ABOUT
MAKING A FILM
I
am not one of those who can say that one specific event in one media has inspired
me, or rather determined for me one possible fate of many.
I
spoke to myself only, but as one friend would to another. Words on paper were
my first companions, and now as this friendship drifts, the ´years of journals,
unsent letters, fragments of stories and outlines for articles become the
rubble and mortar of a makeshift tomb.
In
my early adulthood I found my first friends.µ We knew we could change the
world because ours had just changed. But the ways of the world, that construct
of oppression had already begun to categorize us and put us to use in it's
service. We began giving away our little utopia to the turbulence of first
love affairs, to school, to drugs, to our jobs.
The
condition of our happiness was set in those years. In the pensive years that
followed, the memory of community in dead time is what fed my dreams, and
the words that I wrote then tell a tale of cannibalism where dreams devour
dreams until nothing remained, at which point the dreams devour the dreamer.
I
would fail in my intention here if I did not bring up the failure of love,
or of love's use. I mean the love between two people whose language and kingdom
is the body. I do believe in love, but this belief may be among the last of
my superstitions.
Using
love as a tool, a drug, an antidote to the human condition of total alienation
is to place life in suspension, separated from living, from mobility, from
action. This statis is death. If life can be seen as a war of will and desire,
then love may be an agent on the side against what makes us human. We become
casualties, our wills subjected to the wills of external, abstract forces
such as work, state, progress and culture. Love eases this pain. Love helps
us do our jobs, and resting in this suspension we construct our tombs, that
is build homes.
By
saying "the failure of love", I mean specifically of how it is structured
for use. There are deep attachments and investments on love by society. Love
is a strong sedative for the discontented. Love is insular in that it fosters
an exclusiveness that has a tendency to keep people from looking elsewhere
for satisfaction, stimulation or social activity. Love keeps bodies from motion,
which in turn provides a scenario where homes, cars, televisions, loans, credit
and all the other accuetremonts of sedentary life become increasingly attractive,
which in turn keeps economies going and a large labor force to be exploited
where bodies stay in place, without which a strong nation cannot survive.
This is how I speak of love. Know that when I say that I've loved or have
been loved, that I mean it in the most human, warm way. It's just that how
this has been used, and created from it could be the most monstrous parody
we face.
Through
love, and with my consent, my body became a territory of such forces. I ceased
to move.
I
saw a community sprout up around a dozen or so short lived clubs that revolved
around two longer lived ones, filled with people who had experienced the final
gasps of sexual permissiveness before the heavy hand of HIV and taboo associated
with it had set in, and people who had also felt the personal liberation of
punk. Over just two or three years I witnessed the world's destruction and
reconstruction on any given night of the week. Drugs, sex, and more notably
the creative act all lost their sobriety and weight in this vertigo induced
by play.
Memory,
like love is something that in and of itself has no will. It is neutral territory,
passive. As such it is easy to possess and put to work in a manner that can
be just as liberating as oppressive. It is how this sword is wielded and by
whom that makes the difference. Social memory, personal memory can be seized
and exploited here in the interests of capital. This is why I distrust nostalgia.
My strongest memories cease to be memory and are the actual terms of my life
when my will is not submitted to wills other than my own. I am happy when
I am allowed to be as I am or as I desire. The power of my memory is that
it contains clues when I am lost so that I m...ay find that way of being again.
Memory lies dormant, waiting for me to live again, thus freeing it from Time.
But for years my demon bedfellow was Nostalgia, and all I did was read, write,
work and drink.
One
of the most influential books that I read in my confinement was written by
a teenager, a young woman at the turn of the century, a time when what was
demanded of a woman constituted near total occupation. The intensity of her
will, the insistence of her being on an impossible happiness sparked in her
a complete rebellion. She saw with the brightest lucidity the future she was
offered, rose up to smash it with a No that echoes nearly a century later.
her words and her life helped me see for the first time that one of my greatest
enemies was my own belief in, therefore collaboration with the external forces
of commerce, society, culture. My memory was not my life because I had betrayed
it and reduced it to Nostalgia.
