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

[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.