FINDING LEO TOLSTOY

 

henry miller

 

Driving home from seeing the race Sunday, the history of my life as an employee came forward and I followed a thread that runs through all the work life that started a long time before I started working for pay. It started in childhood seeing daddy laid off during Eisenhower recessions, and during union strikes. He worked for GM in Kansas City as a "ding man," he smoothed the bumps on car bodies in the assembly line. Every recession, every strike he found whatever work he could, driving a milk truck, this and that, awful jobs that paid little and frustrated him along with everybody in the house. The guy he worked for driving the milk truck loaned him money to buy a used 51 Oldsmobile, a beautiful car, yellow and white, and repoed it when daddy couldn't keep up with the payments. That really was a frustration. Next was a big Nash tank that had a similar "modernistic" body style. It was parked in the street in front of the house one night during a storm, an electric wire fell onto the car and toasted it. I swore to myself for the rest of my life that I will never work for a big corporation. I set as my life purpose to only work for individuals or very small businesses. This meant a lifetime of minimum wage inspiring me to determine that I will always live on very little. I must learn frugality. It's not that frugal is in my nature, so I taught self over a long period of years. A guideline I carry in my head from artist Marcel Duchamp, "It's not what you earn ; it's what you spend." I've learned along the way that desires are expensive, wanting is expensive. I've trimmed my desire for a new black Ferrari down to wanting what I have, a 93 Buick Century that runs perfectly with a classic motor that doesn't even burn oil 21 years later. Things go wrong, I take it to the mechanic over something rusted away almost regularly. That's ok. It's better than payments. It helps keep a man working for a living in his own business at home where he wants to live, and each repair improves the car. Win-win. I drive on the interstate and see thousands of new cars with the unconscious thought: everybody has a  new car but me, weep weep. Next thought: everybody is making payments but me, tee hee.

 

alberto giacometti

 

Even though the Kansas Fundamentalist church I lived in throughout childhood filled the child's mind with so much contradiction and general obvious falsehood called dogma, I did get a spiritual education. It took fifteen years to reason it all out of my head. I had to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It took fifteen years to find the baby. I've spent my life reasoning away the nonsense. What I found fifteen years later was I had actually exempted the words of Jesus from everything else I'd thrown out, because they bore out. As was said of him in his day, he spoke with authority. He knew what he was saying. It wasn't just that he was smart; he was way beyond smart, in another league. I didn't know I was testing what he'd said, holding it up to the light of experience, but the whole process ran its course and left me with the words of Jesus. I don't' recall a time I did not question in child's mind why the preacher was always talking about Jesus and love, but nobody in the church liked anybody else in the church. And they sure didn't like anybody outside the church. I asked somebody once about love your neighbor and was told it has a spiritual meaning that doesn't apply to this earth. I thought: What? And left it there. All the kid's real questions were passed off with equally vacant knee-jerk nothingisms to the point I quit asking adults anything that mattered. The people in the church didn't get it. The people outside the church didn't get it. Teachers didn't get it. Parents of friends didn't get it. Parents didn't get it. If we're bowing down to Jesus to pray, and avoid each other, and control each other, what's the use of going to church or bowing down to Jesus if you aren't going to get your heads and hearts out of the Old Testament? The moment I left parents' house I ran as fast as Usain Bolt from church mind. It was slow in receding. I find that in the subconscious I carry a moral code for my life: always do work that benefits humanity, not takes away. I saw GM and the other mass corporations taking from us, depleting us, spoiling our planet of its minerals and gold so a few can live in uber-luxury and the many can work for the very least allowable by law, and that struggled for by labor unions. 

 

alberto giacometti

 

