawn

breath. Pin-barrelled abominable.
Gargantuan gone on the lash.

Owl

I scrunch the owl into a tawny ball,
origami’d bones, rumpled tufts,
and see, between the concertinas,
gold-lit streets, skyscraper clusters,
his gelatine eye a sunrise
above the ice encrusted
roads of his own intestinal tract,
his beak an ivory spangled bridge.
With paper architecture’s creak
the struts, the flat-packed vertebrae
unwind, and he is moving back to flight,
to swoop, to sky-hard in a hunter’s breath,
the city closed in his winged flex.

Words by Matthew Haigh: http://matthewhaighpoetry.wordpress.com/

Photos by Caleb Sivyer

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

"The Harmony of Pen and Sword"

This samurai motto used to be a way of life

Now it's forgotten

Can art and action still be united?

This quotation forms perhaps the central theme of Paul Schrader's presentation of the life of Yukio Mishima in his 1985 film titled Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. The film is a dramatic and stylistic portrayal of Mishima's life, told through flashbacks, scenes from the last day of his life, and dramatic adaptations of excepts from three of his novels. I found the film absorbing, tense, thought-provoking, and imaginative.

Throughout the film we see how Mishima develops from a sickly young boy, forced to live with his grandmother for the first few years of his life, into a young writer of poetry, and finally into one of Japan's best 20th century writers. Throughout his life he seems to have been deeply troubled by the duality of words and world, language and action, or, as he puts it, pen and sword. This central theme of the film is not only presented in the narration that appears throughout the film, but is dramatised through stylistic recreations of parts of Mishima's writings. For example, we see scenes from The Temple of the Golden Pavilion in which a Zen acolyte who suffers from a stutter, sets fire to the temple because he feels inferior to it's beauty.

The concept of beauty is another central theme of the film. Several characters from Mishima's novels, as well as Mishima himself, discuss beauty throughout the film. In one scene there is a dialogue in which an artist attacks a body-builder by telling him that his beauty, or rather his seeking after beauty through his own body, is doomed to failure because of the finitude of his own existence and because of the inevitable decay of his body. By contrast, he says that as an artist he can grasp the eternal form of beauty through perfecting his craft.

In another wonderful scene from the film, definitely one of my favourites, a young narcissistic man reflects on his own beauty, only to be mocked by his lover, who places a mirror on parts of his body which reflects corresponding parts of her own body. The effect is brilliant: the spectator sees, for example, the reflection of her breast in the mirror exactly where his breast is. Thus there is an effective doubling of his appearance: he appears beautiful reflected through his lover and her mirror. The question though is whose beauty is this and does it reside in any one person? She says that she will be his mirror, but then uses a real mirror to reflect herself. Only, she places the mirror on his body in a kind of transfigurative gesture. It is a wonderfully ambiguous scene that resists easy analysis.

In his striving for a principle which will connect art and action, Mishima seems frustrated for most of the film. However, near the end there is a beautiful scene in which we see him piloting an aircraft high above the clouds. It is in this scene that Mishima reveals the principle which will unite the two: death. The poetic way in which he explains this is through an analogy with the upper atmosphere of the planet: here, where there is no oxygen, man must wear a mask in order to survive. Hence, he is like an actor who must also wear a mask, adopt a persona. Mishima finds a stillness and a sense of unity beyond opposition high above the clouds: no more pen or sword, no more body or spirit, no more male or female, as he says. He has found a ring that resolves all contradiction.

However, juxtaposed with this scene we see the last moments of his life, in which he addresses a crowd of army officers unsuccessfully, and then finally takes his own life through the ritual of seppuku. This brings me to what is perhaps most troubling in Mishima's life: his militant traditionalism. Throughout the film we see Mishima more and more disturbed by modern life in Japan. He sees greed, corruption and a lack of national spirit, and he forms a private army in response. It is through this traditionalism that he seems to believe he can unite his writing with action. And it is here that I was reminded of Martin Heidegger's project which took him into National Socialism. The connection between poetry/language and being/action seems to be an important theme in both writers, as well as a politics of turning back to tradition in order to reinvigorate modern society. The film does a decent job of helping the viewer to appreciate how Mishima came to his ideas, but never acts in support of them.

