On the Face of It

November 2015.  The term ‘face’ has roots in the verb ‘to see’.  It’s the appearance, the look of the thing, the front, facade, form.  While outward, it broadcasts the inward.  A mask on the other hand prevents the seeing.  Imposes a different look, a different seeing. And if you use the phrase, ‘on the face of it’, you’re meaning that what you see isn’t necessarily what you get.  Seeing is not believing.  Ask a barefaced liar about this.  Or a woman putting on her face.  Ask Carmen dell’Orefice.

I get caught up in watching this stunning woman, who at 85 or so is still modelling.  Gorgeous face.  Bones.  She and other models talk about aging, of face lifts, air-brushing.  Even so and with all this assistance, there is something of the truth that sneaks in and resists the repair.  Something in her movements. The mouth.

The Mask is a short story written by Guy de Maupassant.  A masquerade ball is held.  One of the dancers, a thin man with a ‘pretty varnished mask, blonde moustache  and wavy wig’ is drawing attention to himself with his frenzied and clumsy jigging.  At some point he pitches forward falling to the floor.   Carried out he is shortly attended to by a doctor who must first remove the mask, a rather complicated affair.  Attached by a network of small metal wires to the wig, it covers his entire head, neck and shoulders, attached also to the collar of the shirt.  Once all this has been cut away, a worn old man is revealed to everyone’s surprise, all having been quite certain this unskilled dancer had been a young man.  The doctor finds his address and takes him home, met at the door by an old woman who is clearly annoyed but not overly concerned or surprised.  Apparently this is a usual occurrence.  Every Saturday night the old man downs a few absinthes for strength and then heads off to the masquerade with his pasteboard face.  And why does he persist in this activity?  So the young women will think he’s a young dandy and he can continue to believe he’s still capable of making conquests.

The beautiful face, the mask of youthfulness…there’s intention here.  Dell’Orefice loses her savings in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and has to get back to work.  The old dancer experiencing regret that he is no longer viable, finds a way to remain connected to his past identity.

There’s function.  In my dream most characters are wearing masks that have to do with various roles they’ve played during their life-time.  Some are ready to hand them off as they’d like to retire, but as no one is available to take over, they’re stuck with the masks..as well as the tasks.

While they have their uses, the very nature of the mask is to prevent a certain kind of seeing while offering another, and for that reason masks are not popular in some circles.  Seekers of authenticity want the bare face for its expression of emotion.  They want simple language.  Maybe no language at all.  Literal interpretations.  Plain food.  (Just kidding about the food).

At the same time, the bare face is not popular in other circles, or rather, isn’t even seen to exist.  Take Art Spiegelman, author of the comic strip Maus.  He says identity itself is a mask.  It’s a constructed, fabricated object.  In MetaMouse the protagonist is seen struggling to pull off his mask.  By the third panel the mask is off and all that remains is the skeletal frame.  Not even a  face.  The caption:  the artist finally rids himself of the imposed mask of identity.

I admit to being partial to the idea of before and after.  Under and over.  But it’s all becoming slippery.  Apparently our word ‘person’ comes from the Latin ‘persona’, which was originally the megaphone-mouthed mask used by actors in the open-air theatres of ancient Greece and Rome, the mask through (per) which the sound (sonus) came.  So is it then a matter of the actor first, person second?  Intention and then megaphone-mouth?  In the beginning the word and later the flesh?

Perhaps, and in the end, a face is just another pretty facade.  At any rate I’m heading to the dressing room to hang for a few minutes before my next scheduled appearance.

Notes From the Underground

December 2015.  Pete, an Elvis impersonator, sues the town of Cicero after he receives injuries falling into a manhole.  It is determined he should be awarded $260,000 for lost wages, no longer able to continue performing karate kicks and other manoeuvres necessary for his act.

Pete’s act in my collage is less demanding.  He simply makes his entrance, plays the gig, and returns to the underground until next time.

Going back years/centuries I read the two terrors of the 19th century world are epidemics and revolutions.  Disintegration of the physical and the social body.  At the time the word ‘contagion’ is applied to any ideas, sentiments, emotions and beliefs that might possess a crowd and to the filth diseases of cholera, typhoid, typhus and polio which likewise threaten the order.  It’s interesting that both forms of contagion are associated with the underground, the one swept away in the sewers, the other naturally taking root there.  Cleanliness and order, on the other hand, are associated with the open-air, the over-ground.  Even with this divide, it’s impossible to maintain effective boundaries between upper and lower.  There’s a kind of flow happening.  Seepage.

Dostoevsky’s narrator in ‘Notes from the Underground’, is a 19th century man in personal revolt against, and flight from society.  He chooses to go below, to settle with an ill-natured, ignorant and filthy country woman as his servant in what he calls a wretched, horrid room on the outskirts of Petersburg where the air is bad.  In this hole he writes his passionate, obsessive notes which amount to a kind of memoir and diatribe against society and the emerging utopian philosophy.

The underground, representing an alternative to whatever is going on above, is a place where heroes traditionally spend time, some going to considerable lengths or rather depths.  It’s a place where a person doesn’t settle down, the idea being to do the THING and get the hell out of there.  To prepare, awaken and then bust out into new life above ground, a move that suggests progress, advance in a desirable direction.