A friend told me about a job opening at a shoe store. He got the name of the store wrong, but I didn't know it. I went where he told me and they, too, had an opening. I felt like shoes are a necessary item for us in civilization. Selling shoes gives rather than takes away. I wanted to experience face-to-face with strangers, people I'd never seen before all day every day. I was the shyest kid in school all the way along. I was shy of everything and everybody. I wanted to learn to speak freely with people I did not know as with people I knew. It made a difference; I look back in gratitude to the man who gave me the job in good faith that a kid just out of high school could do the job. It was a great learning at the beginning of my life. From there on, I could enter the world "out there," anywhere, a passport. The high school graduate was in a state of confusion that could have broke-out of a straightjacket like the Hulk. All kinds of shit that happens to the ignorant jumped on me like fleas on a stray dog. I jumped in a bucket of shit way up over the top of my head and did like the frog dropped into boiling water, got outta that shit right now. Thank you, God, for the US Navy. It rescued the clueless kid of my tailspin life for two years. I hated it for that. But, it took me out of my life at a time an escape hatch was necessary. I went into it knowing I needed an education. The reason I wasn't able to get going with advanced education was I could not read with comprehension. I used every minute of free time reading, remembered the titles of the books taught in Senior English, a class I didn't dare take. It involved a lot of reading I couldn't handle. The day before leaving for the airport to go away for two years, a few years after high school, a kid, a senior in high school, a friend of somebody I knew, handed me a copy of Albert Camus' The Stranger to read on the plane. By this time in the life I can see that kid as an angel unawares. One of many I suddenly see, now that I've noticed the pattern. I don't know his name, couldn't pick him out in a lineup.

 

alberto giacometti

 

The Navy was good practice in doing what I did not want to do. Going by my anti-authoritarian interpretation, it was not to the good of humanity. It was to the worst. I had a hard time committing to a role in a death machine. Couldn't do it; never advanced, never took it seriously, only wanted to read. Every port we stopped, up and down the East Coast and the southern Europe, northern side of the Mediterranean, the others looked for bars, I looked for bookstores. The very last thing in the world I wanted was to be carried back onto the ship. I wanted peace, not mayhem. Found Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi in Athens, Greece, 1963, so glad now I wrote the place and date in it. Colossus, like The Stranger, was one of the great books of my life, great in that they spoke to my soul like Ralph Stanley's music. Like Camus, Miller woke me up a step further. I'd read a fair amount in those two years, mostly French Existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone deBeauvoir, Camus, French underground resistance fiction and plays I felt at home in, resistance the key word. Even crawled my way through Heidegger, even getting some of it, a spot here and there, but followed it. His appearance was toward the end, a kind of graduation test given self upon entering the college phase of  my new life making my own decisions. Again, an angel unawares had confidence I could work in his bookstore. The years in the bookstore, side-by-side, interwoven with the years in school educated a major dummkopf to satisfaction of what I wanted from college, a further understanding of how to get along in this world. Every summer I dove into a stack of books. In the summer I read way beyond what we were reading in school. Like Great Gatsby didn't impress me at all, still doesn't. Even movies of it don't. It was good writing. There is a lot of good writing. A whole lot that I Iike better, like Patrick White, Tolstoy and a great long list. I read War and Peace while school was going on. Couldn't stop. He held me like Stephen King holds his readers. Once I found Tolstoy, this was what I was looking for. Have read several biographies, one by a daughter, one by a son. In this house I can actually put my hands on two volumes of his letters. Henri Troyat's biography brought Leo to life. Why am I not reading Tolstoy now? I'm reading Henry Miller now. Like when reading Tolstoy or Patrick White, Naguib Mahfouz, I don't want to read anything else until I feel like a change. These four are people who illustrate an interpretation of great minds. They were benefits to humanity in their time, and in all time, like Sophocles and Harold Pinter. Nelson Mandela comes to mind.

                                                                                  and



alberto giacometti

 

 

*

 

 

   

AN ANGEL UNAWARES

ai weiwei

 

Earlier this evening, my friend Lizz Jones asked me on facebook to list ten of the more significant books of my reading life. Wow, I thought. How do you do that? I looked at her list to get an idea of what she meant. Books that inspire a new way of seeing, such as that. One that radically changed my life was Albert Camus' The Stranger (l'etranger). It took hold of me from page one. It was a story told for me to read. He didn't know who or where I was, so he had to publish it in book form and leave it to chance for me to find it. It woke me up to something within. It told me I was not alone in my thinking. Somebody else in the world sees what I see. He showed me that thinking the way I thought then, half a century ago, was a philosophy with a name, existentialism. He turned me on to other existentialist writers and other French writers. Camus wrote some plays and turned me on to some other contemporary French plays. Less than ten years later I had the opportunity to see Genet's play, The Balcony, in London at the Royal Shakespeare Company, opening night. Not that it was a big deal, just an accident of timing. It was see it that night or not at all. But I still thought it was cool. Camus kicked off my interest in 20th century theater, taught me an interest in reading plays, starting with his, Sartre's and Genet's, and ones Camus wrote about in his essays I found in paperback.

