- Patricia Highsmith, The Cry of the Owl
Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1951)
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999)
I no longer have any friends and I don’t want any of the old ones back. Am I perverse? cruel? stubborn as an old intransigent mule bucking in its stable? In fact, my biggest problems in nominal recovery are the hurt I alchemically transform into quasi-terroristic hatred very quickly (on account of the high-strung nature of my metabolism), and the unbelievable amount of crap I talk at a rapid clip, very often knowing it to be crap just about as soon as it comes out of my mouth. In the tradition of twelve-step upkeep and maintenance, I try to clean up these messes as best I can and as fast as I can, because I’m fast but also fundamentally conscientious. However, because my system runs so hot and so fast like a spazzing Toshiba tube TV, I’m often probably many kilometres away by the time you’ve stood to call me to account and demand I stand rigid in receipt of some witless, stammered judgement. One thing that good painters and the best music producers always come in time to understand is that like the Samurai who rapidly dispatches thirteen successive adversaries with one decisive brushstroke, from the beginning the painter must have a vague sense of what the painting will look like when it is done and even more importantly the painter must know when the comprehensive gesture is fully consummated, because if you put even a little too much paint on your canvas it's garbage and you have to throw it out. I’m pretty confident I recall and old episode of the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle where the paterfamilias played by Bryan Cranston finds himself with a bunch of time with which to do whatever he wants and so he decides he’s going to live out his lifelong dream of producing an abstract expressionist painting which has always existed hazily in his mind…and which will require an unseemly amount of paint. Ultimately, he puts just a little too much paint on a perfect painting and the canvas falls on him. I personally work with quantum chaos and every last thing people are reluctant to face or resist accepting. I am one skinny, jittery man. When I make my own little world I can only really put a very small amount of stuff in it, like a time capsule buried in a building’s foundation. In a recent short essay called “Dark Humour in the Reign of Daddy Cool,” Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst-in-theory Slavoj Žižek expresses his delight at having discovered that the widely-revered and majorly intimidating German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk had in a recent interview praised his Slovenian colleague for bringing “dark humour” into philosophy. Žižek: “we live in an age when only dark humour enables us to adequately grasp the madness of our social reality.” Of course, simply for ballast if nothing else, we must include—and I should think end on—the words of the great Hermann Broch who terminates a series of clauses in the following way in his large portmanteau novel The Sleepwalkers, probably the greatest novel ever written in German: "we feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives."
No comments:
Post a Comment