I think the film is brilliantly made and well worth seeing. I found myself totally captivated by it's wonderful style (the use of colour is fantastic), provoked by many of its central themes, and towards the end I felt a very tangible sense of tension. The film is 2 hours long, though I never felt it was dragged out in any way. Philip Glass provides the music and it seems to fit the tone well, with it's building sense of tension through repetition. The narrative is split into four sections which give the film a good sense of coherence (each chapter focused on a particular theme such as beauty or action). Schrader himself considers it his best directed film, since he only wrote the screenplays for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. It's a beautiful film so go check it out!

Takeshi Kitano's Dolls

I just watched Takeshi Kitano's film Dolls and was so moved by it that I decided to write about it here. I found the film quite slow at first, but after a while I relaxed into it and found both the images and the simple narrative to be very captivating. The music is appropriately sparse and sad, being scored by Joe Hisaishi (who has scored many films including Spirited Away). The acting is mute, but despite this it manages to convey a great deal of emotion (similar, perhaps, to Robert Bresson's films). After watching it I felt both melancholic and hopeful. The story is a sad one, but touching enough that doesn't fall into a pessimistic tale.

The film tells the story of two lovers who are precariously tied to each other by both their love for each other, and perhaps a force greater than the two of them. Throughout the film we see flashbacks of their time together, which appears mostly happy. But there is a sadness and distance between them because their relationship came to an abrupt end (which we see at the beginning of the film). Despite this, however, they remain bound to each other, dramatised in the film by the real length of rope which ties them together as they walk the land together. This device works to convey both their real ties to each other (perhaps the man returned to his lover), and their symbolic link. The latter is obviously open to interpretation. Some might see it as a way of dramatising fate or destiny, whilst others might see it as a visual depiction of the material traces which bind them together even after their real separation (memory, history, emotion and so on).

Along their journey together, they pass by several people, which triggers other mini-narratives. These take a similar form to the two principle lovers: difficult, temporary, delayed, or failed encounters/relationships. We see some characters trying to have relationships (with varying degrees of success) and we see others running away from them only to return, finally, later in life. In general, these sub-stories are tragic but with enough love to allow hope to survive. Even if the relationships all end (and mostly with death present), the fact that two people managed to come together, if only for a few moments, seems to overcome the sadness of their end.

The cinematography is the main reason that so much emotion is conveyed, and so well. There are many extraordinary scenes in the film: the lovers walking through an avenue of cherry blossoms in full bloom, or walking up a hill covered in snow and lit by a single street lamp. There are even some dream sequences which are surreal and haunting, such as the couple walking past tens of fans blowing in the wind. The film begins, interestingly, with a scene from a Bunraku performance (a traditional form of Japanese puppet theatre). This short sequence foreshadows later events in the film and is also sets the style and tone for the film (Kitano himself has said that the film is Bunraku in film form). I found it very expressive and I liked the combination of puppets with live action. It also has to be said that the costumes in the film are amazing. Late in the film, the two principle lovers dress in costumes similar to that of the two Bunraku puppets and this looks great.

Although death is a prominent theme in the film, I didn't feel despairing or depressed after watching it. In fact, quite the opposite. It was sad and moving, but there was so much love in the film that it managed to avoid the negative connotations that films usually surround death with. The actors and actresses convey a lot without much dialogue, and this heightens the emotion of the film.

I was reminded of another of his films, Hana-Bi, and after watching Dolls I do want to go back and see his earlier film again. Kitano strikes me as a hugely talented director, more so now that I've seen Dolls. I look forward to seeing more by him and I encourage everyone to see Dolls if they get the chance. It's slow, it is partly about death, but it managed to touch me deeply with it's tenderness and bitter-sweet love.

