EARTH DAY WITH PEOPLE OF THE EARTH

wrench

Yesterday I searched for my own definition of nature, came to see the natural world as whatever is not created by the human mind, natural meaning left alone by human mind. This does not mean to dismiss the human mind, which, itself is natural as a tree, a rock, a squirrel. The human mind, a microcosm of the Creator is a creator itself. Mind created civilizations all around the globe down through time. Mind created an historical legacy of art from beginning to present. In Athens, Greece, 1972, I went to the museum of Greek art. I saw some of the very first carvings in soft stone of the first human depictions in that part of the world of self representation. They were static, arms straight down for centuries. The Greek renascence, the Classical Age, depicted the human form in motion, in time. Art is one activity of the human mind, philosophy too, that a good case can be made for to include them as the same as the natural world. Plato continues to be as relevant to the human condition as Michelangelo and Matisse. Much of our own human behavior is natural as donkey behavior, or chimpanzee behavior, cat behavior. I believe it is that part of self, the natural world part, that I have aspired to find in adult life. To do it, I've had to separate myself from the games of the human mind like social climbing, making money as an end in itself, identifying with the most expensive house, car and clothes affordable, and the right people. That's the zone I consider unnatural; therefore, the world. The mind likes to attach itself to things as expressions of self. Of course mind is attached to things because things are creations of the mind. A rubber ducky, somebody's mind created it. God creates life, the whole cycle from birth to death, whereas creations of the human mind begin their process of entropy upon creation. I hesitate to use the word God, because its meaning varies from individual to individual, but it's the same with a lot of words.

ross

My way of living the natural world in human society is to have my right people be the people I naturally resonate with in varying degrees. Several years ago I decided to trim my associations down to the people I care about who care about me. I have enough people in my life I care about who care about me that I don't have room for gamers. When somebody starts gaming me, it's a very short time before it's a game of one, bouncing a ball off a wall. I quit playing bridge not long after catching on and finding it a fascinating game I believed I could learn well enough in a few years to become a player. But the temperaments of bridge players was something I couldn't handle. When I got cussed by my partner for playing the wrong card, I stood up, announced I will never play another game of bridge the rest of my life and left the table. How are we going to finish the game? I don't know, that's yours to figure out. My hillbilly blood shining through, back when I didn't know I had hillbilly blood, and sure as hell wouldn't have told anybody if I knew it. Blood is natural. I believe it is natural when somebody gets in my face cussing me to do something about it right now, whatever it takes, least violent recourse first, unless it calls for putting the individual on the ground. You don't have to be a fighter to be able to do that real easy. Just turn on the mode Justin calls survival mode when he's in a fight, when you do whatever it takes. Our feelings are natural as our bones. I'm recalling my friend Jr Maxwell in his 80s telling me, You have to go with your feelings. Another time he said, Patience is everything. He was a welder, a tractor mechanic, a sawmiller, heavy-equipment operator, farmer, bluegrass banjo picker and singer, husband in grief without his wife, a man of the real thing wisdom, who looking back over his life assessed himself a fool. I called him, in my mind, the wise fool. He used mind for a tool, for figuring out how to fix things. Money was what you needed to meet expenses, the rest of it was living your life, enjoying talking with friends around the wood stove in the tractor shop, enjoying playing bluegrass on weekends wherever the band played.

 

zak

 

