There I happen to be. I imagine this must be early in the opening Fall term of my first year of undergraduate studies, Carleton University, backend of 1997, shortly before I am to turn eighteen. Even as a grad student at the beginning of the 21st century I would not spend nearly as much time at the library as I would my first year as undergraduate. Later I tended to cultivate my sources like some occult horticulturist, would only visit the library to procure specific things toward specific ends (a pro visiting the garden centre). In my final months as a seventeen-year-old I spent a significant amount of time at the library with little or no itinerary, a passenger of fancy, making my desultory way from book to book, never sitting with any one of them for too terribly long. I had recently become fascinated with the philosopher/theorist Jacques Derrida, having already acquired the Meridian editions of the English translations of both Aporias and Archive Fever at the Carleton bookstore, though naturally no such thing was expected of me. I think I liked Derrida primarily because as a teenager I had already come to intuit that: a) fatuous truth claims presented to me by my elders almost always coincided with the presentation of the fatal weaknesses of those claims; and b) statements (or all lexical business) could be broken down into spare parts and made available for associative prestidigitation / renegade operations / the engendering of Frankenstein monsters. The afternoon in the library where this mediation purports to commence finds me picking up a copy of the Meridian collection of Points..., a book of interviews with Derrida spanning the years 1974 to 1994. I read a page, no more, and am almost immediately assailed with a sense of the impossibility of what I am reading. Now, even by 1974 Derrida is already a man of forty-three or forty-four, I in the autumn of 1997 a mere child of seventeen. The text before me seems impossible because I am not capable of believing that anybody possesses the capacity to speak extemporaneously in the manner recorded. The discourse seems too fine-tuned, finessed in its manifold complexities, and I imagine that it would almost have to be a case of the eminent interviewee having been provided the questions in advance and thus been able to prepare his answers preemptively in longhand. Obviously that would not have been the case. I know that now, myself a man of forty, and the interviews in Points... would present a new intelligibility were I to have the texts at my disposal. It is all about the work. Discipline, repetition, and time. What is the work? For me, the work is already the life, in all its variability and dynamism. It is practically a Christian ideal: love and work are united on the earth and put in service to one’s conception of the divine. I often charcaterize myself as a witness to history. Writing is hardly the totality of the work, reading already comprising the more salient core. Writing is where the work is gathered, organized, and archived. For one’s faculties to develop is a byproduct of the work and the most natural thing in the world. Whether Malcom Gladwell is strictly correct or not about the enterprise requiring 10,000 hours of rigorous toil, it is of course the case that a person can come in time to speak like Derrida as though it were as natural as ordering à la carte. In her recent essay collection Index Cards, the Canadian-born New York-based artworld superstar Moyra Davey, who spent her childhood in the city of Ottawa, where I would subsequently pursue both my undergraduate and graduate studies, demonstrates a formidable grasp of the nature of the work. Davey’s 2008 essay “Notes on Photography & Accident” charts a typically roving trajectory by way of the application of the author’s conversational-associative (non-academic) methodology, leading us circuitously to a consideration of practices in which reading is already writing and part of a self-generative labour of affinity and expansion. Of the precursors Davey visits on her rounds, two are especially important with respect to this specific domain, namely Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. Two quotations are stacked, one atop the other. Benjamin (“The Author As Producer”): “For the reader is at all times ready to become a writer…. [C]onsumers into producers, readers or spectators into collaborators.” Barthes ("From Work to Text”): “The Text decants the work from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice.” Shortly thereafter, Davey reflects on the synthesis she has just produced: “Though conceived at very different historical moments, and under very different circumstances, these prescriptions from Benjamin are nonetheless very close in spirit to Barthes’s own manifesto texts that call for collapsing the distinctions between writers and readers, producers and consumers.” Let us pivot. There is another line that can be drawn back to 1997. It relates to the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. First, a number of things have happened relatively recently: 1) In 2016, not long after Kiarostami’s death, I wrote a piece called “Beginning with My Father’s Atlas” for the UK magazine Under the Influence in which I addressed, foremost, the profound influence Iranian cinema exerted over me as a young person; 2) In 2019 I helped oversee, in my capacity as film programmer, the curation of a Kiarostami Masters Series; 3) earlier this month I received my copy of the new Criterion Blu-ray of the director’s Taste of Cherry, revisiting the film for the first time since the 1990s. Taste of Cherry opened during its original run at Ottawa’s ByTowne Cinema shortly after I have presented myself sitting in the library trying to reconcile with Derrida’s extemporaneous speechifying as extemporaneous speechifying. Taste of Cherry had shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes that May with Shôhei Imamura’s The Eel, a film which likewise screened at the ByTowne and which I had at the time deemed to be the superior film. I had adjudged Taste of Cherry a lesser film from a director I regarded very highly. When it came to curating