My First Month in Cardiff

Well, it's been rather a long time since my last blog post and I've been meaning to get writing again for quite some time. I moved to Cardiff in the middle of September to start my PhD and since then I've had so much to do that the blog has been left behind sadly. But no longer.

For this blog post I thought I'd just run through some of the highlights of the last month or so. Because of the time that's passed since my last entry, and because a lot has happened in that time, I've been highly selective for this post. I will mostly blog about films I've seen recently as although I've been reading a lot (both for pleasure and for a couple of seminars at uni), I think I'll save that for another blog post. That way I can spend more time on one or two particular things rather than try to summarise it all now.

The photo at the top of this blog is one I took recently. It's the view from the front of my flat as I look out from my desk by the window. For me this is one of the highlights of the flat. It faces onto a wide street with large trees running down the centre island separating the two roads. It's been a pleasure to observe the change in colour of the leaves, and to sometimes watch individual leaves fall to the ground. I'll post more photos of Cardiff soon. So far though, I haven't taken many photos so I must take my camera for a walk one of these days!

The first book I want to mention is David Graeber's book Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. Although I started this before I moved to Cardiff, I read the bulk of it here. I can't praise this book enough. Although there are some sections which begin to drag a little, overall it's one of the best books I've read this year without a doubt. Graeber sets himself the task of exploring and analysing the concept of value, drawing on his years of expertise as an anthropologist. What results is a lucid and stimulating account of his explorations.

There are two principle theorists which underpin the book, Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, and Graeber brings them together in a complimentary way by using each to address the weak points of the other. Graeber explains various theories of the concept of value, such as Marx's dichotomy of 'use value' and 'exchange value,' as well as different forms of exchange, such as Mauss's theory of 'gift exchange.' Although it's abstract and theoretical at times, the book is peppered with anecdotes and examples from anthropological field work. Furthermore, Graeber demystifies a lot of economic theory and jargon through clear and concise prose.

There are many things to take away from this book. One of the most important things I took from this is that Graeber shows clearly that what is at stake in the concepts of value, exchange, debt and so on, are various forms of social relationship. Debt is, after all, just a system of promises, which can always be re-negotiated. Likewise, value is really just an expression of how much you are willing to invest of your creative energy in some project. Realising this is potentially liberating since once large numbers of people appreciate that all these terms are fundamentally about social relationships, they may well decide to engage in transformative political action.

Shortly after I moved to Cardiff I discovered a great alternative cinema, which I've been back to a couple of time already. But the first film I saw there was Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In. The film is about a surgeon who is working on an experimental new type of skin which he has created in a lab. Without giving too much away, the film centres on the young woman who is being held captive by the surgeon and who is experimented on. I won't say anything about the plot as it would spoil the film greatly.

Thematically, the film can be seen as a meditation on transformation, identity, appearance, vanity, the refusal to let go of desire, and no doubt more besides. The first point of comparison which sprang to my mind was Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve. The film is similar to this book in many ways, particularly the central theme of the transformation of the body. But in the end, the film doesn't have as rich a narrative as the book and ends rather abruptly in my opinion.

Perhaps the best thing about this film is the lush visual style and intense portrayal of sexuality, power and desire. In one scene, the surgeon's criminal brother arrives at his house in an elaborate tiger costume, discovers the beautiful woman being held captive, mistakes her for the now-dead ex-wife of his brother, and proceeds to rape her. Although it's uncomfortable viewing, it's also rather compelling and again reminds me of some of Angela Carter's work. In particular, it reminds me of the short stories collected in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. Again, Carter's work easily surpasses the film in my opinion, but the film still manages to create some visually stunning and intensely disturbing scenes.

It's not a positive story, granted, but it's interesting to see a film which tackles the problems of sexuality, power, and desire in a manner reminiscent of Angela Carter's work. It paints a bleak picture of how desire and resentment can become closely allied, how appearance can become more important than other aspects of living, and how sexuality is a troubling and ambiguous matter.