Had to make a town run today for cat litter and gas for the car. Stopped at the Exxon station for four gallons, 80 miles. Walking from the pump to the station to pay, I saw Doris putting gas in a car for a woman I didn't know. I spoke to Doris, the woman started to drive off. Doris started drumming the trunklid with the palm of her hand and hollering for the woman to stop. She stopped. She was up in years. Inside, paying Doris, I said, That's me in a year or two. She said, I'm afraid I'm gonna be there too. It was an amusing moment, but it was not funny--if we live long enough, we will each have such lapses. It was a moment of empathy both Doris and I were feeling. I'm glad we spoke of it. I was thinking this is what I love about country people. Doris knew the woman and knew she could not put gas in her car, went out to work the pump herself. I just now heard the yipping of a pack of coyotes in the donkey meadow. I jumped and went out the door hollering GIT, loud like the giant that can kill you by looking at you. I had to holler several times. Each time I hollered, one or two stopped, until after half a dozen or more monster roars they quit. One stayed behind. It sounded hurt. But their yipping sounds like they're screaming in pain anyway. It continued to squeal for quite awhile after all the others were quiet. I hope Jenny nailed one. If she did, word will have run through the pack by now that donkeys fight back. I don't know how Jenny responds to coyotes, but I do know they scare her and Jack. It tickled me to show Jenny and Jack my psychic power over the coyotes. When the ice cream man brays, the coyotes scatter. After attempting to frighten coyotes by clanging shovels together or clanging pots and lids, I learned quickly they paid these noises no mind. But holler GIT in a bold monster voice, it gets their attention. They know it's the monster that lives in the barn. I don't mind the donkeys having coyote experience. Donkeys can kill coyotes, but Jack and Jenny don't know it yet. A highway of trails the night animals use runs just the other side of the donkey meadow. The night animals know two donkeys are living here by now.      

 

harry

 

I stopped by the tractor shop, Maxwell Equipment in Whitehead, to breeze with the fellers, smoke cigarettes and talk. It was Jr's shop, which Ross has now. Ross and Jr were friends since Ross was a child like Justin and I have been friends since he was a child. Ross is the natural next one to keep Jr's shop going. Zak went to UNC Chapel Hill in philosophy and makes pottery at home. He has a short-legged black and white dog named Rimbaud. Harry is a retired Army and Air Force jet and helicopter mechanic. Harry gets so much in retirement, he doesn't need any more money, so he hangs at the shop and works all day for something to do. All three of them have fast minds good at taking IQ tests, putting round pegs in round holes. Every job that comes in is something to do the first time. They use their minds figuring out as they go. All three were involved in work today they had to focus close attention to, so I left them to work without distraction and walked around with the camera. They know I stay out of the way. I've known the shop for so many years, it's as comfortable as being at home. I remember sitting in wooden chairs with Jr gazing at the cars and trucks going by outside the big garage door, talking for hours. These are people devoid of pretensions. None of them is going kiss anybody's ass to get ahead. In New Age speak, you might say they're grounded. All three are from here, all three from families that have been here a long time. They're Appalachian Americans, hillbillies, and wouldn't have it any other way. We are each very different people who share a respectful memory of Jr Maxwell and a love for these hills, would rather live poor here than rich someplace else. We are all people who have withdrawn from what we take for a fake society and live our lives the way we want to. Patti Smith sings in my head, Outside of society, that's where I wanna be. These are people I value, people I look up to. I see them natural human beings as opposed to correct or right or best. I call them good people. Some may not. I don't care. I present them as examples of people I am drawn to who live closer to the earth than to the world.

 

found art

 

 

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IN AND OUT OF MIND

a moment in waterfalls creek

I wondered for a great part of my life what the difference was between the earth and the world. I have an idea the preacher in the church I grew up in believed they were the same. I automatically believed they were the same until I gave it some observation. Carried it in the back of the mind where it floated in a storage room, picked up periodically, looked at and returned to its quiet subconscious search. A gray squirrel is scavenging just outside the window in front of the desk, sitting on a rock, scampering about with huge bushy tail behind. I came to see what scriptures mean when they say the world, it is the world created by the human mind. The scriptures are full of recommendations to avoid being seduced by the world. Mainly for practical purposes. Disappointment follows. The sorrows I carry for the my dog friends, my cat friends, my human friends, would have been avoided if I'd stayed away from a need of the human mind and heart for friends both two-legged and four-legged. But it was worth the pain of losing them to experience the joy of knowing an other for however many years. I came to see what scriptures were talking about as the world is the creations of the human mind. The world lives on the planet, the earth, and consumes the earth's resources. The earth is the source of all the world's resources unless we're getting some from space. The oil division of our corporate government has been suppressing solar energy over the last 40 years. Solar energy was spreading fast against resistance until 1980 when the Reagan Junta took power. Immediately, solar energy and research toward electric cars were finished. Solar energy is creeping back gradually by necessity, still with corporate government opposition. Politics is the world, the money game is the world, art is the world, desires are the world, ego is the world. Get down to body and it's the earth.