Before
this point in my life the thought of a creative act other than writing had
become an impossibility in part because of moral and aesthetic standards I
had set that now seem rather childish. I say this because those creative works
that I held in esteem I had set above me, as opposed to seeing them as texts
that I could learn from and incorporate into my own being. This gulf of separation
is a mechanism of that horrible construction; genius, the cop of creative
acts, ensuring not only that all creative acts conform to it's standards of
narcissistic esthetics, but also prohibiting creativity as manifesting itself
as play. The only way that I could see myself "making" something
was by negating the end, and place value instead on the means. To make a film,
or write a book for that matter, would have to be an act, the way that walking
or talking is an act, both in their meandering forms.
I
thought it best to evoke her, rather than depict her, and the windmills at
the Altamont Pass against a blue sky, among high, rolling hills of yellow
grass, with their white blades singing and humming spoke nothing if not the
language of Desire.
I
had also become very fascinated with the surveyor symbols that are painted
on the streets and sidewalks for reference in the repair of public electricity
and sewage maintenance. I began to make connections for alternate meanings
of the symbols with space, and began to imagine them as maps to other spaces,
perhaps even as maps to other spaces that I may discover and move into with
loved ones, should they like what they see there. What had begun to interest
me was seeing between the spaces, a search for cracks in what is considered
real, where even through the smallest extension of faith or exertion of will,
one could forge a way into that other way of perceiving and experiencing,
thrusting oneself into the realm where worlds exist upon worlds, where geographic
facts such as a body of water, or an empty lot are no longer things that one
sees, but instead events that one experiences. I followed the symbols painted
on the ground with faith, and found such a space. A vast empty lot on toxic
ground in an industrial area by the bay was the place where real concepts
of space and time melted away. I cannot do justice to it by trying to describe
it to you, but I will say that it was covered with the most rare of flowers,
and that the ground glittered in the sun, a mirror of what the sky would be
each night. I wrote some pieces in an attempt to understand for my self what
this discovery meant for me, and soon wanted to share this with others. The
idea occurred to me to make a film, a sort of spiritual adventure documentary.
My
love had a need to shape itself differently in order to survive as love. Those
external forces had been ingested. I felt the desire to be elsewhere in my
life pulling strongly, but wanted to share with him these ephemeral things
I had come to know.
The
experience for me had not only clarified the distance between my imagined
life and my real life, but also was proof of how the meanings attached to
the creative act can mutilate the act, distorting it so as not to be recognizable
from it's intention. I wanted to make a movie, yes, but more so I wanted to
shape a new way of being in an environment of temporary community.
Just
once more to be faced with the eternally possible. I felt sound capable of
devouring language.
I
had a great time, but felt as if I was visiting friends through a time warp,
the space between us as we sat on park benches may as well have been measured
in years.
These
projects and meetings gave me great joy but when they had finished all that
remained was the feeling of a loss of potential in my self, my life went on
as before. With the loss of potential there is the sound of doors slamming
behind you. what I needed was not to want, but to be. Killing desire seems
next to impossible to someone in whom habits had reduced passions to hobbies.
I
needed to let him know just how much I love him, and to thank him for letting
me know what it means to have been loved, but more than ever it was necessary
to dissolve the context in which that love had grown so that love would be
subject to nothing, and nothing would be subject to love.
I
kept watching the tiny black bits of debris pull towards the base of the flame
where sent by the heat they soared again through the clear, thick fluid just
to the edge. Fearing the solidity of the waxen shore, the tiny flecks repeated
this gesture again and again until the flame destroys both wick and wax and
all is extinguished.
I
wanted to make a movie of nothing but credits and thank yous, a long list
from leads, extras and grips to script consultants and set designers, but
my carefully constructed life collapsed, as does anything built by us. Now
fumbling through the mess I inventory loves and losses, pick up a few snapshots
and will be on my way.