To: Gerry. This was fascinating, seeing how the questions built one upon the other. I was interested in the way it all fit together and how the answers, given appropriate thought, would form the bridges to the next questions, happening unexpectedly as I wrote, so I decided to just run with it and see what evolved. Which means my answers are way, way overlong, but my expectation was, if you used any of it, that you would be choosing out excerpts. Because I did go overlong on the main questions, I opted not to do the extras, except for one, and finished with the Kubrick.
Hope you understand, it's out of respect for what you've constructed here, and my appreciation for the deep structure, that I allowed myself free rein. So I could experience to my best ability what you were doing with it and the unfolding of the logic of its process.
Did the interview as a word doc and am attaching.
I'm glad John Fell Ryan put you in contact with me. This was wholly involving, and rewarding. Truly. Out of it came inspiration on and resolution of puzzle I've been turning over in my head, off and on, for months. My best, Juli
Questions from
Gerry Fialka
310-306-7330
Bio - https://www.laughtears.com/bio.html
1- What's the best thing for a human being?
For a child, loving nurture. For an adult, loving support. For children and adults, a curious nature.
2- What is your favorite form of information?
Gnosis, as in that space that occurs between a decent preparatory launch pad, where you think you know what you’re learning and where it’s going, and then a long landing ramp for reflection on what happened when everything you thought you knew quit its normal compass orientation and realigned itself in some very novel, unexpected ways, informing you that you don’t know much of anything, but having availed one of some fresh perspectives. The whole package is the most effective delivery system.
3- Why do we collect/gather information?
Fundamentally? Ultimately? So the mouse can find its way back to the cheese, which translates into hoping to find our way to source, the ineffable mystery, a volition/goal of which many may not ever be complicitly aware. The statement, perhaps, taken in broad terms, suffices whatever one’s spiritual bend as the ineffable mystery can never be translated and is thus ever beyond everyone’s reach. It is simply a matter of fact. The horizon beyond the vanishing point. Along the way, we pursue many different kinds of information for various purposes. But ultimately, fundamentally…
4- Is this need or want to collect information learned or hardwired?
People are neurologically born engaged, and as we’re already in the game, collecting information with no conscious awareness, it may take a while before it dawns on us that much of the environment we inhabit conceptually is a product of this collecting. Being naturally curious creatures, we also engage in active, conscious collecting. When force fed information, whether through harsh pedagogy or institutionalized education, with no reciprocal curiosity on the part of the student, we are no longer collecting but being controlled. And, of course, this as well is ongoing from the time we are infants, that we’re being directed to collect certain types of information and eschew or blind ourselves to others.
5- What is your earliest memory?
This is a little involved. When I was sixteen months old, twin brothers of mine died. They were but a couple of days old, yet strong impressions remained of that time, such that as a young teen I was still able to describe in detail the woman who took care of me during my mother’s initial mourning, the car that would drop this woman off in the morning, things that she had said to me, and other memories of that period. I knew there had been a great tragedy, that there was death, and for a long while I’d a nightly ritual of making sure all my toys were in bed with me so that in case I died they wouldn’t be left behind, not so much that I needed to have them translated with me into this child’s version of some kind of Egyptian afterlife, but because I worried about their feeling abandoned. These were extremely powerful feelings. One can guess that a reason I retained such strong memories from this time is not only because of the sense of tragedy and sadness, but because I felt very isolated, the adults around me profoundly, understandably grieving this loss, my mother in her bedroom behind a blank, closed door, and the message was that I was to be quiet and leave them alone. Also, I wasn’t included and I wanted to be, because I remember conversation about how I was too young to understand what was going on, when I did, and I wanted them aware I understood. Interestingly enough, because of this, I’m able to recollect a couple of even earlier memories because they were active then. At night, as I went to sleep, every night I was (and had been for as long as I could remember) visited with memories of being very, very young and rocked to sleep by a woman dressed in white, who was quite soft, and I still had in my mind how secure I felt. This ancient, pre-verbal memory came unbidden to me nightly and drifted me to sleep, and I was aware it was pre-verbal because language for attempting to describe the memory was its own kind of evolutionary process of discernment. I couldn’t talk about the memory until I knew how to talk about it. So one night I remember finally being able to ask my mother about these memories. We had no rocking chair and I knew I was being rocked. By the time I had the language to describe the memory, I was unsure if it was my mother that I was remembering, but was fully expecting her to tell me it was. I was puzzled else I never would have brought it up, because the presence didn’t feel like my mother. If they were music, my mother and this presence would each have very different rhythms; if they were musical instruments they would have different tunings. My description perhaps entailed more, even how she smelled, for my mother sounded quite surprised and after a moment told me I was describing one of the nurses who had cared for me in the hospital after I was born, who had taken to me and would rock me at length. My birth was premature; I was healthy but tiny, underweight, and I’d been kept in hospital for a couple of weeks before being sent home. I had been unaware I’d been in the hospital that long, had been nurtured there first. The memory felt suddenly less intimate, the woman now distant once identified, a nurse whose face I couldn’t picture, a person who had likely forgotten I existed. The missing puzzle piece seemed to fit just right, ending confusion, also ending the comfort in that memory, as if it was a betrayal of maternity. The nightly sensations of this past presence rocking me softly to sleep in the present ceased immediately and never returned. I know it seems unlikely I would recollect a memory from when I was such a young infant, and we’re counting on my mother’s assessment of the memory for identification, one which we never spoke of again, I never had the desire to bring it up again, so she probably hasn’t any recollection of it now. But the memory never left, nor our speaking about it. The memory just ceased to function as a presence.
6- Is memory a curse or a blessing? (Please note that we are trying to get beyond either/or, and deeper into the meta-cognition of it all. We know it involves the context and/or the specific situation, but what is this question really about?)
Memory means knowledge so perhaps what the question could really be about is whether or not self-awareness is a curse or a blessing. Such as when I was seven and the concepts of self-awareness, death and infinity kept me up all night, tormented by the consciousness of self, my identity now wrapped up in it so that I wouldn’t want to be without that new manner of self-awareness, but also ruing loss of innocence, the “before” time when death as the prospect of the loss of knowledge, of self-awareness, hadn’t yet dawned upon me, or the incomprehensible, just as unapproachable, untenable alternative of just being forever and ever, self-aware or not. That humanity could survive living with this awareness, these questions, seemed impossible to me. I wondered how did they do it without cracking under the strain? Except to forget. And how did they will themselves to forget? How did they will themselves, generation after generation, to forget, so they could simply tolerate being alive? So, it’s a bit of a conundrum, my previously expressed idea that we collect and gather information, more and more pieces which we hope to translate into knowledge, ultimately, so the mouse can find its way back to the cheese, the source, the ineffable mystery, when knowledge is so painful. While yet seeming to us to be an essential part of identity and thus being able to discover “other”. Once possessed of self-knowledge, the search for more and more knowledge seems to count on finding our way to an all-knowledge (whatever that may mean, even for those who are atheists, in their own fashion) that will satisfy the quest.