And speaking of Angela Carter, shortly after watching the film above I read one of her early novels: Love. This was written before The Bloody Chamber, before The Passion of New Eve, and before her more famous Wise Children and Nights at The Circus. It is less playful, less carnivalesque, and much bleaker than most of her other work. However, like all her works it is emotionally intense, rich in imagery and beautifully written. Throughout the novel, there are references to the Gothic, to pre-Raphaelite painting, and to Britain's counter-culture.

The novel focuses on three characters: two brothers and a young woman, who eventually marries one of the brothers. Whilst Lee tries to hold down a university course and then a job as a teacher, his drug-addict brother Buzz girlfriend Annabel stay mostly at home in their shared flat. Whilst Buzz spends his time stealing, taking photographs and doing drugs, Annabel mostly just sits in the flat all day. Occasionally she goes out to wander through a gothic park or paints on the walls of the flat.

The novel deals with many themes and ideas: obsessive love, being trapped in a hermetic world, dependency, suicide and the inability to face up to a sense of shared reality. Annabel mostly lives in her own private world, a world in which she can become invisible, and which she prefers to the external reality outside of the flat. Buzz has similar issues though in a different way. Lee seems the most sane of all of them, yet he has his own issues to deal with. In particular, he seems disturbingly irresponsible and insensitive to Annabel or Buzz's needs.

There are lots of interesting visual elements which drew my attention. In one scene, Lee arrives home to find that Annabel has painted an enormous, colourful tree on the wall. In a move typical of male heterosexual anxiety Lee construes this as a sign that they should have sex for the first time. It seems to him an answer to that most fraught question: what does woman want? Interestingly, Darian Leader talks about this in one of his books, which I read recently. His example is even more strange and disturbing: a jealous husband inspects his wife's underwear to count the number of pubic hairs that have fallen off her body - this being his way of trying to find her hidden jouissance. What Leader says is that most heterosexual men want the woman's body/sexuality to speak to them (and when it obviously doesn't they get anxious). Hence the love of hysterical women - their body really does seem to speak!

There is another great visual scene in the novel that takes place later. Annabel takes Lee to a tattoo parlour and has him agree to a tattoo of a heart with her name inscribed on his chest. Because Lee feels guilty about how he has treated her (she spends time in a hospital after attempting to commit suicide) he agrees to the tattoo without complaint or hesitation. But after this point, things only go from bad to worse.

This is a bleak novel which shows how painful love can be, how sexuality and power are never far apart, and how people can become trapped in their own closed off worlds. Despite this bleakness, it is an amazing read because of the power of its images and beautiful style.

Just two more films to report on before I finish the blog post. Firstly, I saw Lar von Trier's latest film, Melancholia. It's a film about the end of the world, and about how people might react to their immanent death. More than this, it's a meditation on life: on how we live our lives, how we can become suffocated by the depressing aspects of contemporary society, and about the lack of affective/aesthetic engagement present today.

The beginning was my favourite part of the film because the first few scenes are shot in ultra-slow motion and lit in a greenish, saturated way. This gives the film an other-worldly feel and also draws attention to the intensity of imperceptible moments in time. It seemed to me as if slowing down time allowed one to grasp something which is lost in the high-speed of contemporary society. In a certain sense, this relates to what I said about The Double Life of Veronique in my last blog post. Film has its own particular way of creating/showing intensities, intense processes which are lost in the buzz of modern societies, drowned out by the spectacular, the commercial and the banal.

This is rather surprising, since the film is about a catastrophe, something which is usually the staple of Hollywood blockbuster spectacles. But in von Trier's film, the catastrophe is not averted by an all-American hero and his team of rogues. Instead, the end of the world is inevitable and all we can do is face our existential dilemma. It is this inevitable doom which seems to turn the film into a kind of diagnosis of modern society. The depressed character in the film becomes animated, becomes alive, once she discovers that the end is near. It is as if her sickness is caused not by a mental disorder (a pathology) but by society itself. Her only happiness is in those endless moments before the earth is obliterated forever.