 

 

ai weiwei

 

 

It was a time of my life when the whirlwind of fate was blowing a hurricane all around me and I existed in the still space in the middle. The storm was my mind. I was sucked into the storm and carried away to sea in the US Navy, involuntary servitude for two years. The day before I was to leave on the plane for Norfolk, Virginia, to begin my life behind bars, a high school senior I'd only met once before, and then for a short time, handed me a paperback copy of The Stranger. He suggested I read it on the plane. I don't even remember his name. That was the last I ever saw or heard of him. I've often wondered if he might have come to me, an angel unawares, to hand me something that would wake me up at a time I needed help. I'd made a weak attempt at college and wasn't ready for that level of serious homework. I thought I was going to Kingston Trio Disney World, or something. I couldn't take the big anonymous school. Factory school. I was not prepared in any way for that. Church had less than twenty. Classes at school had less than twenty. All the way along, it was like that, then jump into auditorium classes and classes with professors talking way over my head and the text indecipherable for this average high school student. I never learned the art of homework. It was always a drag for me. I couldn't read with much comprehension and read very slowly, still do. By the time the Navy pulled me out of my life for two years, I understood my key issue was inability to read with comprehension. I spent those two years reading as much as possible. Reading some incredible contemporary French writers, much of it the French Resistance in WW2 against the German occupation. I was in my own interior resistance.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

Camus was a guide for me in that time, turning me on to writing tuned to my view of the world. This was my own college-prep course, two years of reading inspired by Albert Camus. Also listening to early Bob Dylan in that time. Kennedy, Johnson, Viet Nam, early 60s, civil rights, protests, Communist listening devices in every bush, the importance of dying for your country. H Bombs. A head full of Hi-Ho-America on one side and resistance on the other. My Oppositional Defiance Disorder was young and raw then, unconscious, not self-aware. An American working class dumbass with an ego the size of two football stadiums. Unskilled. Unlettered. Unanything. An ego in a body looking for a job, fantasizing unaffordable car, unaffordable babe, unaffordable pool, Playboy magazines by the stool. It makes my head swim to go back to that time. It's so far away it's like somebody else, something from a movie with a title I forgot. My confusion in that time was enormous, incomprehensible to me now. Incomprehensible to me how I got through it. The Navy snatched me up at the moment I needed rescue. I resisted it like a fish on a hook, but I had to wait out my time. I just now spoke of myself out loud, "What a fool.' That was spontaneous outburst from observation. Some years ago I got up by internet with a friend from that time. It didn't work for me. He was a constant reminder of that time, He liked to talk about that time and the people. It wore on my nerves until I couldn't stand it anymore. I may, at the end of this lifetime, look back over it and exclaim simultaneous with thinking it, What a fool. It's actually about the highest praise I can give this lifetime.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

Better to be a tarot card than a slave to a false god. I'm recalling Jr Maxwell telling of his life, summing himself up a fool. He made a very convincing case for himself a fool. I was seeing him a man of real wisdom and could make a good case for it. He mad a better case for himself a fool. I thought of him as the wise fool. What else could a wise man be in this world but a fool? Though he was calling himself a fool for having more than one of those whirlwinds of confusion in his life, looking at times of making self-defeating decisions. I couldn't stand any more of those times that bring out my own fool. Yet there is something comforting about seeing my own self a fool knowing Jr Maxwell thought himself a fool, too. Starts getting kind of Taoist. There were times, sitting on Jr's cement slab porch in plastic patio chairs, the kind you see stacked in front of the Dollar store, watching the cars and trucks go by on the highway, talking and not taking, being, I wondered if we might have had lifetimes together in the past. Surely we did. We knew each other right away when we met my first year in the mountains.  I wondered if the lifetimes might have been in shamanic cultures and he my teacher. It felt like a spiritual connection. I felt like I was sent to him to learn from him and in return assist him in his vulnerable time to make it possible for him to die in his own bed. It was important to him and important to me for him. In one way, I was doing it "for the least of these," the hopeless and helpless who wanted to die in his bed, not in a nursing home or hospital.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

