The Long Shot, the Close-Up, and Epic Tradition

Watching "The Shining" with a friend last night, and reading Robert Polity's article about D.W. Griffith and Poe in the new American Poet a couple of nights ago, I was reminded again of the discussion of film and poetics that has most stuck with me over the last couple of years, thanks to Nancy West's wonderful cinema course: Bela Belasz's writing about the close-up as lyric. He may have said "lyrical"; over the last year or so it's blended for me into Virginia Jackson's writing about the lyric as a kind of blackout of genre, and vice versa.

But Belasz writes about the close-up as its own moment, having its own life outside of the narrative, and the coincidence of that definition with a view of the lyric poem taking place outside of time, outside of the narrative of historical context, and outside of traditions tied to genre, seems like no coincidence.

It's tempting to invert the comparison itself without looking at priority in terms of history, so that the lyric acts as close-up in a very cinematic way. But that also points, as Jackson does wonderfully, back to the absolute mercuriality of lyric as it's been discussed in the last century and a half.

"The Shining" remains, for me, the scariest movie of the twentieth century. That may show how few movies I've seen, but the sense in it is that the whole project of the movie is not to expunge fear like a slasher movie can, or take on that sense of promise of day breaking the ghosts that comes from so many other horror movies, or even to draw suspense out like Hitchcock does, with the triumph of the human spirit that he and studio pressure gave as a defining torque for his stories. Instead, the narrative's unrelenting, multiple forebodings seem tied up in the apparatus conveying them, so that the scenes and the camera framing them take on a ponderous weight extending beyond the screen. In the midst of that, Jack's Cagneyan facial contortions, the inscription of "Psycho" within the film, and the escape of Danny and Shelley at the end become humbled to a greater fear extending beyond all of the above. Kubrick seems less the relief that Hitchcock is to his own project than an extension of its ominous and empty spaces; of course he never appears in the Overlook. He is not of it, and it is not of the domestic spaces that most horror movies seem only to compromise for a little while. He shares in its grimness; he's not Stanley, but an extension of the camera. Or we sense his wish to have been that, and find less release than identification. That's not of the close-up. It's of the faraway.

It makes sense to look at faraway cinematography, and call it epic. It's not that what was close is now far away, but that the zoom back shows a context for the object, that, depending on the ingredients of the mise-en-scene, can imply lots of things that have been seen as ingredients in epic poems (that may or may not be)--the place of the human in the landscape, the backdrop of some kind of nation, and, maybe most, the presence and mandate of the machine, in this case the camera. The long shots that show Shelley Duvall as a tiny figure escaping from the window of the Overlook don't only show the huge context in which she sits, but imply that a camera is capturing it all, and a cameraman behind it. The kind of inhuman that this is might seem alien and cold in terms of only technology, but, in the epic context, the machinery producing the artwork is something even more frightening--it's divine.

The Meganarrative and Epic Tradition

For the last couple of years, much or even most of my tv-watching has been devoted to the series on DVD that can be rented and then devoured one after the other, or watched in the same way online. They've definitely got pre-millenial precedents, maybe most obviously in "Twin Peaks" in their tv mode, in the old movie serials before that, but one of the differences now seems to be that they're more likely to be watched in one stream that's unfortunately broken up by things like work and sleep. They're meant less as episodes than as a single narrative to be absorbed asap.

They might be more like native American stories that could take days to tell, but I'm afraid that I know almost nothing about those narrative traditions. I don't know anything about this one, either, but the term "meganarrative" came to mind as a way of framing these serial narratives, because they seem to come after the metanarrative skepticism that helped old narrative modes to be broken down, but to sit comfortably on the ruins of the palatial shells they deconstructed. They seem to float, partly by way of the still-othered cable that most of them exist in, free from easy attribution to one particular, towering ideological machine, and to provide some narrative nourishment for the many who float there, too.

But their impact is tied to the speed at which they're viewed, and the power for that viewing now rests more than ever in the hand of the one holding the remote, who can be as immersed or distant as his or her will. I'm a little too captive to the storylines for my willpower to operate in that way, but even that fixation carries a different weight from either the grand-narrative network world and the antimetanarrative stance in which anything making meaning makes hegemony. It's meganarrative. Maybe.

When Aristotle criticizes epic for being too long, and claims the ability of tragedy to do provide the goal of poetry (pleasure) in a shorter time, he is also tying the different tragedies that he discusses in to larger back stories, that they kind of metonymize. The Trojan War is meant to be invoked in full by a short play giving some of its events, and the pleasure has this root system that he never quite discusses in terms of its meaning or purpose.