Lastly, I want to briefly mention Lynne Ramsey's latest film, We Need To Talk About Kevin. Her last film, Morven Callar, was released in 2002, so it's been a long to wait. But the wait has been worth it as her latest film is an extraordinarily moving and powerful film. The film concerns a mother reflecting on the horrendous crime her son has committed, and on her trying to understand her role in this (through her parenting role). Tilda Swinton plays the mother and I don't think she or anyone else could have done a better job. Her acting is incredible in this film. She manages to convey such an intense level of emotion that I felt truly drawn into her story.

Furthermore, this is one of those films which really makes the most of its medium (unsurprising given her two previous films). There are beautiful shots of lights caused by unfocusing the camera lens, numerous shots of everyday items, and a use of editing that creates a vivid sense of time and memory (much like Proust's involuntary memory). The camera will focus on an object and suddenly we are transported to a different time. Or a sound will be heard which again takes us back in time. It reminds me of films like Don't Look Now because it's brilliant use of the filmic medium to tell it's story.

Again, like all the films in the blog post, it's a disturbing story. But one worth viewing. If you like film for what it can do, then see this. If you enjoy films that challenge and provoke, then see this. I was captivated throughout.

That's it for this blog post. Hopefully, things will be back to normal now with more regular posting. Thanks for reading!

Distance and Closeness - Letting things draw near in The Double Life of Veronique

Tonight I watched The Double Life of Veronique and it provoked in me some thoughts about my relationship to others, to the world, and to technology. In particular, it started off a process of thinking about distance and closeness, and how these function in relationships. Whilst distance might be thought of as a barrier to relationships, something to be overcome in order to share one's space and life with another person, I believe this film paints a more subtle picture. Namely, the film suggests that distance can actually facilitate relationships and that what matters is how we relate to this distance.

The two main characters of the film, Weronika and Veronique, are both the same and different, separated by great distance and yet unified. They have the same appearance, the are both musically talented, and they seem to have an intense relationship to the world around them. Even though they don't text or email each other every day, they have an awareness of the other which is often lacking in typical communications today. This awareness could be referred to as intuition, feeling, premonition or other such terms. What matters though is that their awareness of each other does not take the form of endless updates of their status on facebook or even face-to-face meetings. Rather, their awareness of each other is vague but intense, something deep within them, yet hard to convert into the language of text messaging.

As you can tell, I thought about the contrast between modern technology and the relationships dramatised so brilliantly in The Double Life of Veronique after watching the film. What struck me was that whereas in the film distance seems no barrier to unification, togetherness, belonging and so on, a lot of modern technology actually separates people, even though this goes against the slogans used to sell a lot of it. Much communication technology is designed to bring people together who are separated spatially. We phone each other from anywhere to anywhere, have wireless internet and so on. And yet after watching The Double Life of Veronique I had the sense that the film stages beautifully a more enriching and wonderful sense of togetherness through distance than any experience I've ever had with using modern communication technology for bridging spatial gaps.

Because the film shows that a kind of closeness can be achieved despite, or because of, a certain kind of distance, I will refer to this as a dialectical togetherness. There are several examples of this dialectical togetherness in the film. The most obvious and powerful is the link between Weronika and Veronique. The former glimpses the latter in Krakow, getting onto a bus, whilst Veronique first sees Weronika in a photo she herself took (though at the time not realising what she'd taken a picture of). There are other elements which link the two: the piece of music which repeats throughout the film, the tiny transparent ball, and most strongly the feeling they both have of the other (Veronique feels as though she is grieving just after the death of Weronika for example).

The other obvious instance of dialectical togetherness takes place between Alexandre and Veronique. Their relationship starts off and continues for much of the film as a relationship at a distance. Veronique spies Alexandre in a mirror as he is performing a marionette show for the school children that Veronique teaches. Later she comes across him by chance at a traffic light stop and exchanges glance with him through the windows of their vehicles. Alexandre then begins sending Veronique items in the post, calls her on the telephone and even manages to shine a light into her apartment. What brings them together, spatially, is a cassette tape which Alexandre records for Veronique, which gives her a number of clues as to his location. This is one of my favourite scenes in the film: Veronique listens to the sounds which Alexandre has recorded (walking down a street, through a busy train station, into a cafe where we hear the waitress talking and so on) on a pair of wireless headphones, walking through her apartment, taking off her jacket and even brushing her teeth. What is so brilliant and fascinating about this scene is the juxtaposition of ambient sounds from one location with images of another. The sounds which Veronique listens to do not match the spatial location she is in. Both Veronique and we the audience are in two places at once.