In another way, I was serving the Master, exactly as the Master himself, the same. The opportunity was that precious to me. That leads me to suspect the shamanic lifetimes, one the other's teacher possibly several times. It may have something to do with why both of us were fools in entirely different ways this lifetime. Id like for Jr to be my older brother next time around, but won't ask for it. I've known so many friends in this lifetime I want to know again. I hope the old belief bears out that we'll meet our loved ones over yonder on the far away shore in the beautiful home of the soul. I want to see my grandmother I listened to Grand Ole Opry with when I was a kid and preferred Elvis and Shake, Rattle and Roll. I want to tell her first thing I finally got it. I came to love the music we listened to, but I didn't yet have an ear for it. I want to see all my dogs and cats there. I want to hold them all. I've been thinking a lot recently about what carries over from lifetime to lifetime. I'm thinking it's more than I'd let myself imagine before. I'm inclined to see it that only the body is different. What does it matter to us to change bodies? We don't see ourselves as others see us. I need a mirror to see my face. I who am seeing out from my eyes is the same I from lifetime to lifetime. It's just that all the parts around the eyes change, the body, experience, place, time, horoscope. I, who see through my eyes, think my thoughts, the same me, the same I, from one life to the next. There is only one thing I can say for certain about what's on the other side, anything I have ever imagined about it is not the case. I was about to say the best thing to do is stop thinking, but that's an unrealistic anti-solution. Just flow with it is all I know to do.       

 

ai weiwei himself

 

 

*

 

SEEING THE PATTERNS IN THE PAST

     vladimir horowitz

I put on some Schubert, les derniers quatuors, The Last Quartets, by Melos Quartet of Stuttgart, Germany. The cover of the 2cd album is a woodcut by Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist. This is one of my desert island albums that satisfies me completely every time I hear it. Another favorite is Horowitz playing Schubert and Schumann. That's one of the loveliest albums I know. There are many. These are the ones that resonate with me. Asked who my favorite composers might be, I would not think to mention Schubert, but it turns out I like his music as much as I like Dvorjak's quartets. In classical music I tend toward the quartets and piano. I don't care for big orchestras the same way I don't care for bombast heavy metal in rock. I have collected such good (to my taste) music that I have a houseful of every kind of music I like. I've gone with preference to hear what I want to hear, not whatever some radio station's programming gets played, and I don't like commercials. So I buy my own music, books and movies. Thanks to netflix I have access to almost everything on earth in film. I have too many of these items for a sensible human being, but I'm not a sensible human being, so it works out just right. I want to play more music. I prefer my own classical to radio classical and prefer my own rock to radio rock.

Thinking of this music historically, considering Schubert only lived to age 31, he composed an awful lot of music in his twenties. Like Rimbaud the great French poet who quit writing when he was 19. One thing about youthful geniuses such as Mozart and Keats, their art is vibrant with passion. By the time I was 19, I was barely literate. It was about that age I discovered Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Ferlinghetti's Coney Island Of The Mind, Kerouac's On The Road and Dharma Bums. 17, 18 and 19 is when I was reading these guys. I was just out of high school and feeling like I was up for what was next. A guy in high school turned me onto On The Road, the latest cool thing, another turned me onto Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn. These writers were instrumental in opening my perceptions. Also Alan Watts books, Way of Zen one of them. These are the sorts of things I came out of high school reading, besides Peyton Place, Dr Zhivago and Ben Hur, the latter two on account of the movies. Pasternak was one of the first writers I read who was what might be called a heavy weight to somebody just out of high school. I wanted to take senior English, but it was all about reading and I wasn't fast enough a reader to keep up with the best readers in class. After high school I read the books from the senior English class, Catcher In The Rye, Brave New World, etc.

I realized how dumb I was upon graduating from high school. Not qualified for any kind of work. Barely literate. Totally uninformed. Didn't know how to work. Had worked plenty, but didn't know how any more than I knew how to study all the way through school. I'd have been so bright to have taken one of those short classes on how to study. I never learned how to study. My study amounted to cramming for exams, staying up late the night before a test. I wasted a lot of schooling not knowing how to study. It would be as good a course to teach in schools as geometry, like typing and driver's ed. It's a shame baptists are so hung up about sex they don't want schools teaching sex ed. I took it at my high school and appreciated it. It loses its sexiness right away and becomes clinical. That part doesn't matter. What matters is the education. Driver's ed was extremely valuable too. These are practical courses that apply to everyday life. Seems to me that's more important than a history class where the history is distorted and reduced to sentences to be memorized for tests. The history is important too, but driver's ed in the world we live in is vitally important.