7- Who were your earliest role-models within your immediate family, and how did they specifically influence/affect you, briefly?
Raised in a traditional nuclear family model, my most immediate role-models, for good and ill, their behavior meriting attraction or repulsion, sometimes deserved and sometimes not, were my mother and father.
8- Who were/are your role models outside your immediate family and how specifically did/do they affect you, briefly? Earliest, and/or later in life.
I was one of those kids who grows up early, observed as being very mature even as a three-year-old, which made me also want to fulfill that role and not embarrass myself by being otherwise (and sometimes I feel that three-year-old was the peak of my maturity). From the time I was three I had younger siblings over which I had a good deal of responsibility, as is often the case with the first born, but of course I was a child taking care of children. Through various felt (some real, some not, some simply happenstance) breaches of trust, I early on developed a distrust of authority and adults in general. Looking for and to role models simply didn’t happen. I was attracted to ideas but ever wary of their purveyors. I always wanted to be myself, but my best self, whatever that might be, and that projection was my role model. Though I intellectually understood this as a life-long process, as a youth, I naively thought I would have a good handle on that fulfillment in my mid-twenties. Then when I was in my mid-twenties, just what life-long process meant hit me hard.
9- Were you raised a particular religion? If so, are you still practicing?
We didn’t attend church early on and later episodically. My first acquaintance with institutionalized religion was at the age of three when I was invited by the daughter of a neighbor to their church. Something novel, mysterious, I was eager to go. Rather than being introduced to rich, new sensations, the experience was a disappointing one of having to sit for a long and boring time on a hard bench while someone droned monotonously on in a large place with empty walls and nothing interesting to look at—there were no pictures on the walls, nothing of visual interest anywhere, just the words, and all I felt was the restraint of rule and etiquette. My leg fell asleep, which was the first time I remember it going to sleep, and the harsh pins and needles sensation of the blood returning. After this disagreeable experience, I was less fascinated by the picture on my neighbor’s wall of the curious long-haired man with the eyes fixated on the viewer and the bewildering, radiant jewel of his exposed heart. But my mother subsequently became a sometimes seeker, and by the age of seven I had been twice baptized into different faiths and had sampled others. They each were so different to me in tone, and all seemed to believe they were the right way to truth, for which reason I was already a skeptic, aware of multiple institutions ready to indoctrinate they were the one right way. One may start to get the idea I was raised as a Christian when I wasn’t. Christ was never mentioned at home when I was growing up. The bible was never read. Prayers weren’t said at the table. My parents communicated to me a belief in a kind of overseeing, great spirit, but even they said they couldn’t tell me what that was, and that they didn’t think anyone knew. There was no indoctrination.
Because the Roman Catholic Church had nice music my mother (a classical pianist) appreciated, and provided the opportunity to focus on the Madonna, I was baptized into the RC in second grade, just before my first communion. I enjoyed the music, the art, the variety in the mass, some of the rituals, the candles that flickered in their little red votive vases, and Mary dressed in a cloak of stars. But I was also horrified because I was now being taught about hell and the devil, and even got on the phone one morning and called people in my mother’s phone directory to query them on why these priests and nuns would want to teach me about all this. The RC association lasted until I was ten and quit going when I lived for several months with my father’s parents, who actively discouraged any interest. My grandmother’s grandparents had been Freethoughters, her grandfather raised in a Fourier-inspired, Universalist socialist community in which his family was a part, and had afterward become involved in other experimental communes of the nineteenth century. Those grandparents of hers, and their children, eventually settled in the first so-called Freethought town in the United States, Liberal, Missouri, which publicly advertised itself as a place where there would be no churches (many were actually Spiritualists). The no churches thing lasted for eight years before the Universal Mental Liberty Hall was sold to the Methodists. Christianity had arrived. People signed up. But the community was still full of people who had settled there as Freethoughters and/or Spiritualists (the town was torn with contention over whether it was possible to be a Freethoughter Spiritualist). During the ensuing years, many learned to be tight-lipped. Just as my grandparents were tight-lipped, who said it was no one’s business but your own what you believed and best not to talk about it. They were members of a church, which they said was a safe and practical thing to do to keep questions at bay (during the McCarthy era, they were worried about the family’s socialist history attracting attention to them), and they gave regularly because my grandfather felt churches could do good for those in need and provided community service. When I insisted once on going to church with an RC friend of theirs, my grandparents said that though they didn’t see any sensible person’s attraction, they wouldn’t stand in my way. As it happened, I disliked it as the music and architecture were different, and realized then environment had been the key component for me. My grandparents also introduced me to the fact churches had a bloody history, which no one had previously discussed with me. They didn’t go into how, all it took was a mention, and it got my notice, new information for me to pursue and consider. When with my parents again, upon being reintroduced to the Roman Catholic Church, it seemed prudent to lie to the priest about how long had passed since my last confession (months), and upon seeing what happened immediately subsequent to a boy who didn’t lie, I said I wouldn’t return and my parents didn’t argue. Later, my parents had us attend an Episcopal church, but I was kicked out of the youth group when I was seventeen after a round table session in which we were each asked to relate our beliefs. In all innocence I was frank about my beliefs and it was a surprise when the young, supposedly forward-thinking priest called me a heretic and told me to leave. Right then. There was silence as I stood and made my way down the stairs of the rectory. Recently, due our teen son’s interest, we have begun attending a Unitarian-Universalist congregation. Though not members of a Unitarian-Universalist congregation, my husband and I met in LRY (the Liberal Religious Youth fellowship) back in the 70s. They’ve no set beliefs, just 7 principles by which to abide.
10- Do evil people exist or does evil use people as a vehicle?
Personally, I believe a kind of law of love operates over everything—or, let me put it this way, as humans it’s the best law on which to act on and count upon, and to reflect upon how everything is connected=we are all related. At the same time, nature isn’t human. People are part of nature, but this great beastly/angelic, mechanical/free-wheeling universe, ever undergoing destruction and rebirth, isn’t human and the laws of nature, not taking human sympathies into consideration, can appear pretty brutal. I would like to think that, in the plane of existence in which humans generally dwell, evil is a matter of these forces of nature gone awry for a variety of reasons. The phrasing of your question seems to skirt shy of asking if humans are components of a clockwork orange world or do we have the privilege and responsibility of free will? I have no absolute answer. And if I have no absolute answer it’s because I can’t think in absolutes. Stick one’s head up a little out of the human sphere of our known world and…it’s different, and the way that it’s different makes very different what’s going on in our normally perceived sphere. I am composed of questions rather than certainties, except that I do believe in a kind of law or will of love that operates over everything, compassion, and that it’s the best law on which to depend upon and to act on.