 

small waterfall beside a place I like to sit

 

My question upon defining the distinction to my own satisfaction was how do I live in the world and not of it? How do I drive a pickup, have a job, have money concerns in the front of the mind all the time, want a bigger flat-screen, want a better shelter for the donkeys? How do I interact so pervasively with worldly things, belief systems, traditions all day every day and not be of them? I never learned how. Yet, a short number of years ago it feels like a gear slipped into place. I came to see there was not anything I wanted anymore. I don't want any of what I used to need to have. Sure, I'd like to have Robert Bly's new selected poems, Stealing Sugar From The Castle, but not like in the past. Then, I'd have bought it as soon as I started wanting it. Now, I wait. A time will come of a petite rush of extra money, and then I'll get it. No hurry. No hurry. It will happen or it won't. I recall feeling the urgency of necessity when I wanted something new. By now, I have so much more than I want, I want to get rid of stuff and don't know how to start. It amounts to stuff. This is the world I created for myself, a box full of stuff I wanted, piece by piece, until I got it. That's when it became stuff. I live in a box full of things I once wanted, stacked, on shelves, in drawers. It's totally absurd. If I had any brains I'd leave the house, turn it over to an auctioneer and say, empty it. Come back into the house next day, scrub and wax the floor, give the walls a good scrubbing and start again with the simplest of everything. Then comes the day I want to read some poems by Robert Lowell; Oh no, I sold all my books. No more poetry of Tu Fu and WB Yeats, no Elizabeth Bishop to pick off the shelf to sit with and read a few poems. no John Berryman and May Swenson, no Henry Miller to pick up at will, no Wallace Stevens. I don't think it's a good idea to get rid of my stuff. Attachment? I have my own library of books and music. Walls are loaded with images I like seeing every day. I live in a closet of my stuff. It's my own personal nest. C'est moi. My rind. My mind.  

 

my barn where the winter's hay is kept

 

I've come to assess the world the manifestations of the mind. Mind. The world is the human mind. The way of the spirit is guided by the heart. It doesn't work in this world to be all heart, same as it doesn't work to be all mind. We live a weave of both. Living in the world not of it suggests to me living everyday life, taking care of business, using mind for a very interesting tool without attaching identity to stuff and justifying impractical desires. Self control. It means what my grandmother used to tell me, "You don't need everything you see." Ultimately, I suspect it is about balance of heart and mind. What we call nature is where I find heart. In nature is where I see the flow, hear the flow, join the flow. Today and yesterday I am hearing new birds returning for summer or passing through on their way north, seeing new birds at the feeders. It is the time of year snowbirds leave for wherever they go, fewer daily at the feeders. I feel like it is about accepting our humanity, not suppressing it, allowing self to feel honestly, allowing heart, the feminine, the subjective its place in the world of reason, logic, the objective, numbers. Left brain / right brain. The balance. I live so much in my mind, I feel I need the natural world, the woods, a mountain creek, donkeys to know, people without forebrain mind, the mind we're still learning to live with.  The donkeys have thought and feeling, but not the forebrain we call mind. They are still in that place we were before the forebrain when we slept in the trees because the ground was dangerous at night. This evening after the donkeys had a full day of grazing, I saw Jack raising his tail, Jenny stood directly behind him watching, and Jack let go some droppings in a little pile. Jenny stood just a few feet from him. Jacked stepped away, Jenny stepped up and sniffed the pile and walked straight through it with head high in a haughty air looking straight ahead while Jack watched. She walked away in a straight line not even looking back. It charged Jack. He about danced. He fell down onto a place where hay they'd eaten had been, rolled on his back, rolled over and rolled back. Up on his feet, he took off after Jenny in a gallop, ears up like a rabbit, out of sight of the window.