The day before I took the plane from Wichita to Norfolk, Virginia, to go into the Navy, a guy I had only known a little bit handed me a paperback copy of Albert Camus' The Stranger. I read it on the plane and finished it soon after arriving in the transient barracks. It woke me up like a firecracker under my bed. I can't say I "got it" intellectually, academically, or even could have done well on a test. But it rearranged my thinking to where I can say it changed my life. So many changes were occurring in that time, I can say the changes Camus triggered I followed and embraced most closely. I read his plays, his other novels, his essays, his philosophy, everything by him I could find. He turned me onto the plays of Jean Genet, the novels of Sartre and Simone deBeauvoir, philosophy of Heidegger. Read some Henry Miller in that time. An interest in the Surrealists in Paris between the wars took hold of me, an interest in 20th Century French poetry and American poetry of the same period. By the time I left the Navy I was ready to start college. I knew how to read. I can't say my comprehension was way up high, but it improved a great deal. I actually went into college with a bit of a boost from all that reading during what I thought of as my time out, the time of involuntary servitude for being born male in America. I used the time reading as much as possible, for escape and education.

The officers and all authorities saw me a hopeless tool, which is what I wanted them to see. That's what I was. I had nothing for the USN. It didn't care if I lived or died. It wanted me to think dying was honorable so I'd be happy to line up and make myself an obedient target charged with nationalist propaganda. He's a rebel and he'll never ever be any good. But as I look back, that period of time the Navy took me out of my life was a great time for assessing what I was about. It turned out to be one of the most valuable times of my life. No doubt about it, I was a tool. It wouldn't do to attempt to articulate that any more than the one word. Tool will do. I've heard it said that in one's advanced years memories from the past come forward. What I see happening in self is looking at the past in patterns, seeing how a period of time was different in its function from what I saw at the time. Events and people I took for granted turned out to be important in the changing patterns. I find it interesting the people from the past I remember and the ones I don't remember. Most of them I don't remember. I like looking at the patterns. They help that which has no meaning appear to have meaning. Patterns organize illusion like the constellations organize the night sky.


*  

DISCOVERING BELA TARR

clyfford still, pastorale

 

 

 

Today I've been in a state of awe most of the day. A few days ago I came upon by chance an interview with Hungarian director Bela Tarr. It was a ten minute or so interview that held my attention every word he said. By the time it was over, I needed to see his films. Found I already had his film Damnation in my netflix Q. I ran it to the top of the Q and a couple days later it was in the mailbox. That would be today. I was fired up with the beginnings of a new painting, Edwin Lacy banjo, Scott Freeman mandolin, from waist up, focus on faces, instruments and fingers. This one is to be like they're standing in front of a yellow Barnett Newman painting. When I'd had enough of painting, I put the disk in the player and sat back to see what was next. In the first scene I knew for a certainty I was in the presence of art unfolding before my face. Severe black and white, high contrast, bringing David Lynch's Eraserhead to mind, though only for the stark white and black.

 

 

It wasn't long before I was seeing Eastern European Existentialism in the raw. I am no stranger to existentialism in that I first read Camus' The Stranger at age 21, in awe that I was reading a novel that seemed like I might have written it. I identified with it so much, the writing indeed felt like I wrote it. I knew nothing about Camus or existentialism at the time. Somebody I'd recently met handed the paperback copy to me the day before I set out by plane for Norfolk, Virginia, to start my two years of involuntary servitude. Camus' writing resonated with me like nothing I'd read. At the base library I found several paperbacks by Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, essays, plays. I devoured them, every one. It all resonated with me like it came from my mind, though a far more intelligent mind than mine, but he carried my own thinking that much. He articulated for me elements that were floating around in the stew inside my head and ordered my own thinking, at least a good start. All through the time in the Navy I read novels by Simone deBeauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre on the French resistance  in WW2, identifying with my resistance to military mind, a continuation of daddy mind. In that time of my life I felt like a black teenage boy in the back seat of a patrol car, hands cuffed behind my back.

 

 

As my reading progressed, I went beyond existentialism to the place that I look back and see that line of thinking limited to the human mind. Eventually, I transcended and don't identify with the philosophy like I used to. It is a word I never liked to use, because it was so pretentiously used on the whole. It almost always sounded pretentious when somebody used the word. Yet, in Europe it was taken seriously. It meant the same as intellectual used to mean. This may be why wherever I go in Europe I'm told by somebody, "You're not like other Americans." I don't know many existentialists among people I've known along the way in America. It's a foreign way of thinking. America is about smiling a lot and making a good impression, selling self with attractive personality. Hopelessness? Deny it. Prozac, Zoloft and a host of other aids help make life more like television where actions are devoid of consequences.