What strikes me about both these relationships is that distance is not a barrier to be overcome in order to have a close relationship. There is a sense of togetherness without the need for technological solutions. Having said that, one might object that the tape recording is a piece of technology and therefore an example of how technology can bring people together. In response, I would just briefly say that the use of technology here is not to bring the other into immediate presence, but to use absence and distance in order to defamiliarise both Veronique and the audience's relation to space, and to facilitate a creative relationship between Veronique and Alexandre. Therefore, perhaps I should say that technology is not inherently poor at creating relationships and doesn't necessarily alienate people, but that it depends on its use.

To give one more example of dialectical together from the film let me consider briefly the role of the marionettes. Though they are mute and are clearly constructed puppets controlled by human beings, they take on a life of their own suggesting that they are not what they seem, or perhaps not just what they seem. A scene near the end of the film shows two puppets made to look like Veronique. There is a beautiful shot which shows Veronique being almost caressed by her puppet double, or even hypnotised. To me this suggests a relationship which has more meaning and depth than one could make with a virtual pet, for example. The puppet was hand-made, it is manipulated by hand, and it's static expression seems to be defied by its movements. Hence, we are drawn in by the puppet despite the sense of obvious distance which it creates because of it's artificiality.

I suppose in one sense I'm merely trying to put together a number of ideas and concepts that I have read of: Heidegger's remarks on technology, Benjamin's thoughts on art and the aura which is lost in mechanical repetition, and no doubt more besides. It does strike me that The Double Life of Veronique can be productively read alongside such ideas and concepts. For example, there are so many fragile, beautiful elements to the film which might be seen as auratic elements or things which technology hides or even destroys. The tiny transparent ball which creates an upside-down miniature world, or Veronique's strange intuitions of being suddenly alone in the world, and of remembering the feeling that she was not, before, alone in the world because there was someone out there, just for her.

To me, technology is enormously helpful in providing solutions to various problems, such as long distance communication. But I do believe that the technologisation of life comes at a price. Watching The Double Life of Veronique reminded me in a very sensual way that there are things which are both more special than anything that could come from, or through, technology, and that technology is actually one threat to some of these things. To take an example, the film somehow captures the feeling and atmosphere of solitude. Through the film's lighting, use of music and camera angles, very fragile qualities and almost imperceptible elements are drawn out, including a feeling of solitude. To me this is what makes the film so special: that it manages to film things which one might think impossible to do so. Solitude is a very fragile thing and hard to describe or experience. It is not simply being on one's own or being in a quiet space. It is not something which one achieves through satisfying certain criteria. If this were the case, then we could imagine technological devices which would create the conditions necessary for solitude. Having said that, this will not stop people from trying to achieve this, and no doubt there are such devices already available (ambient music, luxury spas and so on might qualify). But in trying to create a sense of solitude through technology, one ends up trying to force a situation through instrumental rationality rather than letting it emerge.

In conclusion, The Double Life of Veronique strikes me as something rather rare and special. It is a truly beautiful film which manages to let the more fragile and precarious aspects and elements of life come out of their hiding places for a few moments. In particular, it shows how relationships based on these fragile elements are possible in spite of, or because of, a certain kind of distance. Perhaps this is the distance of letting things be (as Heidegger might put it), as opposed to the distance between two mobile phones. Or perhaps this is the distance which creates and sustains the aura of things which Benjamin speaks of. In any case, for me this film rekindles my hope of having a more spiritual, precious and intense relationship to life, appreciating the singularity of things, people and events, and of allowing relationships to blossom through distance.