our Kiarostami series last year, a spate of new restorations having become available, it was largely on account of me that we eschewed inclusion of Taste of Cherry. Still, in preparing for the series, I read the second edition, published in 2018, of Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s book on the director, an undertaking that made clear to me that I owed TASTE OF CHERRY another look. Rosenbaum addresses some of the misunderstandings that have clouded the film’s reception, especially as pertain to its infamous coda, a video segment in which the nonprofessional actor we have just witnessed lying down in the grave he himself has dug is suddenly resurrected in the company of Kiarostami and his crew, the production turning its gaze upon itself. The erroneous way of reading the coda is, in Rosenbaum’s estimation, to interpret it as an insistence on the foregrounding of artifice, a reminder that what we are watching is a deception or construction, the drama thereby undercut or muted. Rosenbaum argues that the coda reasserts the axiom implicit in the film’s title by other means. In his search for a stranger willing to conspire in his suicide, Mr. Badii, the protagonist of Taste of Cherry, will ultimately meet a Turkish taxidermist willing to help, though it is this taxidermist who makes the case for life most ardently, asserting that he was once himself dissuaded from committing suicide because of nothing more than the simple enjoyment of a mulberry. Like the taste of cherry (or mulberry), the cinema itself returns in the coda to Kiarostami’s film in order to present itself as a collaborative exultation that can and does announce the preciousness of life, of interbeing, all the bounty immediately at hand. Back in 1997, I was not nearly so errant as Roger Ebert, its not being a matter of my imposing a restrictive misreading. I already understood that Kiarostami is a metaphysician whose cosmic symbology is best exemplified by the zigzag path and the long “philosophical” wide shot, often of a landscape, that poses itself as a question. I understood that Taste of Cherry was no more closed-off allegory than were the two previous Kiarostami films I had seen and consummately adored. If I understood that the coda to Cherry opened itself to me, let me in, and posed itself as a question, my mistake was in attributing the neutrality or my response to a limitation endemic to the film itself. Revisiting Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry last week, it became all too obvious. I bring so much more to an open question. In that final video coda, when we cut to a philosophical wide shot of a group of soldiers sitting at the side of the road, explicitly framed here in their capacity as film extras, the cut coincides with the presentation of an instrumental version of “St. James Infirmary” performed by Louis Armstrong & co. It is something that could not possibly have meant much to me at seventeen. Now, however, I know the Armstrong recording well, instantly recognize it, and am somehow shocked by my apprehension...then, a few breathes later, I am assailed by a potent, nearly overwhelming complex of associations. It does to me precisely what it is supposed to: I am immediately conscious of the gift of life, of having had time for these unconscious networks to systematize themselves, of being afforded the opportunity to do the work, to be a creditable witness to history. It was like when Laura and I went and saw Bill & Ted Face the Music two Saturdays ago. When Bill and Ted’s daughters find themselves in New Orleans, 1922, accosting the game if somewhat flummoxed Louis Armstrong, viewers like Laura and I are in a position to comprehensively enjoy the minutiae of the encounter on account of what we ourselves bring to it, something like the sum of the history of our shared passions. In an interview with Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa, Abbas Kiarostami compares the public viewing of a film to multiple people shopping for different items in a grocery store, based on their own needs: “when you see a film, you should come away with your own personal interpretation, based on who you are. The film should allow that to happen, make room for that interaction.” You bring your work with you. To the cinema. Just as you bring it (and conduct it) everywhere else. I think of myself as exceedingly lucky to have grasped in early childhood that a good deal of the actual work, the heavy lifting, is done by the unconscious. I knew early on that this isn’t magical thinking. You bombard yourself with information, with all manner of stimuli, and you are not obligated to thoroughly comprehend all of it, a good deal of the sorting going on behind the scenes. Looking at the letters that Gilles Deleuze sent to various persons, starting in 1969, early in his collaboration with Félix Guattari—collected as these are in the recent Letters and Other Texts from Semiotext(e)—it is exciting to witness Deleuze grapple with both the recording and the production of the unconscious within the context of a new set of concepts pertaining to the machinic (“the schizo metonymically expresses the machine of industrial society…it treats you like an IBM machine treats its information…”). Consider also one of the epigraphs to Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, extracted from James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry: “…we appropriated about the last one of the ‘jes’ grew’ songs. It was a song which had been sung for years all through the South. The words were unprintable, but the tune was irresistible, and belonged to nobody.” Reed’s epochal Hoodoo frolic imagines Jes Grew as a jazz contagion unto pandemic and pandemonium, originating in something in the vicinity of 1922 New Orleans, the time and place Bill and Ted’s daughters sidle up to Mr. Armstrong. It seems to me that we might call on Jes Grew to perform double duty as additional terminology for the unconscious...as both recorder and producer… an unconscious that collapses “the distinctions between writers and readers, producers and consumers.”
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