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lundi 26 janvier 2004
 

Well, it was snow.
Of that dirty-city sleet kind driven by a biting wind which turns every corner straight into your face...
The Inuit (Eskimos) must have a singularly horrible word for this sort of slush, which left me drenched and bone-chilled in the 15 minutes it took to walk to the Mind Juggler's place.
Now I know why some Brits mentioned on the Beeb at the weekend that they planned to call on the Canadians for some expertise about "Arctic conditions imminent"!

Far from further rest and relaxation, Dr F. again proved radical in her latest recommendations regarding getting shot of the Condition.
We're in for another bout of intensive mind-body sessions, since she reckons I've more than assimilated Round One, for all my misgivings (this morning's entry). She even thinks I should go to the Factory rather less for a while and work intensively on the recovery plan we're formulating!
That, I can see, is going to go down as well at AFP as a couple of tonnes of bricks...
But I suppose it does make some kind of sense, since it's now clear that "social integration" is far from the issue.

Facets.
Did I mention facets before?
Sort of, certainly in 'Where There's Will, there's a way' back in May ... those were the days, when I could parody Shakespeare about the Condition, geez! I didn't know then just what I was launched into and how darned long it would take.
The Mind Juggler and I have begun to argue.
Constructively, but it's an argument nevertheless, in which one of the few things we agree on is that the harder I can work with her now, the better it'll be and the quicker the whole process will be over!
What this really boils down to is that your correspondent is going to have to push harder at the breakthrough point(s) I confusedly suspected we were approaching by this morning.
I've already learned the "learning paradox" for myself ("paradox" being one of her key words today): the fact that learning anything is not a steady uphill path for any of us, but rather something we accomplish in a series of "jumps".
That's to say, it's often precisely at those moments when you often feel that you are more confused about whatever it is you're learning than ever, when you feel you've been treading water for a while, that your brain's doing the really hard graft for the next level "up".
This is a phenomenon I've observed particularly when it comes to learning languages or related skills, and also in the creative process.

I'm going to have to devise a "work schedule" for putting all the fragmented facets together; those facets of self that appear to have splintered at around the same time as the guts fell apart.
We've discussed elements:

  • creative writing (more of it, not less, reckons the MJ)
  • musical expression (and expression about music)
  • "educational" wordcraft
  • family matters
  • sexuality (she is a shrink, and there's been a lot about that of late, quite self-revelatory too)
  • senses of guilt and duty (ditto)
  • "religious" outlook (if that's the appropriate term for my renewed waxing interest in "Oriental thinking", Zen, the Tao and all that)
  • sciences and science fiction, writ large(*)
  • the Factory (which is supposed to go down my list of "priorities" at the very time I'm beginning to settle back into the place. That's one of the matters where we can't see quite eye to eye).
Yes. Well, I think that'll do for starters.

Fuck me! I really thought this lot was going to be sorted out within two or three more weeks at most...
Even if I know well enough that the accomplishment of self-realisation is a lifelong task. And probably, usually, an unfinished one.

_______

(*) From a collection of definitions by the intriguing Neyir Cenk Gökçe (Gökçe's 'Science Fiction Page'). These are but a handful of many Neyir has gathered on the wide-ranging site of a Turkish mechanical engineering student.
I post them first because I find them interesting, and secondly because they're an excellent example of the danger of trying to label and pigeon-hole things, Western-style:

"By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism."
Alvin Toffler
"In fact, one good working definition of science fiction may be the literature which, growing with science and technology, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the rest of human existence."
Bruce H. Franklin
"A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.
To make this definition cover all science fiction (instead of 'almost all'), it is necessary only to strike out the word 'future'."
Science Fiction: its nature, faults and virtues, in 'The Science Fiction Novel', Advent, Chicago:1969
Robert A. Heinlein
"A revealing way of describing science fiction is to say that it is part of a literary mode which one may call 'fabril'. 'Fabril' is the opposite of 'Pastoral'. But while "the pastoral" is an established and much-discussed literary mode, recognized as such since early antiquity, its dark opposite has not yet been accepted, or even named, by the law-givers of literature. Yet the opposition is a clear one. Pastoral literature is rural, nostalgic, conservative. It idealizes the past and tends to convert complexities into simplicity; its central image is the shepherd. Fabril literature (of which science fiction is now by far the most prominent genre) is overwhelmingly urban, distruptive, future-oriented, eager for novelty; its central images is the 'faber', the smith or blacksmith in older usage, but now extended in science fiction to mean the creator of artefacts in general--metallic, crystalline, genetic, or even social."
Introduction, 'The Oxford Book of Science Fiction,' (Oxford, 1992)
Tom Shippey
"Science Fiction is that class of fiction which contains the currents of change in science and society. It concerns itself with the critique, extension, revision, and conspiracy of revolution, all directed against static scientific paradigms. Its goal is to prompt a paradigm shift to a new view that will be more responsive and true to nature."
'The Cosmic Dancers' (New York, 1983)
Amit Goswami
If you've got more Neyir hasn't listed with these and his others, he'd be glad of a heads-up, he writes (spotted via a recent 'Science Fiction and Religion' post at Kuro5hin).


