Tempo di Viaggio

[poliphilo]

The couple next door were arguing last night. I don't know what they were saying because they were doing it in Urdu. At one point a glass went smash.

Don't let them start hitting one another. I'm not sure I'm brave enough to intervene.

Up the garden path. Knock on the door. "Erm, I couldn't help over-hearing....."

I'd been watching the film that Tarkovsky made about himself preparing to make Nostalgia. It's the cinematic equivalent of a rough charcoal sketch. Tarkovsky sees everything sub specie aeternitatis. What's a little human life with its arguments and its throwing of glasses when the universe is forever? Calm down people, go sit in a field and look at the earth beneath your boots.

Do it for half an hour.

An hour.

That's the film Tarkovsky would have made if he'd been able to get away with it- if we, the paying audience, had been worthy of him. Long, lingering close-ups of soil, of rain falling on the surface of a lake, of waving water-weed. Maybe, just to humour us, he would have allowed the camera to pan...

He appears in his own movie in a denim suit. He never changes into anything else. He has long, silky black hair and a beat-up face like Charlie Bronson's.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

It's so funny to think of your image of yourself, tapping (very tentatively) on the next-door neighbors' door while hearing shouting and things crashing within...and then something crashes against the door itself and you hear the Urdu version of "Bugger off!" and then a pause and then the door begins to open...

Oh, my, I love this...

As for Tarkovsky: I took an art course about Seeing. We spent 45 minutes at a time looking at one place on our thumbs and drawing just that.

Tony, you might try it. It's enlightening.

Well, I won't go so far as that.

But you will be amazed at how much you will See if you narrow your focus on one minute thing--your thumbnail, or a single leaf on a plate.

The wide world goes away soon enough and you are left with a world of your thumb, and, because the exercise forbids you to look away and change your orientation, you begin to See your thumb without the shorthand schema that was fixed in your 10-year-old brain:

There is a simple image for almost everything in our brain's dictionary, and it's all too easy to spit those out on demand. By ten, we have a stylized horse or cow or thumb or boy, and that's it, for life.

Unless we can free the right side of our brain to overlook those schematics and See for itself.

It's a wonderful exercise. I spent an hour in the garden drawing my foot in its sandal. I didn't actually draw my foot and sandal:

I drew what I Saw: lines, curves, dark and light areas.

It was a wonderful drawing, because I looked past my foot and my shoe.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Any chance of you posting the drawing?

Yes, I can imagine that would be an enlightening exercise. There's a movie- I don't know its title and it's years since I saw it- in which we're taken on a tour through a fabulous, weirdly coloured, hallucinated landscape, with Salvador Dali doing the voice-over. At the end, the camera pulls back to reveal that what we've been looking at it is the steel ring on slowly rotating ball-point pen.

I hope the next door neighbours are OK. The wife is a delightful woman and they've got a small child. I was telling myself that (up to a certain point) shouting matches can be a sign of rude health in a marriage....

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I can't remember where or if I still have my notebook where that drawing is.

Another exercise which was very illuminating was to draw only the negative spaces around, say, a branch of leaves.

It's amazing!

Here's a third fun thing we did: we were given a print of a famous painting, but it was upside-down, and only one inch of the bottom of the print was revealed at a time.

We were to copy the lines and patterns onto a similarly sized piece of paper, gradually--inch by inch--revealing more of the painting as we copied.

Amazing how well we copied the painting UPSIDE DOWN--we could have never done so well just copying, because the lines and shapes would have been overridden by the brain saying "That's a horse, that's a tree..."

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

What a fascinating exercise.

I was never much good at drawing from life. I got bored too easily. I couldn't wait to be finished with the apples and rumpled tablecloths so I could get back to something interesting- like gladiators poking one another with tridents.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see some of your gladiator art!

(I also found life drawing tedious.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Gladiator art? Alas (or maybe not) none of it has survived.

[seaslug-of-doom.livejournal.com]

That drawing upside down thing is done in the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I've often heard that book recommended. I probably still have it on my Amazon wish list somewhere but I just never can find the time to get back into drawing. Run on sentence, anyone?

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

It's always distressing to hear people shouting at each other, because they can no longer hide their pain.

(Isn't it amazing how well we do hide our pain, most of the time? I read once that a therapist was always moved to see how his patients, having wept and recounted awful moments in their lives, always somehow gathered themselves back together at the end of their hour and went quietly back to their cars and their lives.

Maybe it's best to cry one's eyes out sometimes, or throw something against a wall, just to shake up the world and see things--See things, including one's partner and one's life, freshly.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's rather what I was thinking last night. Acknowledging pain is a good thing. How can we learn from an experience if we won't admit that it's there.

All healthy relationships involve the occasional chucking of breakable objects- don't they?

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I hope everything is now quiet next door.

Soon, if all is well, one of them may go out and return with a new set of glassware and a bouquet of flowers.

(I once had some friends in Atlanta who lived in an apartment next to a very wild couple, and one night they spend some time ducked down in the bathtub, thinking they heard gunshots.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's been quiet all day. But then they're both of them out most of the time.

We'll see how things are at 10 o'clock tonight.

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine who was with the Bedfordshire Constabulary for many years said the real problem he had with the immigrants from the Indian sub-continent was that if you got called out for a suspected murder, for some reason, it was always one of those where they felt it was mandatory to subdivide the body and bury it in various parcels throughout the garden. "Not a nice, tidy British sort of murder", as he put it. Something to look forward to perhaps?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Oh I hope not. I've only had the most cursory exchanges with the husband, but the wife is a delightful person.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

When I was a very young wife, we lived in many places, and I always dreaded the moment when the neighbors found out about my marriage, because it didn't take long.

God, the sorrow of that. It's still with me.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You did the right thing. You got out. You didn't let yourself be destroyed.

So many people just buckle.