 

jenny tells jack to get back

 

Pre-human behavior fascinates me. It shows how deep some of our human behavior goes. What I saw Jenny do today was down and dirty. It was donkey talk I don't understand. I'm wondering if she's going into heat. I've already thought she was pregnant. I looked up donkey gestation, it said she has to be three years old to go into heat. Jenny is young and so is Jack. But I don't know their histories. I hope she is not pregnant yet. If she conceived when I thought she might have, that would put the baby due in the coldest part of the winter. I also wonder if it could be Alpha Donkey behavior. The days Jenny's ankle hurt, Jack took the role of Alpha, stayed alert watching the fences and protecting Jenny with his Alpha power. I saw Jolene in the distance, neighbor's black and white dog, walking up the road toward home. Jolene left the road, went sniffing over the ground the other side of the donkey fence. I saw her look like she was considering a shortcut across the corner of the donkey meadow, looked to see where the donkeys were. Jack was looking at her with jackrabbit ears up from the middle of the meadow. Jolene walked around the fence to the road. By this morning Jenny had taken the Alpha role back. I don't know what is going on between them. They are both sexually charged. Jack is jumping out of his skin to have a chance with Jenny and she keeps her ears back, dives at him with her teeth when he comes near, kicks at him, snorts and growls at him. I went into the meadow this morning to spend some time with them, see them up close. I've been staying out of the meadow, they've been acting so frisky. I stood still and let Jenny smell me all over, front and back, arms, hands, head. She ran her nostril all over my clothes like a vacuum cleaner. She took the bottom of my shirt in her teeth, just to feel its texture and let it go. How pre-human is that? I'm glad we know each other well enough now for her to be comfortable giving me the deluxe sniff, or even trusting me to be still long enough for her satisfaction. Today I was still for her, gave her the time she wanted. Jack was occupied munching grass. She's well acquainted with my scent now. This is what I mean by nature as much as listening to water splash over rocks and the trill of a screech owl as night consumes the last ripples of daylight.

  

side of the barn

 

 

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DETATCHING FROM DISINFORMATION

robert rauschenberg

Every day I see links to articles about inequality in America and today a video of Paul Krugman talking about inequality with Bill Moyer. It's like the latest new thing everybody talks about for a spell, then the subject changes to something else. Nothing gets solved, nothing gets done to correct a situation. Articles are written, pundits speak with the authority of movie reviewers. They talk like it came outta the blue, nobody ever heard of it, though I've seen the inequality my entire life, have lived it throughout my life from ww2 to present. I went to school with black kids who lived in shacks. Not plugged into Propaganda Central I don't have voices in my head telling me what I see is not the case. I look at the world television portrays us inhabiting, upper middle class and middle class, which may be so in some big city neighborhoods. The rest of us cannot afford a Lexus advertised on football, golf, etc. Prices are going way up really fast and we don't hear anything about inflation rates. Wages for working people are going down, not up, because of the freeze on wages over the last 30 years of inflation. The Bank is draining us to the point it has become a Blood Bank for the vampires that drink our blood, corporate CEOs and execs buying legislation to funnel our economic life energy to them, and by now have rendered Democracy illegal. When something like Democracy goes away, it doesn't come back any time soon. After all the American wars in my lifetime, seeing the beginning of rock n roll, women's liberation, sexual liberation, the drug world, the most significant turn of events I've witnessed is the popular end of Democracy in America, the popular diminishing of individual rights, the progression into popular police state. My feeling is the obsessive American passion for money attracted the demons from the dark side. An entire nation that worships money and rules the defenseless countries of the world with aggressively arrogant rudeness is a magnet for evil (hate) and cannot stand. This isn't prophecy. It's simply natural law, like gravity.