 

 

Bela Tarr's film Damnation put me into a trance of Awe. I didn't realize I was actually in a kind of trance overwhelmed by awe. Directly after finishing it I drove to town to go to the wine-tasting at the coffee shop. I was not there. I walked into a big place jammed with the suburban middle class that I came to the mountains to get away from. I stood there, in effect frozen in place, unable to enter the crowd and start talking politically correct suburban-speak, smile like I'm on tv, a commercial for myself. Why? What am I selling? Nothing. Then why put on the dog? Why be there? After visiting with a couple of friends, I exited and came home. The only thing I wanted to do was watch Tarr's film again. I was in a place inside my head that didn't have room for anything else. I put on my house clothes and settled for another couple hours in Bela Tarr's mind, a fascinating place to go, the mind of a pure artist. The man is a serious thinker. I heard him say in an interview that he makes a film as he sees life. I've an idea he and I see life very similarly. I have my own that is not his and he has his that is not mine. In this film he was dealing with hopelessness. I think I've transcended my own hopelessness. In this world, living by mind, hopeless is the only way there is. It's all in how we adapt to it. In America we tend to deal with hopelessness by denial. I'd guess that's fairly universal.

 

 

The visuals in Tarr's film are there with Fellini visuals, von Trier visuals, Kurosawa visuals. I see it with Fellini's 8 1/2, Pasolini's Oedipus, Kurosawa's Rashomon, von Trier's Medea, Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman In The Dunes, in Tarr's own way, as each of these films is made uniquely in the director's own way. Tarr will hold a scene for a long time. Somebody walks through a still scene from one end to the other until out of sight. This was how he ended it too, the man just walked into the frame from the right and walked through the scene and out the left side. A point was made during the film that characters in a story disintegrate when the story is over. The man going through the story has problems with egomaniac mind, his need to destroy women, eventually ends up in the slag heap of his self. A couple times people told him he would come to no good end. In his debasement, he left the people he was among and walked into the netherworld of slag heaps where he came face to face with a dog. He went down to all fours and barked back at the dog. They barked and danced around each other until the man eventually cowed the dog that went away whimpering. He'd told a woman, another man's wife, that he would do debased things for her. She still wasn't interested. He explained how and why he had murdered his previous girlfriend. Seduction was not his talent. 

 

 

He walked away in hopelessness after learning he had no support from anyone who knew him. In his world he was a self-centered waste of fresh air. I felt like what story there was watched this self-absorbed man, who couldn't connect with anyone authentically, walk out of the story into disintegration. And the visuals were jaw-droppingly incredible. It was a visual abstraction from start to finish. Vertical lines, horizontal lines, squares, rectangles, angles, light and dark. His scenes were long and still, with a little bit of motion, like steam rising from something on a stove, fog outside. He'll have a scene with nothing moving except all the way to the right in the background a small fan turning slowly. In an interview he said that he puts light on the part of a given scene that is the focus of attention. The rest is context. I went to youtube to see trailers to some of his other films. Went to netflix and put them all at the top of my Q. A Bela Tarr film festival will be happening here next week. It's kind of like falling in love to discover an artist whose work satisfies me all the way and leaves me in a trance of awe. It was something like when I first discovered Steve Reich's music. I hear Music For Eighteen Musicians in awe every time I've heard it over the last thirty-five years. It's music I listen to like watching a movie, sit back and let if flow by.     

 

  

*

I WAS A TEENAGE EXISTENTIALIST

running fence by christo

Today's foreign film, WINTER LIGHT, by Ingmar Bergman, 1963. Every time I see a Bergman film, I'm reminded that his films are totally satisfying and I'd do well to give myself a Bergman film festival and see all of them together over some weeks. I want to do this with Kurosawa too. One of the aspects of Bergman as artist that is difficult for me to fathom is how he can make a film with no concessions to box office, whatsoever, and they turn out among the best films ever made, consistently. This film, in particular, has the potential to be the worst and most boring film ever. Yet, it was fascinating from the start for the psychological understandings of the characters involved. Silences were not a problem, long monologues were not a problem, adding, in fact, to the feeling of the atmosphere. It was winter outside, and winter within.



