Invisible Cinema

This is what it's like to study . . .

"I heard my soul singing behind a leaf, plucked the leaf, but then I heard it singing behind a veil. I tore the veil, but then I heard it singing behind a wall. I broke the wall, and I heard my soul singing against me. I built up the wall, mended the curtain, but I could not put back the leaf. I held it in my hand and I heard my soul singing mightily against me. This is what it’s like to study without a friend."

-- Book Of Mercy - Leonard Cohen

Songs of Experience

Songs of Experience by William Blake

INTRODUCTION
 
 Hear the voice of the Bard,
 Who present, past, and future, sees;
 Whose ears have heard
 The Holy Word
 That walked among the ancient trees;
 
 Calling the lapsed soul,
 And weeping in the evening dew;
 That might control
 The starry pole,
 And fallen, fallen light renew!
 
 "O Earth, O Earth, return!
 Arise from out the dewy grass!
 Night is worn,
 And the morn
 Rises from the slumbrous mass.
 
 "Turn away no more;
 Why wilt thou turn away?
 The starry floor,
 The watery shore,
 Are given thee till the break of day."

 

 

 William Blake, 1794

Anthem - Leonard Cohen, 2009 tour

I was there . . . 

 

Errol Morris: "The Ashtray: Shifting Paradigms (Part 2)"

The Ashtray: Shifting Paradigms (Part 2) by Errol Morris

Do you have any idea how many movies I had to watch . . .

Do you have any idea how
many movies I had to watch
before I knew surely
that I would love you

- Leonard Cohen

 

This time tomorrow . . .

The Photograph . . .

We have the same nature.

We are lazy and fascinating.

-- Leonard Cohen, "The Photograph"

To travel four different journeys at once . . .

"Perhaps the best way to conceive of films that go beyond the limited and all-too human is to quote from my own work in progress.  In all these projects I seek to move from one world into another, using a technique described in baroque Venice as 'Il Ponte,' a way of producing anamorphic agents that play with four levels of medieval rhetoric: literal, allegorical, ethical, and anagogical.  But there are also other rhetorical systems like the seven paths of Aboulafia, or such simple things as crossword puzzles.  Except that instead of seeking to read all four levels at the same time, the aim is to skip constantly from one level to another.  The jump is the element of surprise that not only procures a sudden illumination, but all the pleasure as well.  Imagine a slalom skier propelled with each turn not just in another direction, but on to a completely different slope.  In this way he manages to travel four different journeys at once, though the point is not in the journeys themselves but in the beauty of his leap from one world to the next."

 

-- Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema

About a poem . . . "Mind, Give Me" by Juan Ramón Jiménez

Mind, Give Me

Mind, give me
The exact name of things
. . . that my word may be
the thing itself,
recreated by my soul.
So that all who do not know them
go through me,

        to things;
all who have forgotten,
go through me,

        to things
all those who love them
go through me,

        to things . . .

Mind give me
the exact name, and yours
and theirs, and mine, of things!

-- Juan Ramón Jiménez  (translated by Peter Levitt)

*****

"I can almost hear him whisper these words as a kind of prayer, though it is not his prayer alone.  To have one's words or vision become reality -- what poet or person could want more than that?  Then, the river a poet names, with its stones and song, would ceaselessly flow in the hearts and minds of other human beings, and green would become the green of real love, as when Lorca wrote, 'Green, how I love you green.'  The possibilities here are endless.  Even peace is only as far away as our ability to truly hear the imagination and to say through word and deed, from the depth of our being, exactly what we hear."

--Peter Levitt, "About a Poem: Peter Levitt on Juan Ramón Jiménez's, 'Mind, Give Me,' Shambhala Sun, September 2010

 

"She said, Leonard, . . ."

"She said, Leonard, whenever you leave the room an orange bird comes to the window."

-- Leonard Cohen