11- How do you deal with enemies? Consider - Alan Watts: "If you acknowledge your enemy, you empower them." Coppola stole from the Mob and Samurais: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." Frenemies. JFK: "Forgive your enemy but don't forget their name." Fellini: "I need an enemy." Chinese proverb: "He who cannot agree with their enemy is controlled by them." Levi-Strauss: "Cannibals boil friends, and roast enemies." Also, please comment on the first quote.
I’ve not thought of myself as having enemies. What I mean is the word “enemy” almost doesn’t exist in my vocabulary except for recognizing myself as my own worst enemy. That isn’t to say I’ve not thought of or recognized others as being harmful, with or without intent, to myself, loved ones, or en masse, and experienced my share of grief, anger, bewilderment and bitterness, but the word “enemy” doesn’t spontaneously spring to mind. States of being I think of more as being threats. Destructive ideologies and actions based on ignorance, selfishness, greed, hate. Hormonally, my body has a little difference of opinion especially in respect of loved ones. It surprised me, after my son was born, how in positions where I felt he was threatened, and I don’t even mean any direct physical threat, I’d experience this intense adrenaline rush, the red flag of danger waving, saber-toothed tigers on the prowl. I had felt a degree of the same before, but nothing near as strong and unbidden and immediate. I was surprised with how fierce the protective maternal instinct is.
12- James Joyce was the first projectionist in Dublin over 100 years ago. He checked out and asked, "Why should I go inside a building and see a movie of a tree when I can go outside and see a real tree?" Years later William Faulkner said that the best fiction can be more true than journalism. Why do we have to recreate/reproduce things in order to get them? Why do we go to a theatrical play of people acting out life? Why don't we just live life?
Joyce said this? I wonder what play his eye disease might have had in his making this comment, if there was too much strain. There may have been no relationship, but I wonder.
Don’t we enjoy viewing the world through the eyes of others, learning through their perceptions, gaining a different perspective which enlarges our own? Seeing a little of the story of others, sometimes we may believe we see ourselves as well. But enjoyment may be a poor word to use, because pleasure often enough doesn’t factor. In art, we see the story of humanity’s struggles and joys as it attempts to comprehend its place in the universe, and strive toward greater understanding.
13- Lewis Hines published photos of child labor in newspapers, printed matter. Upton Sinclair wrote the book The Jungle. They both have been credited as the tipping-point to change laws. Can you tell me of any music, theater, art, or film that actually was the tipping point to change laws?
I wish I could say, but I can’t think of any such tipping points. Instead, I think art normally functions as a part of a variety of efforts pushing toward change, the build being probably, typically rather slow.
14- A screenwriting teacher told me a great film is when you can clearly see the intention of the maker. Stanley Kubrick says the opposite: great art is when you can not see the intention of the maker. What role does intention play in your creative process?
Honestly employed, openly deployed subversion. I’ve multiple layers of intention, some exposed to the light where they work best and serve well in their own right, but also serving as cover for those layers which must be indirect and in the shadows.
15- What first attracted you to pursue filmmaking? (and/or writing, activism, painting, etc)
When a child, I began to draw and make art because it was a part of breathing in. When I was older, about eleven, I began to write stories because it was a part of breathing out. When I was about eighteen, I was attracted to filmmaking because breathing in didn’t completely suffice, or else I wouldn’t be breathing out, but breathing out was a hell of a long and isolated process. Filmmaking seemed a natural, magical child of both, also attractive because it was less isolating and was physical. As it happened, I was unable to pursue filmmaking and continued with writing, but I had never planned on not writing. In my late twenties I stumbled into being a playwright. Then returned to straight fiction. I enjoy doing photography as the state of suspended breath.
16- If clothing is an extension of skin, and knife & fork are extensions of teeth, what human sensorium does the moving image camera extend? (or the pen, paint brush, musical instrument, etc)
Emotions. I’m thinking about how film and television—even films and shows that I don’t like at all, don’t like the genre, the style, nothing--can create such emotional tension that I will have to escape, put my hands over my eyes (though keep my fingers open) or will have to go to threshold of the room and stand there, as if I’m waiting to flee. Too intense, and I’m not even talking scenes involving horror. I can find myself feeling that way about something onscreen involving the threat of painful humor, the threat of intense embarrassment (even in humor). I can’t think of all the different situations. Many involve suspense, though not all. It was less this way before I was a mother and it’s not always that way--but my nerves will feel as if they are being extended, long filaments, drawn out of my body, raw, exposed.
Emotions as a sixth sense. I saw a part of a report about vision being a property of the brain in such a way that a person who is blind in one eye will be shown neutral faces with their good eye and expressive faces with the blind eye and that their face will reflect the emotions in those very expressive faces. It’s considered to be a kind of previously unknown sixth sense, an emotional sense, deeply rooted in the brain, accessed subconsciously, which is normally overwhelmed by our other senses, such as the visual. And yet we have a person who is seeing, viewing neutral expressions, while the input from the blind eye slips past the normal pathways and these other deeper areas are activated. In a way, I feel like films activate that same subconscious emotional sense. I’m speaking with no basis and they probably don’t. Run a person through an MRI machine while they are watching a film and it’s likely what’s shown happening in the brain in these other experiments, which isn’t even really understood, won’t be observed at all. But it seems to me at least something like this, that the way film works with our visual and auditory senses, the others suspended, taking in these compositions that are physically removed from us, a strange kind of magic occurs where all this neutralized territory helps translate what we’re observing into a deeply emotional experience. After the first viewing, when I’m acquainted with what is going to happen, what emotions will be activated, they can usually then settle down and with subsequent viewings I can engage more purely intellectually, examining how it’s all put together and works. Watching instead for ideas. At least where all this is important to a film. I watch for these things in a first viewing as well but they become more overt in a second and third viewing when the emotions aren’t as engaged, even if invoked.
17- McLuhan said there is no such thing as a good or bad movie, it's a good or bad viewing experience. Any comment.
I’d like to be more philosophical about this, and often am, but am also the person wading through Netflix and complaining, “There’s almost nothing good to watch! Trash, trash, and more trash!” And, yes, I’m full aware that there are many who think to be great films what I consider to be trash. As I’ve just said, with the former question, even with a bad film I can be engaged, but that doesn’t mean I want to waste time being engaged in what I would consider a bad film. Unless, you know, it’s so bad that it’s great and is thus a good viewing experience.
18- Peter Greenaway said that cinema is much too rich a medium to be left to storytellers. Are experimental filmmakers telling stories a different way or doing something completely different? Is Tony Conrad's The Flicker storytelling?
I don’t think of “The Flicker” as being storytelling—and I think experimental filmmakers do both, some telling stories in a different way and others doing something completely different. If Greenaway means straight, sequential narrative alone that doesn’t pay attention to visual dialogue, like movies that are a filming of a play or amount to the same, cinema is certainly too rich a medium for only storytellers.