But the sense is of a larger story that's able to be absorbed in smaller doses, the inherent promise being that the audience will be able to come back and get more at some further point, and be nourished in the meantime by their own memories of Troy and wherever in it they most like to wander, which burning buildings they most like to see warriors pour into. This is a different shape from the meganarrative, but maybe not too different. Or maybe.

Homer, Plato, and Obama

I've been reading for my comprehensive exams for the last few months, which has involved digging more into Homer and Plato than I ever have before, which has not been hard to do--my knowledge of Homer is mostly "d'oh," and Plato not much more. But the thing that leaps out immediately from Plato's reading of Homer is how he does seem to find there both the inspiration to call poets divinely inspired, and the start of his inspiration to boot them out of the republic, for being liars, of ill repute, etc., in his hammering away at the rhapsode of Homer, from whom Plato, or Socrates in the dialogue, seems to see a glimmer of the poet's role--one who just reiterates what's given to him from within, so that not only does thought not come into play, but the poetry that he recites has the effect of arguing against thought as the seat of identity, and its cultivation as the highest good. While Plato seems to throw more weight and page space behind condemning poets than calling them divine (which might be seen as an insult also, considering the Greek gods' behavior as represented by Homer), what starts as the root of his argument is that they partake of a higher reality, which supersedes the republic, and from which thought either grows or tries to fly. He takes on the rhapsode's role in quoting Homer himself, or having Socrates do it, and uses that role, or his version of it, to bring Socrates back to life on the page, in a way that suggests his belonging also to a space outside of the republic, not only by dying and going to the underworld, but by contemplating the will of the gods for his whole life before that.

Early in the election, some of Obama's poems surfaced, and were read and critiqued, maybe more as a joke than anything, but the discussion seemed to carry a spark about it, too, that confirmed a personal, original sense of the poetic in his work as an orator. I wonder if the sense of his charisma that comes across to us always carries this underpinning, not of the republic, but of the deeper sense of the spirit that lets us believe in it.

Either way, it is phenomenal to be getting paid to think about this stuff. Mizzou rules. So do you.

Craig Arnold

Sorry for taking forever between blog entries, and thanks for reading this one. Yesterday, the team searching for Craig Arnold seems to have found his trail in such a place and way that he probably fell from a high cliff. His incredibly brave brother, Chris, and the other members of the team, are going to its base to see what they can find, and there is still time for a miracle. In the last couple of days, what's been coming back to me about Craig is his generosity of spirit, that shows not only in his work but in his way of encouraging others in theirs--like a friend heading toward a shared horizon, no one's property, open to everyone who felt that strange urgency to search.

As so many of us have been searching for him electronically and internally in the last few days, that automatic process of trying to find his trail up the mountain has come--how deep its greens and the multiform shadow of its peak, how blue the other Japanese islands dyed by the ocean between them and him, how infinitely soft and full of molten things the calm on the volcano must have been to listen and lean into. What a necessary courage his work had and has, not just in blazing those spaces, but in the natural, most heroic move to take us with him. Please keep his family and loved ones in your thoughts and prayers.

Ninth Street and the Mirror Stage

On Friday, I was walking through downtown Columbia to teach my morning class, and watching the people, the diverse crowd that always seems to include some students, some homeless men and women, and some people whose jobs or paths or lives have given way to walking there for a few minutes. I saw a girl, who may have been about three, looking at her reflection in the window of one of the stores, and making this noise of joy at what she saw there. Her mother said, "Do you see yourself there?" She didn't answer for a second, and I walked past and didn't hear whether she said yes or no. Whatever she was thinking, I was thinking about Lacan's description of the infant finding a specular self in the mirror, that's separated when we see that the mirror is a naturally occurring thing that only represents what's put in front of it, and that this helps to break us away from the necessary narcissism of infant dependency.

I've been thinking, too, about how Lacan apprenticed himself to Freud, and seemed to find his genius not by a process of deduction but by this sense of entering his own mirror stage with Freud, after the infancy of being immersed in Freud's work, not leaving his sense of questioning behind but examining its continuities, its harmonies, and, finally, finding the place where the study of the mind and the study of the signifier met, both of them aligned in his thinking so that the imperative to start to speak to his community began, powerfully enough that his force and passion drew crowds to whom his reasoning came home. In this passing on of language, not solely for its logic but also for the beauty of its construction, he was carrying out the role of the poet that Plato describes in Ion, demonstrating it himself, first and foremost, by being a conduit for the ideas of Socrates.

The girl staring into the window, making a sound, was making poetry, and we can see her not being stumped by the question of who the girl is in the window, but seeing her own face superimposed on the colors and shapes in the store, the people moving there, at the point when the mirror turned into glass.

