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Silence Please
” Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.”
- Carl Theodor Dreyer, “Thoughts on My Craft”
Two of the many themes of these posts that are a subject of fascination to me are non verbal communication and metaphor. These themes are the instruments in an orchestra. The composition of this score as it is played are the variations of these themes that re interwoven into a a keyboard as they well upward from my imagination.
Last night I made another ill fated attempt to digest more of Ibn Al Arabi’s “The Disclosure of God”which is so ripe and densely packed, that I often have a premonition that my head is going to explode. I only made it as far as one sentence.Imagination links the physical body and the soul. I sat in the chair and placed the book down beside me. Being tired, I made my way to bed.Everyone else had long since done so.
I had a dream that was silent. Only images.
The scenes in this film moved between parallel universes. Each universe had a unique set of characters and situations.What one set of characters did did effected the other in another universe. The “script” of this dream succinctly illustrated it was all one story in sum total. The themes of each set of characters together and individually are the instruments in an orchestra. The composition was arranged by imagination.
To see what does not exist as it exists in another state, without sound, intermediary interpretation,the babbling of busybody language. Metaphor and non verbal communication, reading as I write Eating while being eaten.
The curse of language.
I sit here typing as form of exorcism using language and as I do, I think on summaries, endings, alternate takes on my life. It occurred to me that if someone asked my what I had been in search of during this transient existence, I would have an answer. I was in search of something rare, something beautiful.
It had been women, art, literature, the Midwest prairies, a fleeting glance.
All of it non verbal, all of it, a metaphor.
In this sense, yesterday I ordered a new copy of Carl Dreyer’s masterpiece, “Joan of Arc, a silent film.
Over the decades Dreyer’s film was a victim of religious and politic censors, two fires that destroyed valuable prints, unauthorized cuts, and zealous editors working against his wishes to modernize the film. An original, uncensored cut was found miraculously in a Norwegian hospital for the mentally ill.
The human face and the face of what cannot be gazed upon. Imagination.
Read more at Intangible Materiality
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