19- If you and I were starting the Ann Arbor Film Festival with George Manupelli many years ago, would you want to be more inclusive or exclusive? Keep in mind that it's featured a fraction of animation and documentaries, but mainly is experimental films. Chick Strand was starting Canyon Cinema around the same time in the SF area. She told me they were trying to recreate their 11 cent movie-going experience by showing a feature along with a newsreel, a cartoon and then added an experimental film. Stan Brakhage told them to just show experimental because those other genres have venues. And what are the possible motives and consequences of being more exclusive or more inclusive (which means showing all genres: animations, documentaries, experimental and mainstream movies too)?
As my knowledge about Festivals is zero, I can offer no opinion except to say I’m not confident other genres had sufficient venues. But I can wholly understand wanting to keep a festival exclusive to a particular genre. As with music festivals, I would think it’s a matter of knowing your audience. As I’ve no personal stake in it, either camp could likely offer me what seems a perfectly logical argument. If I had a personal stake, then my feelings might change. I’ve had numerous opinions on things which shifted when I became involved and learned how ill-formed they were based on lack of experience and inside knowledge.
20- What are the services and disservices of the ghettoization of experimental film? When Jackson Pollock was on the cover of Life Magazine in 1949, regular folks could start developing an aesthetic on experimental painting. There was no Bruce Conner or Maya Deren Life Magazine covers. Generally it's the privileged (alot of rich art kids) who develop an avant garde aesthetic and dominate the experimental film world. Any comments.
With the internet, I had been hoping that there might be more opportunity. As the internet continues to sort itself out, I’m not so sure. Then there’s the matter of what’s available in schools for kids to nurture interest and make them even aware of the arts, much less alternative arts. Looking at kids as being the future pool for film arts, there seems to be nearly zero available in communities, whether for profit or not; nothing going on film wise for kids (pre-college) where they’ll have exposure to learning tools and technique. I’ve observed it in music, it’s the rich art kids who can afford the proper school for social exposure and connections, and in-and-out-of-school can float for a few years while being bankrolled by their parents and projects bankrolled by parents. They may present the appearance of living rough, but unlike those who actually are, they are financed, they’re not paying for rent and food and equipment and it makes all the difference in the world. The idea is pushed that anything is possible if one just pursues one’s dream. The fact of the matter is art—any art--is damn expensive and pursuing one’s dream can be made impossible when one is simply scraping by to eat and pay rent and isn’t fortunate enough to have the support to have the tools, the time, and to be where one needs to be. When I was interested in pursuing film, I was accepted to NYU’s film school, back in the 70s, but my husband and I, freshly married at a very young age, had a medical catastrophy, no insurance, no safety net, all plans were derailed except for surviving. Later, I slowly pulled together equipment with the idea I might make film on my own, but again that was sacrificed for rent and food. And I was cool with NYU not having happened because other things took far greater precedence. You do what you have to do. My life took a different path. But the hard facts are that it’s usually those with money, with support, who are going to be able to put those ideas on film and get exposure. With the internet and the ability now to do very low budget film, which you couldn’t do before digital, I’ve hoped people with the dream of doing film will now have greater opportunities. At least something. I love film stock but the cost of even a cheap camera and editing equipment and film stock and developing were pretty well astronomical odds to overcome when there was only celluloid. Now, imaginative individuals can put together small films on an iPhone. My son, always the artist, turned out to be very interested in animation and film. Because of the computer and digital camera, he was able to do hundreds of animations and stop-animations before he was even eleven years of age, impossible before current tech. The same with his current interest in film and teaching himself editing and making experimental music for it, teaching himself mixing. He’s a young teen and it’s wonderful what he’s able to do. It’s wonderful, too, all the great films and animations he’s been able to see, everything he’s been exposed to, films it took decades for me to be able to see. In the late 70s and early 80s, I hungrily sought out all the Evergreen Black Cat books on the films of Godard and others, screenplays, learning them first on paper and dreaming of the day I’d be able to view them. Before moving to Atlanta, my husband and I lived in a city where these films weren’t available, kept track of what was playing in Atlanta, and would drive 300 miles round trip to see these films when they came through. 300 miles just to see a single film. To see “Alphaville”. Then drive 300 miles the next weekend to see “Three Women”. 300 miles the weekend after that to see “Dr. Strangelove”. 300 miles the weekend after that to see “L’Avventura”. 300 miles to see Wenders and Herzog and Fellini and Buenel and these weren’t at all obscure directors. Always in one day. Drive up, see film, drive back, and not have enough money to eat anywhere because the money was going to gas and the film, which was the food, the film, our observations on which we’d talk about during the 150 mile ride back home. My son? Almost all of this is available on DVD (breaks my heart that the old Wenders films aren’t) or online. And we’re not rich. We’re not even what is thought of as middle class. We live in a small, ancient apartment. A young relative asked if we’re poor. Our walls our filled with art, cases overflowing with books and film and music. I’ve always thought of us as wealthy with our immersion in art and ideas and the lack of money a brutal fact but not an indicator of real wealth. The rich world of creativity and ideas. Still, money counts. And I hope our son, although not being a rich kid, whatever he decides to do (right now he wants to do everything, but his big love is animation), will find an opportunity with the current tech and outlets. He has been exposed to a lot of avant garde/experimental animation that would have been impossible for him to see if he’d been born but a few years earlier, before DVDs and the tastes and clips that are available on Youtube of otherwise unavailable films.
21- When I asked Michael Apted years ago why rock video makers feel so obliged to edit fast, he told me "because we have learned to take in information faster." Martin Scorsese also said that he edited his films faster because of MTV. Can we indeed learn to take in info faster?
When I began writing for theater I was warned that television with its commercial breaks and sensibility had made everyone ADD and thus MTV and thus difficulty in staying seated and absorbing anything that wasn’t short scenes. I take these both as variants on the same cloth though one is negative while the other has a positive spin. Can we learn to take in info faster? I don’t think that’s it. Does a person on a nature hike take in info any more slowly? What about driving a car? How many jobs demand rapid handling of information that aren’t even associated with advanced technology. A waitron has to take in a lot of information very quickly. A musician jamming with others on stage. Listening to any kind of music, that’s a lot of information to take in. One could come up with one example after another. Concurrent with faster editing and MTV we had MTV playing videos repeatedly, not just one time and then never again or not again for months, and the VCR and the ability to stop and pause and replay, and play over again. When rock video makers stopped simply filming the band and started putting storylines to the music, you’re working with a very limited time opportunity for revelation of the story board, not just because of the length of a song but because of the way lyrics relate a story, and then they were also editing to synch with changes in the music and working with its dynamics.
22- "Film as an art form has been swindled by capitalism." Any comments.
It has. Though I’d say gutted. And so have other art forms been.
23- Jean-Luc Godard told Michael Moore his film Fahrenheit 9/11 was going to help Bush get elected. With the slew of political documentaries over recent years, do they more activate or more passive?