My Facebook Friendship With Leonardo DiCaprio

It started a few months back, and ended fewer months back. The whole thing left me as it was meant to, shaken, as I'm sure it did Leonardo. It began when I got a friend request from someone I'd never heard of, and I defied Facebook etiquette, even lying, saying "yes, I know this person," feeling like I did know her because my constellation of friends seemed to mirror hers, and because our becoming friends seemed less an act of will than a suggestion by the universe that we find each other. Proceeding that way, and still not quite believing my new network, I found a friend of hers, who had Leo and a whole slew of celebrities as friends. Something in me was now pulling me forward, and that something seemed to be confirmed by my invitation to the Paris Review benefit dinner, that had my name in the same list as his. While I couldn't think that he felt drawn by the same pull, I felt like Lacan must have when, before writing on the mirror stage, he saw the blank page that didn't show his face back to him, but suggested a host of possibilities in the form of this new exploration. Leonardo DiCaprio as text, but, more, as friend in the sense that nonreflection befriends.

I watched my hand send the friend request, and watched my own nervousness miraculously drain away. The thought that it had to happen, and that it couldn't, both dissolved in whatever came of the day itself--translating Ronsard, drinking good coffee, watching the flood of Mizzou students that seemed pulled by a similar poetics, composed of the same amalgam of sun and stone that rooted the campus buildings. I wasn't a pattern of electricity in the network, and neither was Leonardo. Both of us were going about our days, and I realized that he had days, and this reminded me for awhile that I did, too. My next day started, and then started again when I saw that he'd accepted my request. Maybe it had been his personal assistant, or one of the many members of his posse, but it was definitely his profile. It said, "I am what I am," like God did to Job from the thundercloud, like the meditator's thought says in its moving through and leaving on the page of the breath. I had only gotten as far as "I am not what I am not," but this let me move forward.

Soon, our brotherhood hurtled into its newest phase. I saw pictures of his vacation in Hawaii, and it's as if he knew that the turtle was a totem I'd come to find ambiguous--a jpg of a sea turtle in luminous aqua water, brandishing the fronds of its front legs, let me see what a womb-like kind of brine had supported me, and now looked back at me, asking for representation. I sent him my elegy for Heath Ledger, and let him know that I wouldn't be at the benefit dinner, but would be in New York, visiting a friend he'd once met, if he wanted to join us. I could sense him starting to embrace what, on Facebook, becomes the completely nonrandom, synchronous connection of people who otherwise wouldn't be connected, in a space where the star system merges with the earth. More, I could see the same in my inner Leo.

I started to sense that our relationship was in trouble when his status announced that he was "no longer adding random ppl!" I wanted to assure him that our relationship was anything but random, and that I knew how the kind of living mask that acting is is also a kind of poem that's practiced daily, and also knew that I could hold tight and let the universe, if there was such a thing, take its own shape. It did, and showed me the blue and white silhouette that meant a missing picture. I don't know if this means the end of our Facebook friendship, or just a time for me to move on, into the world of gorgeous French women and faciality that is his to me, where I, and we, have never not lived to begin with. I do know that Facebook is a kind of rhizome, and that its breath is unexpected human connection, its own poem, post-form.

Poetics and Translation

Now that my neurons aren't all firing toward Ph.D. coursework, I'm realizing just how long it's been since I did any kind of blogging. Much has happened that's been bloggable, in MO and out of it--two trips to NYC this last spring, one for AWP, one meant to take me to the Paris Review benefit dinner to hang out with Tom Brokaw and co., that instead led to two amazing days of subwaying around Manhattan, Brooklyn, and beyond; a trip to CO's gorgeous San Luis Valley, where a big brown bear shook his way through a stand of pines not far from where we were driving; one to the Smokies where I discovered that you can get a rental car up a mountain path meant for four wheelers, and, even better, that it comes back down; in between, Columbia has been full of the lush, fusive humidity that helps the air to seem as close and constant as it is.

In the last few months, I've also gotten to start reading more poetics--Aristotelian, Lacanian, and others within the spectrum that they define. My Fulbright project preparation is helping me to study more translation theory, too, which overlaps wonderfully with the study of poetics. It seems possible to do the Lacanian thing of mathematizing the study, to say that Aristotle (poetics as category) + Derrida (translation as ubiquitous) = Shakespeare, and also to point such thought at the networks of global culture.

It's also been great to read the wonderful Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespeare bio, Will in the World. That, combined with Shapiro's 1599, give a combination of closeup and panorama that let his life and work overlap with now. All of this is possible because of the generosity of Mizzou, the way the woods around here seem to hold a pollenating light, and you. Have a wonderful rest of July.