December 2009
I lift my lids and all is born again.” —Mad Girl’s Love Song
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.” —Miles to Go Before I Sleep
Jumping from the chair she sat in.
Time, you thief! who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad;
Say that health and wealth have missed me;
Say I’m growing old, but add-
Jenny kissed me!” —Jenny Kissed Me, Leigh Hunt.
A good friend shared a play list with me a couple of weeks ago and even though I had listened to it, it is only today that I really sat and listened to it while I was working on a project, engrossed in my own private world.
There are many beautiful songs in that play list and I enjoyed most of them while I was concentrating on my work but suddenly this one came along and it seems to me that it took the shape of a little dagger and that it was playfully toying with the idea of splitting my heart open.
In most films the structure of its subject is perfect, the director excellent, the actors extraordinary, the realisation brilliant, etc. But all this talent, all this ability, all the complications which the making of a film involve, have been put at the service of an idiotic story of remarkable moral wretchedness. This reminds me of the extraordinary machine of Opus 11, a vast machine made of the best steel, with a thousand complex gears, with tubes, manometers, dials, precise as a watch, as big as a liner, whose sole use was to gum postage stamps.
Mystery, the essential element of every work of art is in general lacking in films. Authors, directors and producers are at pains not to disturb our peace by leaving the window on to the liberating world of poetry tightly closed. They prefer to make the screen subjects which could compose the normal continuation of our daily life, to repeat a thousand times the same drama or to make us forget the painful hours of daily work. And all this naturally sanctioned by habitual morality, government and international censorship religion, dominated by good taste and enlivened by white humour and other prosaic imperatives of reality.
[…]
Each person enlarges what he sees with affectivity, no one sees things as they are but as his desires and his state of soul make him see. I fight for the cinema which will show me this kind of vision, because this cinema will give me an integral vision of reality, will broaden my knowledge of things and people, will open up to me the marvellous world of the unknown, of all that which I find neither in the newspaper nor in the street..
” —Luis Buñuel.The big picture never ceases to amaze me.
Wake up sleepy head…
¡Mi soledad sin descanso!
Ojos chicos de mi cuerpo
y grandes de mi caballo,
no se cierran por la noche
ni miran al otro lado
donde se aleja tranquilo
un sueño de trece barcos.
Sino que limpios y duros
escuderos desvelados,
mis ojos miran un norte
de metales y peñascos
donde mi cuerpo sin venas
consulta naipes helados.
[…]
El veinticinco de junio
le dijeron a el Amargo:
Ya puedes cortar si gustas
las adelfas de tu patio.
Pinta una cruz en la puerta
y pon tu nombre debajo,
porque cicutas y ortigas
nacerán en tu costado,
y agujas de cal mojada
te morderán los zapatos.
Será de noche, en lo oscuro,
por los montes imantados,
donde los bueyes del agua
beben los juncos soñando.
Pide luces y campanas.
Aprende a cruzar las manos,
y gusta los aires fríos
de metales y peñascos.
Porque dentro de dos meses
yacerás amortajado.