It’s been years since I’ve seen “Fahrenheit 9/11” so I can’t make a remark based on it, as I’d have to watch it again. Well, except to say that I doubt “Fahrenheit 9/11” would have had much of a play on the election. The film, much more often than not, was preaching to the choir, and I don’t mean that in any kind of negative way, which is what I would have to say about most political documentaries. Much more often than not, the person who is in the seat watching is someone who doubles or sings harmony. As to whether they inspire action or passivity, the terrain is such a different playing field than what it was years ago that I’m not one to credit political documentaries with inspiring passivity. There are other reasons for passivity, and I consider it to be a complex terrain. As a parent, I can say that I make broad use of documentaries in inspiring my son to think about issues, documentaries often providing him a good engagement with information. If one is engaged in learning, curious and involved, is that not a form of action? Is information gathering not a form of preparation?
24- Marcel Duchamp said there is no art without an audience. What role does the audience play in your creative process (during the making)?
A good deal in my writing for them. In my early 20s, I didn’t think of audience so much. My writing was very visual, relying very little on story line, so that it was described by some as movies as books. And yet I had also strong dialogue. So when I began doing plays they were highly visual. In my late 30s, I had a dramatic shift and the audience became very important to me. One might credit the plays, but that wasn’t the reason. Except in respect of comedy. Before the plays I didn’t incorporate comedy in my fiction. With the plays, I enjoyed using dark comedy. I then shifted to incorporating dark comedy and comedy in my fiction, and one gets used to thinking in a different way about timing, one has to, because one is writing also for timing and audience response. What role the audience plays in the way just described is different, however, from the role of the spectator in expanding on art by their interpretation.
25- What was the motive of the cave artists?
If we’re speaking about art that’s in the further reaches of the cavern, subterranean, removed from light, my assumption is a ritualistic purpose. You’re certainly not doing it so the masses can see and enjoy it.
26- What is more important - conviction or compromise?
Depends on the circumstances. The conviction foot forward, first and last, but between there are always going to be compromises in one way or another. Even if just with one’s self, one’s abilities as opposed to what one had hoped to communicate.
27- Is ambition based more on fear or joy?
How am I even able to define what ambition is for others? For myself, ambition is based in joy.
28- Is loyalty based on reason?
Geez. I feel like this is a trick question, where if I say that it depends on the situation and the people then an ensuing ambush of Socratic dialogue will lead to discussing if instead, in the best of all circumstances, loyalty can only be based on faith. And I’ll realize, hmmmm, y’know, that’s the way it is, just as I’m now thinking, hmmm, yeah, in the best of all circumstances loyalty is a matter of faith. And then, are we talking loyalty to ideas, ideals or people? Much loyalty is not at all based on reason but on irrational allegiance to a mutual paradigm of interests. And I think a lot of that loyalty is actually settled while a person is still a child, before they have reached the age of reason, and that upon those early loyalties, later like loyalties are formed.
29- T.S. Eliot said that poetry is outing your inner dialogue. What language is your inner dialogue in? What form is your inner consciousness in?
Visual and verbal inner dialogue. Inner consciousness as that which is beyond that inner visual and verbal dialogue? It is more like music, but white oceans of pre-sibilance, under the veiled surface of which pass shadowy, undefined shapes in their own realm of light. At least that is what it is often like beyond the visual and verbal inner dialogue. Not always.
30- George Manupelli says "Ignore yourself." Jonas Mekas says there is no self-expression. Cecil Taylor says he is a vehicle and it comes through him. Is art making more self-expression or more vehicles for whatever dominant technology or culture is currently present? Can art be egoless?
As with so many things, again, it depends. Depends on the person and depends also on what they’re working on. When I began, really, writing was much more about what I thought of as self-expression. In my mid-twenties I got into deeply working with myths. Then I began to think about unconscious content boiling up and how there were things I was writing I didn’t realize I was writing. Synchronicities were a form of this. Having things happen after or while a work was done, that more than distinctly echoed the work, made me think about this. What was happening? I thought I was the one writing and that these were my ideas.
I’ll give a very minor non-example which hasn’t even to do with the writing. When I first wrote for theater I did some experimental pieces for a mime theatrical troupe. No dialogue. One was a story set as if in reality but with a very mythic, dream-like character. During a rehearsal break I was talking with the director, and I don’t remember how he phrased it but he essentially asked me where this was all coming from. I must have replied something like I just wrote and it flowed. He replied something to the effect of, oh, one had to be careful with that, if it wasn’t planned, if it wasn’t conscious. Again, I can’t remember how he phrased it, and no one had said anything like that to me before, that one had to be careful of writing without being absolutely conscious, and it stung a bit. I wasn’t sure why he was saying it and thought it might be something of a real reprimand or put down, that I didn’t absolutely “know”. Then for some reason he started talking about the kabbalah, which I was unfamiliar with at the time. I don’t remember how it came up, but he mentioned Daath. He hadn’t said yet what Daath was. I said, “Not death, but Daath?” And then I told him about a dream I’d had when I was nineteen. In the dream, I had gone out to my mailbox and in it was a manuscript I’d submitted and it had been returned. (I used to dream all the time about exactly when a manuscript would return, something you could never sensibly foresee. I would dream it had returned and it would be there in the mail that day.) I had taken the manuscript out and turned and there was a woman standing on the lawn near the mailbox. She said, “I am Dath.” I thought she had said death, but she said no, and she spelt out her name so I would understand it wasn’t death. She spelled D-a-t-h. She said she was the Witch Tree Sculptress, and I saw there was a tree less beside her than involved with her, and I intuited she had something to do with knowledge. There was more but I forgot everything else she had said to me after that even as I woke up. As with other dreams that stood out from the everyday, it had stayed with me all those years. I told the director how I’d always been puzzled by the dream, by the name and what it meant, because she had spelled it out for me specifically. (And then, the next day, there was the manuscript in my mailbox. Which was my first instance of dreaming of the return of a manuscript on the day the mail would deliver it.) The director stared at me and then explained to me what Daath was, just a little, not much. So, that’s not an example of things happening after writing them, but a tiny example of how one begins to wonder about where it does come from, things you believe are your “own” thoughts or of your own private subconscious realm, when instead the situation is a little different. And very specific. To tell the truth, the first time I began to wonder about this was when I was twelve, because I would draw things, thinking they were novel creations of mine, and then later see like designs trending. Suddenly they were a thing. I can remember sitting in class with one of those drawings (I drew a lot in class on the sly), wondering was it me intuiting something coming over the horizon, my mind’s eye seeing the steam cloud before the engine appeared, or was it a matter of us all being plugged into each other in a very deep way and perhaps even something else.
A skeptic will say I’d encountered the word Daath previously, that it came up in my dream and I simply had no conscious recollection. That would be my assumption as well if I’d not had other things like this happen repeatedly over the years—sometimes dramatic, but most often things of a very banal and unremarkable nature--and there was no way possible the knowledge in the dream, or intuited knowledge, had been available.