10:52:20 PM  link   your views? []

Kenji KawaiThe outstandingly gifted Japanese musician whose photo I've pinched here is Kenji Kawai, whose compositions played a key role in that Manga turned cult movie, 'Ghost in the Shell,' which I briefly mentioned here last August 24.
Along with 'Avalon'!
Kenji -- who works with Macs, bless him (profile at 'kenjikawai') -- pursued his musical partnership with the fabulous writer & director team, Mamoru Ishii and Kazunori Itô, on 'Avalon' (2001), such a strange Japanese-Polish co-production of a film that when the Kid and I first saw it on the big screen it really needs we both emerged quite stunned.
I wasn't sure whether I'd just seen the most virtuoso piece of sluggish nonsense or a chef d'oeuvre. All I knew was that I needed to watch this movie again, so utterly was I drawn into its bleak, mainly sepia-tonal world.
It was gone in a couple of days, my chance lost, but it's one of the very few films to have haunted me at a deep level since; and not least Kenji's astounding musical score, which you can just about still find on a Virgin France CD, ranging from electronica to oratorio. 'Ghost' (Amazon UK) is easier to track down.

Ghosts?Like Kenji's soundtrack, which takes on such crucial importance in the closing scenes of 'Avalon' that to say more would be a spoiler, "ghosts" play a key role in this film too.

Summed up in a line or two, 'Avalon' is the story of Ash, chilled out "warrior" who makes a living playing an illegal virtual reality war game set, with the help of the Polish military, in some near future reminiscent of a hungry, hopeless Cold War bloc '1984'.
Ash has become one of the game's few solo players since her team, the Wizards, cracked up in a clash which left one of her partners brain-dead and hospitalised. In a world that offers precious little else, for her and a few others the game -- and the explicit parallels it draws with recurrent aspects of the Arthurian legends -- has become more than life itself.

On its release, this extraordinary fable of realities was swept into the shadows by the massive box office hit of 'The Matrix,' with which 'Avalon' was initially compared by several misguided critics.
Well, last night I saw it again.
Once and a half times...
My own Mac has been so badly behaved under Panther (Apple's new operating system) when it comes to the built-in CD drive that I cracked and finally acquired -- yes, DVD: a darned good external CD and DVD read-and-write drive. The same me who has long cursed both the horrors of television and the whole home movie thing.

Street fightNo doubt about it this time: 'Avalon' (Amazon Fr.) is a masterpiece, one that I've even decided to buy second-hand as a very strong candidate for my own list of all-time Top Ten Films -- that good!
I see that in the past year or so, this film too has won serious cult status at the IMDb, where those who considered it one of the most turgid and tedious bores of the year on release are now massively outnumbered.

Malgorzata Foremniak is terrific as Ash: ice-cold, except where her dog is concerned, and the rest of a largely unknown (in the West) cast are all good. It is a slow movie, but one that merits several viewings.
First time round, I was so taken with the music and the stunning photography (a subtle interplay of reality and virtual reality in itself) that I missed half the subtleties of a deceptively simple plot, wherein Ash decides to aim for gameplay level Special-A, the mysterious innards of Avalon. At the risk of life itself.

Press reviews last year could scarcely have been more varied:

"If Hungarian miserablist Bela Tarr ever remade The Matrix, it might look like this, but I don't think Tarr would have made it quite so boring. It's a futuristic fantasy whose undoubtedly impressive computer-generated effects are occluded by being mostly presented in a kind of sepia monochrome, as if the film has been developed in cold tea. For all its many bizarre moments, it can be an extraordinarily grim and frankly tedious trudge," wrote Peter Bradshaw (Guardian).
"...the live-action debut of the Japanese animator Mamoru Oshii is a hypnotic science-fiction picture made in Poland and set in a dystopian near future (...)
The picture concentrates on one contestant, the cool, good-looking Ash, and her progress of mysterious self-discovery, and it's beautifully designed and lit, most of it in a golden sepia. At times the use of music is reminiscent of Krzysztof Kieslowski (jyjung71), but the pictures it most closely resembles in mood and appearance are Chris Marker's 'La Jetée' and Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Stalker'," Philip French wrote (same website! for the 'Observer').

Being a "gauche" and right-brained person, I didn't know quite what to make of somebody's comment at the IMDb where they described 'Avalon' as "a very right-side-of-the-brain experience", unless they meant that a lot of the way the film "works" is subliminal, non-rational.
But there is a story to it, a very intriguing one which I grasped on second viewing, taking advantage of the new computer toy to run one or two scenes through again for closer inspection. What some have taken for "repetitive" isn't, in fact: such scenes are like keys, used and understood differently each time round.
And since I admire both Tarkovsky and Marker, of course I'm going to agree not only with Philip French but with all those who contend that to compare this film with 'The Matrix' trilogy is absurd, superficial and idiotic.

