StandingAtTheFence

I am always storing crumbs against infinity. On a good day, moving words from chamber to chamber, the strict repetition of my task calms me.

I cannot be grasped in the here and now. For my dwelling place is as much among the dead as the yet unborn. Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usually. But not merely close enough.

“Cantabile is the cartilage connecting any two sounds, whether made by bone or braying. It is the silken fiber which binds two grains, two islands, two exiles. It is the urge to fathom, to accept, to exonerate the alien gasps of mistrust, the lonely pleas, the harsh deeds, the frigid icons… It is, according to Beethoven, the most important thing in piano playing.”

“Saar describes the act of making art as “a ritual,” which this writer likens to an alchemical process that involves a procedural set of acts. “The imprint—ideas, thoughts, memories, dreams, from the past, present, and future; The search—the selective eye and intuition; The collecting—gathering, and accumulating objects and materials, each bringing a presence, an energy; The recycling and transformation—the materials and objects are manipulated and combined with various media, and the energy is integrated and expanded; The release—the work is shared, (exhibited), experienced and relinquished.” When the set of acts are fulfilled, Saar considers the ritual to be complete.”

“Akerman was younger than Orson Welles was when he made “Citizen Kane,” younger than Jean-Luc Godard was when he made “Breathless.” The three films deserve to be mentioned together. “Jeanne Dielman” is as influential and as important for generations of young filmmakers as Welles’s and Godard’s first films have been. Akerman presented monumentally composed, meticulously observed, raptly protracted images of a woman’s domestic routine—Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) preparing cutlets in her kitchen, for instance. These images prove cinematically that the domestic lives of women are the stuff of art; that women’s private lives are as ravaged by the forces of history as are lives lived on the public stage of politics; and that the pressures of women’s unquestioned, unchallenged, and unrelieved confinement in the domestic realm and in family roles is a societal folly that leads to ruin, a form of violence that begets violence.”

“Suppression always destroys first what is gentle and benevolent; it inspires rage and reaction, encourages malevolence and magic, and so creates the very thing which, theoretically, it would destroy.”

You wore melancholy like a perfume and tragedy was the only human situation that you really understood.

“Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.”

“Decay, growth, fullness, emptiness, now murky, now bright, the sun shifting, the moon changing phase — day after day these things proceed… Life has its sproutings, death its destination, end and beginning tail one another in unbroken round, and no one has ever heard of their coming to a stop.”