With my last book, especially, I made a certain kind of intentional space. I craft my writing, but I made space for much cave spelunking and waiting in the cave for the images on the walls to animate and take the lead. Not so much with the book before that one, for which there was a great deal of pre-planning, but then I had taken as initial and abiding inspiration a giant penguin statue I’d believed I’d seen in the desert when I was ten, the story wrapped around the idea of a search for that penguin, which was its own kind of dream, however pre-planned.
My writing and art certainly isn’t egoless, I am always making decisions, rewriting, sculpting, but I question how exactly ideas arise. When I write something and my son comes in (this used to happen when he was young) and says the exact same words I just wrote or tells me he just thought up a great story idea and its characters are archetypes with which I’ve been working in metaphor or writing about, one wonders at the arising of ideas.
My last book has a man in it who tells cognitive stories in his sleep as kind of performance art, but he’s unaware of it. The book begins with a woman seeing a UFO, a light that zips up out of the sky, then a dog running into the street causing a wreck between her car and this same man who’s driving a Thunderbird…car. There was never a dog, a collision, or a Thunderbird car, but I had once seen a UFO, just such a light, and decided to use it as the beginning of this book, many years after the fact. In the book, I described the scene as from where I had actually seen the light, and then we move into the book’s fiction, and I envisioned for this the dog running out from a specific place near the street corner from which I’d seen the UFO. This was a book that took five years to write and I’d contemplated it long before that. The Thunderbird car was a metaphor for the Thunderbird, which shows up elsewhere in the book and finally at the book’s end in the form of a Pacific North West Indian version on a book cover. 2011 and my book’s done and I’ve published it. A couple of months ago, I thought it might be fun to take some photos, for my blog, of some places I’d used as source for the book, and a friend agreed to appear in the photos pointing toward these places. She’s a young and exceptionally talented songwriter/musician who entered my life (my husband was producing her) during the last draft of the book and served as inspiration for some parts involving the main female character, the one who sees the UFO and has the wreck. So it seemed fitting she should be in the photos. She hadn’t read the book. I’m telling her about it as we walk down the sidewalk to the place where the dog, in the book, runs into the road causing the wreck with the Thunderbird. I’m still relating it to her as we stand there, me showing her where she should point to where the fictitious wreck occurs in this real place. She stops me and tells me to turn around and look at what’s behind me. And there, on an advertizing circular box before which we’re standing, was one lone bill for a few bands looking freshly stuck up on the box. It read THUNDERBIRD and had a graphic of a Pacific Northwest Thunderbird, and a part of my friend’s name was next to it, being part of the name of the second advertized band. Where we live, Pacific Northwest depictions of Thunderbirds aren’t a thing. You never see them. Neither are these bands. What I mean by that is I couldn’t find a website for them. Not even a Facebook page. The thing is, my choice for the Thunderbird as the car, the PNW expression of the being, had been very intentional in the book, drawn from an extraordinary time of my life where the idea of dreaming awake became very serious business to me, my view of the world completely turned on its head, coincident with a flooding of syncs and experiences reminiscent of (to give a shorthand ïdea) some had by P. K. Dick (no drugs were involved with me) and Robert Anton Wilson’s “Cosmic Trigger” literature, both of which I only read later when searching for lit that expressed states of being comparable to that time. Afterward, I let all which had occurred rest for a long while, seeing how it settled, before attempting to put it to use. After all, it was highly personal and I had to sort it out and sort out what could be shared productively in a highly fictitious way, for the book is predominately fiction, and the characters are certainly fictitious. But the collision with the Thunderbird was, yes, yet another metaphor for my experience. Now, here was this shared sync employing one of the more powerful symbols. I took a pic of the box and lightly said, “Yeah, see, the book is all about this,” and went on with the business at hand unperturbed, kind of glad my friend and I had this shared experience. As we finished the photos and walked away she held out her arm and said she still had goose bumps.
Dream awake.
31- Is perception reality?
How one perceives is one’s reality. How one perceives is also not the reality.
32- McLuhan probed Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: artists dream awake. We all have creative powers we use to dream while sleeping, but artists also use them while awake. Dream awake. Have dreams played a role in your creative process? How?
Dreaming awake plays a role.
33- McLuhan reworded Browning's "Our reach should exceed our grasp or what is heaven for?" to "Our reach should exceed our grasp or what is a metaphor?" How and why do you use metaphor in your art?
I use it as camouflage for what can’t be communicated directly, for what exceeds the grasp.
34- Why is it so difficult for humans to consider the possibility that life may be pointless?
(Sometimes it’s pretty difficult to consider it may not be pointless and I’ve blown it.) For one thing, aren’t most people raised to believe there is a point. They have the point given them by their parents (often reflects the church, if their parents attend). The national, corporate point is inculcated. Whatever one is raised to believe, even if one doesn’t purchase it, is still part of one’s conceptual environment, the furnishings of home, even as one rebels. Finish clearing out one room and then one finds there is another. At the same time we’re not only hardwired to collect information/knowledge but to derive meaning, to look for patterns. The deer tracks on the path must mean there is a deer in the vicinity. One expects meaning.
35- Lewis Carroll said "I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Have you believed in any impossible things lately?
We purchase lottery tickets far less than once in a blue moon, but when the Powerball Jackpot reached $550 million I decided “go for it” early that evening then practiced believing for a couple of hours. The odds, I read, were 1 in 175 million, which is not quite impossible, and perhaps renders this answer illegitimate.
36- What elements of your art have changed and what have remained the same since you started creating art?
Everything has changed.
37- Moshe Feldenkrais said that it is literally possible to identify a weakness and incorporate it to become a strength. We are normally taught to overcome a weakness. Please tell me a weakness that you have turned into a strength.
I’m dyslexic. My son is dyslexic. Our household is two-thirds dyslexic and sometimes I think my husband is more aware of what it’s like to be dyslexic than we are because he’s the minority always observing it in action. I don’t think of dyslexia as being a disability or a defect. There are a significant number of people out there who are dyslexic. We must be good for something or we would have been knocked out of the gene pool. This is a fundamental part of who I am. I kind of like my brain. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that that the dyslexia can be difficult for me and make for certain weaknesses. But as I grew older, even before I was out of my hellish school years, I began to sense that brain seemed to be able to see in ways others couldn’t. Just as others had strengths alien to me, I had certain perceptual strengths alien to them, strengths not prized in the school setting in which I grew up. I became very conscious of this later, and even when I was in school I believed it was to do with being dyslexic, before anyone talked about any of this. No one was talking about dyslexia back then, at least not in school systems I landed in, much less part and parcel perceptual differences of dyslexia having to do with holistic thinking.