 

alex katz

 

As I read it thus, it doesn't mean I blame anything or anybody. I've come to see it a process, the wheel of fortune, turning, turning. We had our peak at the end of ww2. It's the nature of American government never to make an intelligent decision. A couple centuries accumulation of money-informed decisions is where we're stranded now. A kid I knew cheated his way all the way through jr high and high school. By the time he made it to the 12th grade, he didn't have what it took. He hadn't learned anything. It came time to produce and he had nothing. It's racism that has us stumped. Persecuting racists by making issues of them gets nowhere. It only makes them mad. The civil rights period got some laws changed, but didn't change American WASP racism. The decision makers in the corporate towers are far more racist than the redneck with a confederate tag on his pickup's front bumper. Nobody is pointing the finger at the corporate towers for racism. We don't provoke the ones that rule us. What's new about inequality? What's new about nothing done to change it toward the good of all concerned? It is at this point in seeing the landscape around my world, the grid my world lives on without recourse, something I cannot participate in attached to it. I cannot care anymore. I'm told not caring is neurotic. So I'm neurotic. Duh. I confess. Now let's get on with it. I came to the mountains because I saw police state coming, didn't know how, didn't know when, but definitely inevitable as a fighter jet flying in a straight line at the side of a mountain too late to steer away. I wanted to be living comfortably on the least possible, intuiting that hard times would be here before my spirit abandoned this old house. I'm detaching myself from concern about American Democracy, what there was of it, about the corporate coup that bought our government from under us, a hostile takeover. I can't care. It's the same as hearing about 16 sherpas snuffed by a surprise avalanche in base camp. What can my concern do about an avalanche on the other side of the earth a week ago? I can send a prayer for their families, can't send them money.

 

rene magritte

 

It's not my world. I can't worry about the refugee camps in Darfur. Had to stop watching a documentary about half way through. I couldn't help, nothing I could do, not even an opinion, not even a prayer. It's way bigger than me. I have to leave that one to God. It's God sized horror. I can't even afford to go over there to bury the dead. So why am I agonizing myself watching these people who have been through suffering beyond the realm of my imagination? This is for God to sort out, not me. I cannot wring my heart completely dry over horrors all over the earth all down through time since before the hairless ape left the trees. I believe we brought it out of the trees with us. God telling us to settle down and get used to each other, see if you can like one another, over and over, and all it does is make a new religion to go to war with the other religions. Killer is in us deep. It is slow to grow out of, a habit, a tradition. This time we're in is stirring it up to the surface to be dealt with. I see it something like the psychiatric couch. Bring the knot up from deep within, talk about it, think about it, understand it and, poof, the knot is gone. I don't want to be a participant in a belief system that believes killing solves problems. So I live outside society. I've withdrawn from paying attention to politicians. I wonder every day why anybody pays attention to Ted Cruz, wonder if anybody really does pay him any mind. He makes Sarah Palin look like an intellectual whiz-bang. It's a television circus show, a cluster of bubbles blown by a child, drifting on the breeze, popping one at a time until the last one. It floats on and by surprise goes pop. It's slow to break the mental habit of paying attention when Clarence Thomas and the Supremes decide against democracy again and again. I tell myself this old democracy didn't work anyway. Like when it's time to erect a bigger building, the old building needs to be torn down first. Maybe a new enlightenment is ahead that will save us from ourselves. To hell with it. I'm going to sit on my mountain, watch donkeys graze, read Henry Miller and Naguib Mahfouz, be as vacant to the world out there as Blanche DuBois. It's asking an awful lot of myself. Comical to think about, but that's it. I listen to five minutes headline news on the hour once a day. I still like to keep up with the fiction to see how it unfolds day to day. No more documentaries about suffering I can't fix.  

 

henry miller

 

