.. ::Ringpull:: ..

I’ve been re-reading some Hermann Hesse this evening and I came across a short story that I don’t recall. This despite the fact that it is the title piece of a book (Strange News From Another Star) that I know that I’ve read things from… Very strange. I enjoyed greatly and was encouraged to venture off and discover https://www.hhesse.de, an internet community of Hermann Hesse enthusiasts. I was a little disappointed to discover how much of the site is in German, but I guess that’s my fault for not speaking German, not theirs for speaking it. If anything would encourage me to read German it would be the work of Hermann Hesse.

Monsters and Looking…

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

I’ve been delighted today to rediscover the work of a canadian cinematographer, Peter Mettler. I’ve just been reading an article which refers to Mettlerism.

My previous familiarity with Petter Mettler was limited to his 11th film The Top of His Head from 1989.
Gus a successful satellite dish salesman is entirely caught up in the capitalist material world, until he meets the mysterious and alluring lucy, who is wanted by the cops for her radical performance pieces that espouse environmentalism. …but any description of the plot really doesn’t cover it.

It’s a film about breaking away from perceptions and finding other ways of seeing the world. Peter Mettler shows us this world through his cinematography. It’s about God as a satellite. It’s about working out which side of the net the fish is on. It’s about a rust map. It’s about last looks at the world. …and it’s about giving birth on a train to a monkey with a port on the top of his head.

The visual imagery is so rich that it becomes a valid substitute for plot in the film. Although Kathryn, who fell asleep two out of the three times I tried to make her watch this film, would probably beg to differ. I remember fondly for example the scene where there is a plasic curtain on the other side of which there appears to be a strobing light. As we pass the thick plastic we see that the strobe effect is created by a half naked man swinging an enormous storm lamp around and around on a very long metal chain.

I realised that one of the reasons I’d liked the top of his head was the cinematographer-writer-director Peter’s expression of the looking (and the perspective of looking) changing the thing that it seen. The painting of Gus by his uncle for example, and the fish in or out of the nets.

This quote is from his most recent film: “Maybe there is a difference between looking for something and looking at something, when you are a part of what you are looking at, and you look at it and it looks back at you.” (Gambling, Gods and LSD, 2002).

The Top of His Head does for Mairzy Doats what Reservoir Dogs did for Stuck In The Middle With You.

Mairzy doats and dozy doats
And liddle lamzy divey,
A kiddlely divey too, wouldn’t you?
Mairzy doats and dozy doats
And liddle lamzy divey,
A kiddlely divey too, wouldn’t you?

What will they say of me when I die? What will they write of me when I’m dead?

Reports say, as they do with all Elderly and Terminally Ill people, that he died “Peacefully In His Sleep”, which I suppose is a bit more comforting to other people than “He died gasping for breath, flailing in horrible pain as his various bodily systems shut down.”

Will I make it to elderly? Will you?

I was always petrified of aging. I could cope with death, it never held any fear. Cessation is obvious, it contains nothing to logically be feared, and afterwards, well, then we’ll see. …but slow, living decay on the other hand. My fears where not aided by my experience of old people. The smell of old people; their breath, their hair, skin and nails. Growing increasingly aware that to age meant to lose one’s faculties. The encroaching inability to hear, see, smell or taste… This filled me with horror. That the growth and developement period of ones life could reach an end and then the begining of a downward sprial as we slowly and painfully slip off the mortal coil was I guess my biggest teenage fear. Aside obviously from Nuclear War and the possibility that the State’s secret police would once more come to bang down the doors.

I just tried to check my spelling of cessation and instead was directed to “caseation” which I suppose puts a pretty good case forward for being repulsed by death too! Go look it up if you don’t believe me.

It is ironic I suppose that my role-models all seem to manifest themselves as ageless or increasingly active and alive with age.

I never thought I would live long enough to complain of growing old. I remember telling someone when I was pissed that I didn’t want to wake up one day and realise that I was too old to die young. I am still genuinely suprised to have made it into adulthood. I am starting to consider that maybe I will grow old after all. I think by so expecting my own death I was spared the consideration of my aging. Now that I am forced to consider it anew, it doesn’t seem half so frightening.

In the same way that children grow up faster and faster, old people grow old slower and slower.

In the playgrounds you’ll hear them, picturing empty cold hospital corridors, asking who wants to live to be 100.
…and giggling, like school children themselves, you’ll hear the new old folk tell you the answer, any 99 year old.

I saw this on PurplKat’s LiveJournal (nolonger exists) and it’s simplicity entertained me. So I complied.

Instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth line or sentence.
4. Post the text of the line or sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

“He turned up the sound. The soap opera had now resumed, replacing the animated hemorrhoid.” – Philip K. Dick – THE DIVINE INVASION

Typical!

“…enough to base a movie on?”
If you’re life is a film, how do you sum up the thematic content?
Will there be American Beauties? Will the sleeper awake?
What themes run through your life?
Are the characters well drawn?
Do they have depth?
What problems and dilemas do they face? Are their trials and tribulations revisited? Over and over again?
Do they even know that they’re upon the stage?
Is yours a big part? Are you centre stage?
Would you watch? Or flick the channel?
“…enough to base a movie on?”

The program for this evening is not new,
You’ve seen this entertainment through and through
You’ve seen your birth, your life and death,
You might recall all of the rest –
Did you have a good world when you died,
Enough to base a movie on?

Jim Morrison