I couldn’t tie my shoes when everyone else could. You’re shamed and ridiculed. I could never tell my left from my right. You’re shamed. I couldn’t do my multiplication tables. My teacher had me coming in every day before school to stare at a construction paper skier sliding down a construction paper ski slope which somehow had to do with learning my multiplication tables. Everyone in the class had mastered them weeks before. I absorbed none of it. She was so frustrated with me. I was badgered and shamed for it. My brain strained to its utmost to comprehend and finally one day it happened. But it’s difficult to succeed in math when you finally manage to comprehend what you’re being taught but when you work out a problem and write down the answer you end up failing anyway because you’ve innocently reversed the numbers. You believe you’re writing down 24, you see 24, but instead you’ve written 42. I could actually read very well and had great comprehension. I remember when I taught myself to read through my art when I was five—I won’t go into that. But no one knew I could read until I was eight because they couldn’t understand what I was saying when I was reading aloud. My second grade teacher didn’t even allow me to read the same material the others were reading and set me apart from the rest of the class, when I loved to read and couldn’t understand why, when I began to read aloud, she’d stop me as soon as I started, mid-sentence, tell me to sit down and move on to the next student. And I loved stories. When I was eleven, because I loved stories and wanted to tell them, to deal with the dysgraphia, so I could write them, I taught myself typing. The first time I was given a bad-spellers dictionary I was seventeen, a gift from an English teacher. No use to a dyslexic as when you look up how you think a word sounds, it’s not going to be there. The last time someone made a present to me of a bad spellers dictionary I was thirty-three. It was probably the same publication. The cover looked familiar. I was a tad insulted as I had thought I was doing really well with my spelling.
Thank god for spellcheck and computers.
But I knew I had something others didn’t. Art wasn’t prized in school. No art classes. They had no use for art. But when they needed art, they came to me, because everyone knew I could draw. I couldn’t remember dates and names and couldn’t do multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank in history, but in essay questions I had figured out how to work around not knowing name and date details by giving my version of the big picture. I failed with teachers who relied on multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank, but aced it with teachers who gave essay tests. Despite my handwriting. They’d have me come up and read my work to them (and sometimes I had difficulty reading what I’d written). I had strengths with seeing the big picture, with making connections, associations, I loved pursuing novel relationships between things. Analyzing. Probing patterns for meaning, sensing a missing piece, seeking it out intuitively, and when it all slid right into place, perfectly, it was like watching the big picture explode into blazing, landscape-of-the-mind-engulfing Technicolor life. Ah. It “lives”. Not just flat ideas. They were alive. But I already knew that, the liveliness of ideas, as if those independently alive ideas want you to find and know them.
I felt that part of this, to some degree, had to do with my dyslexic brain. All this wonderful stuff I could root out of things, these panoramas, had something to do with my being dyslexic. No one else might appreciate my brain, but I did because it was part of what made for me intensely feeling the scintillating life in ideas and comprehending the world as magic. With my writing, seeing it at first as pure self-expression, in my teens and early twenties, I was endeavoring to contribute to the artistic pool of unique perspectives by which we enlarge our experience of ourselves and the universe through that of others.
So many people grow up with their dyslexia being nothing but a torment as they try to figure out where their brain fits in with the rest of the world, thinking of it as an enemy, a foe, something which betrays them. Their brain doesn’t handle information as they’re told it should, as they see others handling information around them. A lot of self hatred happens. I’m saying how much I appreciate my brain and its abilities but it would be dishonest if I didn’t include that I have also always felt dumb, slow, largely inarticulate, and that it’s only self-delusion to think otherwise. There’s that constant, inner voice of derision and self-doubt. I’ve not escaped that.
When you have parents breaking down and sobbing when they are told their children are dyslexic, that is a hell of a commentary on how society views dyslexics. Their child is suddenly broken, and will never be right but can be trained to kind of fit. A broken child and the road to hopefully kind of fitting in is presented and thought of as a long, hard, uphill fight to overcome a weakness that has separated them from the communal school herd that does well with traditional education, only the brain is what it is so the fight can never be absolutely won. Off, over there, is one’s child loping along after their own unique light and as it turns out they are not creative they are instead disabled. Broken. When instead dyslexia is a different way of thinking, which has strengths as well as weaknesses, just as those who think more sequentially also have their own strengths and weaknesses.
Everyone is individual yet we are all part of community. If our society really prized individuality, respected the individual, and desired real community by engaging more co-operatively rather than the game being tooth and claw competition to be the one at the lead of the pack whose ultimate prize is to control others then we wouldn’t have this problem.
38- The American Indians and Eastern culture respect their elders. Can you explain Western culture's disdain for old age?
“In the old days, children respected their elders!” asserts there was once, even recently—the intimation is that it was recent--this lost golden era of respect, when instead that sentiment has been around for generations and forever in literature and letters. I’m wary of the blanket assumption that American Indians respect their elders. With generations of acculturation-assimilation, and the eroding of old values, I’ve heard many American Indians talk about how elders are no longer respected. And American Indians weren’t served by one blanket culture before the arrival of Europeans either. However, I have read of examples of American Indian respect for elders and the societal dynamic for it I would think, from those readings, to be rooted in children being treated with respect. Western culture’s disdain for old age could have much to do with not respecting children who grow up to disrespect elders in turn. And then when Western culture talks about wanting respect it instead means it wants strict control.
39- Why would Joseph Beuys say "Make the secrets productive." Can you tell me a secret?
Similar to making weaknesses into strengths, though a little different. Negative secrets can sap one’s life. Alternatively, positive secrets can be a source of strength. In reality, we are all secrets, unable to begin to even partially articulate to others what passes through consciousness, mind, soul, in even just an instant. We do our best to share what we can, art making these secrets productive. Every word I say has secret, inexpressible content behind it. In that way, no one and no art can tell a secret. Secrets are impossible to impart. All one can do is make them productive.
40- Can anger be a productive emotion?
Yes. The right kind. But I believe it takes some self-training for it to be productive. Akin to how one learns to channel a little inspiration into a productive spell of hard work.
41- Can satire be destructive? Swift compared satire to a mirror in which people could see every face but their own.
Yes.
42- Is human progress cyclical or cumulative?
An interplay of both.
43- What the most significant difference between women and men, physical aside? Why do women live longer than men?
The best answer I can give, that I absolutely know, is that women and men both are still laboring under and living with old, societal, gender prejudices that account for differences in treatment and that these old, societal, gender prejudices affect them both detrimentally.
44- "You create what you resist" and "You are what you hate" Any comments. James Joyce wrote, "It is a curious thing...how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve." "Thank God I'm an atheist" - Luis Bunuel
45- How do you find peace of mind?
When I have peace of mind it’s in my reminding myself that everything is connected.
46- If you were walking down the street today and you met yourself as a 12 year old, what would you say to your 12 year old self?
Despite the fact that I’ve said my future possible self was always my role model, if I saw my 12 year old self on the street I’d worry about approaching to say anything as she’d not know who in the hell I was, and would be circumspect.
47- Should toilet paper go over or under the roll? Why?
Under the roll was my firm belief until my son turned fourteen and decided that over the roll was better. Having lived with both ways for a year, I’m a confirmed ambivalent.