This has been a good week of not paying attention to anything in Washington DC or the world. I know about the Korean ship sinking. I can feel sympathy. But there is a disaster someplace every day, just like there is a baby born every day and somebody dies every day. It's the nature of this world. Pull my attention in closer to home, get my head out of the cloud of disinformation and misinformation called news, read more, relax more, let the players have at it. In jr high and high school I hated it I was required to go to football and basketball games, parents hated paying for it too. But it was better than being at home. I don't want to participate in that world anymore. I want to stay at home, read, watch good movies, make things, watch the squirrels and birds outside the window. This morning I heard the first bluejay. Clear sharp ring. I love the sounds they make. Felt good to have them back. Yellow finches are passing through. I step out the door and squirrel tails dart off in different directions and vanish up a tree. The birds scatter all at once, the doves most dramatically. The donkeys see me step out the door and start walking to the gate. Jack brays, Jenny wheezes, I greet them by name. Jenny is different every day. This morning she deferred to Jack to let him have first carrot. She'd been demanding it for herself. They're doing their mating routine recently. I'm seeing that Jack has spells. First two days, she is kicking him all the time, big power kicks. Third day he kicks her all day long. Fourth day, he takes her by the back of the neck with his teeth and breaks her down. She sprained her right front ankle 4 days ago. It got bad, then better. Today she's walking like before. It was from all their jumping around. Whatever is going on between them, Jack is Alpha donkey the last few days. He walks like it, too. He's a big proud bull donkey. It cracks me up to see mild mannered Donkey Jack whose temperament is even all the time turn into a bull and set his ears just right like tv antennae called rabbit ears. He transforms from Donkey Jack to Alpha Donkey. It's not like he struts his stuff, but like he's a bull with feet firm on the ground. Jenny walks around with her head down more than usual. Jack I see with his head up. I'd guess that inside a week Jack will be keeping his head lowered and Jenny will be Alpha Donkey again. They go through this cycle periodically.    

 

 

zhang ziyi in the house of the flying daggers

 

 

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FELLINI OUTSIDE TIME

giorgio de chirico

 

I've been in the Tropic of Torpor today, nothing in the mind, nothing I want to do. Take a nap, up for awhile, another nap, up for awhile, another nap. All the time awake I wanted to be asleep. Finally, I rose from the bed intending to stay up for awhile. It was after 8. Put in the movie of the day, Fellini's 8 1/2. Two nights ago I saw La Dolce Vita. Takes me back to the early 1960s. These two films were so very modern then, Italian chic, the new cutting edge in film. Then, they were as obscure to me as what goes on in a donkey's mind. Today, they retain their original obscurity. I've seen them both around five times, and none of those times did I feel like I got what was happening, but followed the stories well enough to stay with them, but what's going on behind the story is still a mystery. This time with them I watched as though sitting on the beach watching the waves come in, crash and fade to a wavering line on the sand. I did not want to figure them out. I wanted to see the stories as Fellini told them, leaving out mental static. First time I saw La Dolce Vita was in the auditorium at Wichita State U, maybe 1962. I think the art department put it on. It was new then and the talk of the cinema world internationally, making it an essential film to see for anyone interested in the art of film making, or simply art. It was my first art film. I'd never seen anything but Hollywood films before. It was my first experience reading subtitles. It was so modern it made me feel backwards. I've seen so many films over the last five or so years with netflix I've quit analyzing films. I receive them now as I believe they are intended to be received, riding the flow from beginning to end, seeing where it goes, immersed in the beauty of the visuals. In both these Fellini films he juxtaposed the modern with the ancient. Much of the outdoors scenes were against the ruins of ancient Rome that continue to stand in modern Rome.

 

giorgio de chirico

 

Perhaps the only scene in La Dolce Vita I recognized as having seen it before was Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni late at night in evening clothes standing in a Roman fountain, water to their knees, making out and talking silly nothings. I invited Lucas Pasley, English teacher at the high school, to watch it. We get together to watch a film a few times a year. He watched very closely with analytic mind full steam. We talked about the role of the paparazzi in the film. We came to see they were Marcello's grounding. He goes back to his fantasy life, lives in fantasy world of celebrities for awhile and the paparazzi arrive, grounding him. I'd have never seen that without Lucas waking up my analyzing mind. I've been out of school long enough to forget how to read and see films analytically, by weariness of it, finding I miss much of what is happening in a scene using mind to figure it out. Sometimes I feel like subtitles are a distraction from the beauty and will watch a foreign film without subtitles, to enjoy the beauty of the language, having learned just about everything is told visually. First time I saw Zhang Yimou's film, Ju Dou, it started without the subtitles and I decided to let it roll and see what happens. I've seen it three times and that was the most beautiful of all. The only thing I missed was names and names of relationships, like uncle, cousin, details in language. It's hard to watch, an extremely sad story, the kind only the Chinese do, devastatingly sad, and beautiful to the same degree. The story happens in a place where silk is soaked in pools of dye and hangs on rods to dry, flowing in the air, reds that are out of this world. The Chinese are the masters of the color red. Seeing the film and understanding the words spoken filled in some blanks, but by comparison gave the film a boring edge. I miss so many visuals reading, I've learned to read and look at the images simultaneously, multi-tasking. Am so free with subtitles now I use them on English language films due to so much muttering and whispering before an explosion, a gunfight, a bomb, a car blowing up. I despise turning up the sound to hear the whispering, then BAM, and turn the volume down as fast as possible, always too late.

