Macro-Poetry Part 3

Part 3 of my collaborative project Macro-Poetry with Matthew Haigh.

worker bee

on this our eve of marriage I vow
to whittle our home’s honeycomb to caverns
we’ll wet-winged skitter through ferrying glazed

hunks of nothing to watch waste deep fry play
‘till it comes to this hearts freezer crusted
livers locked in the breadbin our lungs in the toaster

two perfect styrofoam bodies caught
on the pin’s glister
about which our kitchen’s white world pivots

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

Photos by Caleb Sivyer

Macro-Poetry Part 2

Here is the second part of my collaborative project with Matthew Haigh: Macro-Poetry.
More to follow.

Ear

Sorry, you were saying? My eyes were spilling
around your ear. How it is petalled
and useless, your nautilus ear.

Overcome by the need to chew like gum
the cherry pie and ice cream crust
of hard-soft, hard-soft, I notice nothing but

that delicate pastry cooling on your skull’s sweet ledge.
Might I pinch the coldest ridge between
my middle finger joints while you bow

your man-child’s head; might I scrunch it, crush it
out of this world not good enough for it.

Grapefruit

A cleaved grapefruit church glass-coloured to us, yes;
but to an ant the pale segments, runelled

with glue ropes, interlock to form a vast
pink tundra, onto whose citric expanse

the ant will clamber, sink his body’s glass
in pithy juice and drink, antennae-deep

in rolling fizz. The buck and thrust his spindle
hips give out is sherbet giddiness

when sucked too greedily, the taste heady;
sucked from fingers till it stings the balmed lips –

the ant left delirious and dizzy
in this, his crystal, edible landscape.

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

Photos by Caleb Sivyer

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.