48- If a publisher was to release your autobiography, off the top of your head, what would the title be? They want to scent the glue in the binding. What smell would it be?
Such an autobiography would never be written for publication in the first place.
49- If a statue was built in your honor, where would it be displayed and what would it be made of?
My son already did so when he was like eight years of age. He knows I wrote a book about this search for the great penguin. He doesn’t and didn’t know what it’s about, but he got the idea I must love penguins, so he made me a small penguin “statuette” of a penguin mom and penguin child happily waving greetings at the world or us. The material is a quick air-drying clay. It resides a couple feet from my desk on a shelf of a slim book case devoted to extra special things like that.
50- Please tell me something good you never had and you never want.
Oh, there’s a whole world of good out there I’ve never personally had, my mind not going to belongings but the intersections of places, things, events, people in the creation of unique experience. But as for something good that I never had and never want? How about this. I can tell you there have been good things I never wanted at all, no way, at all, ran like hell from them, then they happened anyway like they were bound and determined to do so.
51- If you were in a vat of vomit up to your neck and somebody threw a bag of shit at your face, what would you do?
Is it still in the bag?
52- What is the healthiest cultural shift you see developing today?
A growing acceptance that the so-called war on drugs is destructive.
53- What gives you the most optimism?
The next generation. And the Grand Canyon. I never had any desire to go to the Grand Canyon though I’d heard it was amazing and then one day there I was and I loved it, and primarily for the awe it inspired in the those around me, people from all over the world standing shoulder to shoulder, minds agape at the magnificence they were witnessing and the reminder of what that particle of “now” continually being swept away from beneath their feet means.
54- What is the most overrated idea?
I’ve often had the idea that forks were the most overrated idea. That a knife (especially) and spoon are sufficient. But as I began to answer that a fork was overrated, I then considered that the spoon may instead be the most overrated idea. If it needs sipping there’s always the bowl. Or a mug. Neither of which are overrated.
55- How and when did you get into Kubrick?
1968. I was ten years of age and seeing “2001” when it first came out. A highly anticipated event in our home, at least for my father, a scientist, big into science fiction, and very excited about seeing “2001”, not because of Kubrick, he didn’t know Kubrick’s films, but because of Arthur Clarke and the idea this was going to be a game changer as far as science fiction movies were concerned. Because this was a big event, he took me along and the eldest of my little brothers, who was seven. I was mesmerized from beginning to end. Yes, the special effects were spectacular, but then there was the cinematography, the pacing, these long silent scenes which pulled one into them in a different way as an observer so you were less watching action propelling itself along to the next plot point but taking in a scene with the kind of rhythm you might have when watching daily life unfold before you. All the movies I’d seen relied heavily on dialogue for telling story and were neatly boxed with the film holding your hand and making sure you knew what the story was about. “2001” didn’t do this. Instead, here was a movie that wanted me to think about what I was seeing, and then what I had seen. What I had seen instead was all about encouraging me to exercise my intellect and search for meaning. What’s more, it was showing me how, in the way the scenes themselves, the tableaus, were not just settings but highly interactive wealth of content. I think what happened is my little ten-year-old dyslexic, holistic thinking, pattern seeking, dive deep for meaning brain went wild. As it turned out, my brother was captivated as well. We never speak about film, we never spoke about Kubrick, and then a few years ago he told me about his life-long love for and interest in “2001” and how he had pursued this. He has stuck with “2001” however, whereas I was drawn to Kubrick’s oeuvre, and the relationships between his films.
Between “2001” and “The Shining” I had seen Kubrick’s other films, and appreciated every one as a great film, each one powerful in its own way, but it was with “The Shining” that my interest in Kubrick locked in fully, click, engaged, as an adult. Again, I saw it in the theater when it came out. From beginning to end, again, the plot and its characters threaded through tableaus that weren’t just settings but a highly interactive wealth of content inviting one to delve into deeper levels. At the time it was like seeing a few bright, glittering objects and gathering up the few that stood out. By the time VCRs were in everyone’s household, we had one and we occasionally rented Kubrick, and I watched and considered. Then later, with DVDs, I was able to really watch and consider. He covered so many subjects so powerfully and humanely, with such a rare, articulate and intricate hand in what he was able to extract from his actors, those primary and first impressions of story, his obvious themes, those are most important. But his films were also replete with question marks and peculiar curiosities staged to invite the “what was that” second glance. The final scene of a Kubrick film is never a closed door, but an open one with some bread crumbs littered about for those who linger in their seats hungry for more, and we follow.
The note Bill Harford is given in “Eyes Wide Shut”, the warning to not continue his inquiries as they’re useless, I think is perhaps partly designed for the people who follow the bread crumbs, Kubrick’s little monoliths, into his mazes. The note serves a function. Serves as a warning for life in general and the search for certain knowledge in its mysteries.
At the same time, it is to be remembered that Bill was, after all, intentionally invited to where the rainbow ends. Just as humanity was invited, in “2001”, to outer bounds. He was issued a handwritten invite with the password. Upon arriving at Somerton, he is introduced to the room with all these masked individuals, believing himself a discreet intruder, but there is a small spotlight there to the side, and it is into this spotlight he steps. It is peculiar that the spotlight is there, and more peculiar that he agreeably takes his place in it. It is because he has been explicitly invited that he is taking his place, however unconsciously. Where his agreement is conscious is that he had pursued mystery.
At film’s end, all we ever really know, in conclusion, is that Bill and Alice are sharing now with each other their secrets, are sharing the awareness that reality is uncertain, that dreams have their own reality, and are happy to be awake. “Forever and ever.” Though not so much for Alice, who is scared of that prospect. Just as, at the age of seven, I was happy to be self-aware but scared by the prospect of forever, and forever. That kind of awakening they would have encountered before, and their young daughter who has stepped out of their sight at that point will be introduced as well, they can’t protect her from that curse which is also a blessing. It is common to us all. Just as I wondered, at the age of seven, how do people live with that knowledge except by immersing themselves so much in the perceived world that they forget it, so do we have two characters who have stepped out of their work-a-day reality, in which Bill was told he missed so much. They have found themselves awake again—a traumatic awakening, but so too was Bowman’s in “2001”. It’s the nature of the beast. What are they to do with their experience? Feel grateful, Alice says. They are no doubt conscious of their lives and selves on a deeper level. Fresh from their experience, the ground is unstable, but they are also back on terra firma, where they are to continue their lives with this fresh consciousness and appreciation.
Kubrick believed observation was a dying art. He also knew that to say the thing directly was to deny the viewer the process of discovery. How to initiate discovery but with bread crumbs, monoliths and question marks. How to awaken observation without the installation of peculiar details, bright shiny objects to draw the thieving magpie’s attention?
I’m a magpie. That’s how I got into Kubrick.I got into Kubrick because, though he hid intention, he hid it behind those bright and shiny question marks. He sought to stir curiosity, to awaken it, and counted on curiosity to respond, which is our innate desire to collect information.