It was the story of a priest of a Scandinavian religion, perhaps Lutheran. He was a widower of 4 years, still unable to feel anything but loss. He was having his own version of the dark night of the soul, where he felt God had withdrawn from him. By this time in his thinking, he wasn't sure God had ever been with him, wasn't sure there ever was God. Scandinavian religion is austere, much on the order of the Swedish austerity the preacher (Dwight Johnson) in the church I grew up in espoused. It made my nature much like the priest's in the Bergman story, withdrawn, inconsolable and cold to some. He was dealing with the falling away of his faith. His faith didn't work for him anymore. A man in his church came to him questioning how to go on living. He couldn't counsel him, couldn't say anything about a living God. The man went out and shot himself.



In the time of the falling away of my faith, my thoughts and feelings were much the same as what the priest was going through. My awakening began when someone I knew at the time, age 21 (1963 -- the same year as this film), gave me a copy of Albert Camus' The Stranger, not long out of the church and struggling about belief, which nobody knew but me, unless someone could read it in me. I read the novel on a plane taking me to Norfolk, Virginia, where I began my two year sentence of involuntary servitude in the time of the draft. On my way to prison for two years in the Navy, my only crime being born male in a country that keeps perpetual war going. In my mind and heart I had been taken from my life against my will and was on my way to prison without committing any crime. Stupid was not illegal, so I was ok where breaking the law was concerned. Wrongfully accused, wrongfully convicted, I was on my way to prison for two years, reading The Stranger in a silver bird.



It was the first book I'd ever read I identified totally with, like I had written it. It was a metaphorical version of my story. It reached a place within that no person or reading had ever given me awareness of. Perhaps it was self-awareness Camus gave me. No one I knew saw anything as I saw it. Turns out there were a lot of people who saw things as I saw, but I didn't know where they were or who they were. No one in my world at the time (home, school, church) would even allow themselves to entertain such thinking as I was going through. My thinking had no structure, no education, no handles to take hold of, until I found Camus. In Camus, I found someone who thought as I thought, so much so that reading The Stranger felt like it was specifically for me. I identified with the man in the story right up to and including refusal of last rites before his execution.



In the Navy base library I found other titles by Camus, his plays, essays, philosophy, fiction. I devoured all of them. Then I started reading people he wrote about, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone deBeauvoir, reading their fiction. Their philosophical writings were a bit much for this yoyo that got through high school barely literate. But I could read their fiction rather well. Both of them wrote a series of fairly long novels about the French Resistance during WW2. I went through the time in the Navy identifying with Resistance to the Nazis, struggling against an occupying military force, as I was doing within. They were in a struggle with German militarism as I was with American militarism, from the inside. When an Intelligence Officer was talking once about the enemy out there, I was thinking my enemy is right here; I'm in the prison of my enemy. Like they said in Civil War times, I was cannon fodder. They didn't care about me, not even as a pawn in the big man's game. I was a pawn of a pawn of a pawn, not even a consideration. A target. The bottom of the hierarchical ladder.



There was plenty of opportunity and encouragement to climb the ladder, but I never wanted to be in charge of any of the other prisoners, giving orders from government policy. I left the Navy the same rank as going in. I spent as much time reading as I could. In those two years outside my life, I was able to assess my life. The books I was reading taught me a very great deal. They were my only interest in those two years. I buried myself in books like my mother had buried herself in church. She took the kids with her. She thrived, it suffocated me. When I came up for air, I threw all my beliefs and faiths away. By the time I'd finished the Navy was when I came up for air. Surfaced into the College of Charleston. Out of the Navy on Friday, in school on Monday. I was ready. I could read. I'd learned a great deal in my reading and landed a part-time job in a bookstore. All that went before was in the past. That weekend between was my chopping block moment when the cleaver came down and rent my life in two. Before, other people made my decisions. After, I made my own decisions.



 Bergman took me back to my own beginning. I hadn't realized how much Scandinavian influence came to me through the preacher of my childhood. That Swedish manner of brooding, I'm good at. I hadn't realized that my world growing up made me an existentialist. The black sheep in the church, the one that never done right, the one that flew to the coast and stayed there until they forgot him. A decade later God found me drifting in a sailboat without a sail. He gave me a sail and it's been smooth sailing ever since. Half a century later, watching a Bergman film, I see it like I never could have understood it when it was new. Too close to it then.



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