I still reckon, as I wrote back in August, that 'Avalon' is a "love it or hate it" movie, but now I know which camp I'm in!
The only real parallels one might draw with 'The Matrix' are the questioning of the nature of reality itself -- especially in a world where the "real" really hurts (there's some clever use of colour in the sepia shots of food which take on some importance here) -- and the way Ishii and Itô draw on myth and legend that are pretty important to the points they succeed in making.
It deserves "cult status". It was a movie far ahead of its time and very different mind-fodder from most of the unmemorable gloss and dross that came out of Hollywood that year.
But I think it also deserves a second chance on the big screen circuit!

DVD is OK.
But it really isn't the same thing, not if you've got the devil's luck like I have to live in an adventurous art-movie paradise like Paris, where some of the best cinemas still have the committed support and audience to go on taking risks.

zzz

Also revisited in the past few days, thanks to the rental shop, and another sure candidate for my "eventually buy as part of the Top Ten list": a very different, and exceptionally moving, kind of musical film, Giuseppe Tornatore's 'La Leggenda del pianista sull'oceano' ('The Legend of 1900'; IMDb, 1998).
But that -- and despite the title it's a movie in English with outstanding performances notably from Tim Roth, Pruitt Taylor Vince and an indispensably gorgeous Mélanie Thierry -- is a very different story.
Some other time.

____

'Avalon' photo credits: Cinévia Films;
Kenji: no credit given at source, apart from OPhoto.


7:29:49 PM  link   your views? []

On the 12 strokes of noon, I've the latest appointment with the Mind Juggler, but I'm deeply confused as to where we go from here.
We've not had a session together for 10 days now, which was exactly the way it should have been.
It gave me almost enough of the time needed to let my mind, both conscious and quite clearly unconsciously, assimilate and make some sense of all that "work" we did during the last intensive set of meetings.
But maybe not enough...
This December, January and early February period has always been an appalling time of year where nearly every day is one big battle for clarity, lucidity and indeed, some kind of sanity, against the really black dog blues!
With the exception of a couple of days, last week at the Factory was mostly mercifully quiet on the African news front and there weren't the other events happening which last year -- as an accumulative effect of constant battering on several fronts -- finally tipped me over into the Condition by the time the spring arrived.
But something's going on.

I hesitate, as ever, about blogging it, but fight off the inhibitions because I now accept the fact that this struggle of mine to stay ... well-tempered, in Bach's sense of the term perhaps, against the rage of clinical cyclothymic "disorder" is of genuine interest -- and possibly even of help! -- to some who read it.
So they tell me.
Whatever, this is the first winter I can remember when I seem to have kept a really serious depression at bay, managing to stay generally cheerful, while my brain is functioning like a G5 multi-processor Mac.
Just so much to take in: information overload even when I make every effort to avoid it from the outside world.

It's what's happening inside that's driving me half-crazy, so much long-forgotten data surging up into consciousness from decades back; whole new ways of seeing and being and feeling I'm trying to make some sense of in what Dr F. and I have now firmly agreed is not the once posited problem of social integration, but an ongoing reconstruction of self!
My bowels have been seriously out of order again since Friday, to such a degree that it was a near disaster when Sam saw me heading for the toilet in the Canteen a couple of days ago and broke the dire news that it was broken and he couldn't repair it before the morrow.
But that's not really the point.
A year ago, as those who have followed this online experiment for the past 11 months will know, living with the Condition, however awful, seemed at least straightforward as the long search for purely physical causes of the gut collapse began.

Today, with the ever deepening understanding -- I hope! -- of psycho-somatic medicine that has been foisted on me, it's become really hard going to sort mind from body, in so far as they can be "separated". Which they can't. To accept and absorb the tough facts the specialists have been chucking at me since the autumn.
"Are we going too fast for you?" the Mind Juggler asked last time I saw her.
"No," I said. "I agree that we need to press the pause button for a good week or so, but what they need of me at the Factory and everywhere else is someone together. Whole. Stable!"
And still I'm asked for a big comeback on the humour front, that zany sense of the absurd and the outrageous people seem to enjoy so much... Well, frankly, folks, I can't promise that right now. But it will come. It's already coming, but you can't force that kind of outlook.

Today, it is pissing down out there. Rain out front, and what looks far more like would-be snow out back. This frequent ability of the weather to do one thing on the street side of the flat and another on the garden side is something I've never understood.
But Sunday did bring a small miracle.
Sunshine. Lots of it, for hours on end.

So I had people to see and other things to do than write.

I've got an odd but deep feeling about this coming session with the Mind Juggler, along with the realisation that we're not going to be through with each other quite as quickly and expeditiously as I'd at first envisaged.
We're getting to the heart of the matter!
Today's going to be important.
But why?
Your guesses are as good as mine...

Did this make any sense at all?


11:27:34 AM  link   your views? []


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