 

giorgio de chirico

 

I was thinking about watching 8 1/2 again tomorrow without subtitles. The disk has a commentary with it, too. Thought I might watch it with commentary. I believe my preference would be without subtitles. Having read the script while watching it, I don't see I'll miss anything. None of the talking had anything to do with anything. It was chatter and distracting noise around Marcello's head. Marcello, an Italian film director, is about to begin a new film. Producers, actors, agents, girlfriends, wife, everybody appealing for his attention. He's driven nuts by demands on him from all directions. In the end he pops a cap in his head, then maybe he didn't. Maybe he did. Probably didn't. Probably did. It doesn't matter whether he did or not. The whole story was a dream. Did it happen, did it not happen? Doesn't matter. In one way of looking at it, I can say he died in the beginning of the film. He was in his car in a big traffic jam. His car started filling up with a gas, he banged on the windows trying to get out, then he was quiet. Next, he was seen crawling out a window onto the roof of the car, stood there arms outstretched and drifted away through the air, overcoat waving in the breeze, floating over the tops of the cars. Next, Marcello is up in the sky, a rope tied to his ankle held at the other end by a man standing on the beach. He jerked on the rope and Marcello fell into the sea. Then the story begins. I could say his spirit left the body and went through the review of his life, as they say happens upon leaving the body. The film was his review. It included scenes from childhood. The people around him were telling him what was wrong with him, pointing out his weaknesses, attempting to humiliate him. At the end of the story he pops a cap in his head and next we have a circus band and clowns, the people of his life, mother and father, walking by in a personal parade that includes him and himself as a child. Then the entire cast of the film enters the circus scene. I can very easily see it a vision of the spirit leaving the body, but will not draw that conclusion. I don't want to ruin it with a conclusion.

 

giorgio de chirico

 

Talking with Lucas about La Dolce Vita, no more than briefly in anecdotes while the film was going, and briefly when it was over, I saw much I'd have never seen on my own. He noted the turning point in the film. It had not registered to me there was a turning point. When I saw it, it was plain and right there, obvious. Marcello's only friend, whose name I forget, was an existentialist who waxed philosophical, and was Marcello's other grounding agent in his life in the fantasy world of celebrities, a man who had an air of sanity about him. He killed his whole family and himself. That knocked Marcello off his track. The paparazzi never appeared again, Marcello was lost in space in his world of less than trivial demands. I was glad Lucas pointed that out. I saw it, but it didn't register. I took the murder/suicide for a shit happens day. Perhaps I did not see that as a turning point, because I never think about things like turning points. I found his falling apart inevitable in the flow of the story. Lucas said he had a great deal to think about on the way home before he's satisfied with what he saw. I was in awe that I'd seen a film that totally blew my circuits. I was seeing the juxtaposition of the old world and the old ways against the new world of fashion, celebrity, lights, new cars, pretensions. This story of the trials of modern man was largely filmed in environments of another Age, while still in Rome. It gives the sense, too, that it is an ancient story in modern dress. Lucas and I were both struck by the attitudes of the men toward the women. Slut and whore were frequently repeated words in the script. I remembered the film was made when Women's Liberation was in infancy, and this was Italy, a different culture from ours. It was a little bit shocking, indicating that we, the people of Western Civ have changed in that regard over the last half century. Both films are 50+ years old. They are as if they could have been made this year. Both films were outside time. They continue to be two of my very favorite films.       

 

giorgio de chirico himself

 

 

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