I don’t get a sense that Dostoevsky’s narrator has any inclination to bust out.  Or perhaps more accurately, he seems to think he already has advanced far beyond the above-ground men even while remaining ‘rotting in his corner’.  Addressing them he points out:   I have in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what’s more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves.  So that after all, perhaps there is more life in me than in you.

The sentiment that to remain in the underground is the better way seems to be shared by the British rock band, Siouxsie and the Banshees.  They concede however and finally that even so, they must go up.  Got to give up life in this netherworld, they sing.  Got to go up to where the air is stale.

As for Elvis, there is some evidence that he too is an undergrounder.  The Presley Commission has been tasked to research reports that the king is still alive, that he escaped using an underground tunnel from Graceland.   I suppose I should be pleased he managed a short appearance here.  But I’m still waiting for the second coming.  After all that time spent underground there’s sure to be some good rockin’ that night he really and finally surfaces.

Stand by Your Horse

November 2016.  I find this song by Qowboy Vern:  Stand by Your Horse.  A parody, he notes.  I needn’t share the lyrics as it’s easy enough to guess their nature.  The point is you gotta stand by your horse, be proud of him and take the best care of him cuz after all he’s just a horse.

Tammy Wynette and her producer wrote the real thing and it became Wynette’s signature song, pushing her toward superstar status.    It was even selected by the library of congress because of its cultural, historical and aesthetic significance.  Feminists were not impressed.  Nor was Hilary Clinton and when she dared to speak out, saying I’m not some little woman standing by her man like Tammy Wynette, she was punished.   Chances are she lost this last election due to her impulsive remark.

Because of their great significance I really should pass these lyrics along:   Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman/Giving all your love to just one man./You’ll have bad times/And he’ll have good times, /Doin’ things that you don’t understand. /But if you love him you’ll forgive him, /Even though he’s hard to understand./And if you love him/Oh be proud of him,/Cause after all he’s just a man. /Stand By Your Man,/Give him two arms to cling to, and/Something warm to come to/When nights are cold and lonely./Stand By Your Man,/And tell the world you love him./Giving all the love you can./Stand By Your Man.

I’m dubious about the song’s merits but it does seem to have mileage.  Apparently it’s the title song for the German comedy Dittsche:  Das wirklich wahre Leben ( the really true life). According to Wikipedia the story line goes like this.  The unemployed Dittsche frequents a local fast food diner and converses with the proprietor about current events, drawing heavily on bizarre tabloid headlines to formulate perplexingly insane theories about their background. Schildkröte (German word for turtle), a bar regular, looks on mostly passively in the background.  The show is unscripted and broadcast live from a real fast food diner in Hamburg.

I tune in to one episode and sure enough.  There’s Tammy Wynette singing her little heart out.  But why Tammy?  Why Stand by Your Man?

A man with the name Dittsche is at an automatic disadvantage.  The name apparently creates an overly sensitive nature which causes the man to sense and feel far more than he can understand or put into words.  His feelings tend to build up within him and if he cannot release them through a creative, constructive channel, he suffers with frustration, moods and much inner turmoil.  The name causes tension in the region of the solar plexus, heart and lungs.  Others find it difficult to understand him.

Learning this, I begin to understand. Who better than Tammy to implore the audience to try to understand, forgive, and love Dittsche and his buddies as well as the comedy series.  They’re just men after all.  And one of them so very unfortunate in his name.

What I fail to understand is the recurring theme.   As some guy responds when asked about the meaning of the song: even if a man hurts you from time to time he can’t help himself because he’s only a man.  Okay.  But why does the sentiment come up repeatedly?  Without really looking, I find a quote of writer Ralph Ellison’s:  He’s only a man.  Remember that.  He’s only a man.  Jesus Christ Superstar’s ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’ lyrics:  He’s a man.  He’s just a man.  Vanda, a country singer, records a tune called ‘Just a Man’.  Author Rebecca Warner writes a book with the same title.  I suppose it’s not surprising.  The fallen or tragic hero theme has been around forever.  For some reason it persists.  And for some reason our hero must be stood by as opposed to stood up.

With some relief I return to the horses, finding only one with the name Dittsche.  Perhaps Qowboy Vern’s horse.  If it is, I truly hope Vern continues to stand by.

Sara and Friends Ruminate Until the Cows Come Home

December 2016.  There’s a vegetarian restaurant in Berlin called ‘Till the Cows Come Home’.  They specialize in slow food.  One customer complains:  I have been waiting more than 30 minutes for risotto.  Another:  this place is truly fuckin’ slow.  What do these diners expect?   The header says: Vegetarian Slow Fuckin’ Yummy Food.  EAT LIKE YOU GIVE A FUCK! 

Cows and other ruminants do.  In the interests of nutrition, they rechew the fermented bits downed earlier.  All vegetarian.  Diners eating like they give a fuck need not go to these same lengths.  There’s writer Anne Carson and her mother chewing their lettuce carefully, her mother also studying the lettuce.  (Glass Essays)   There’s Violet Beauregarde, the silly gum-chewing girl in ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’.  ‘By gum, it’s gum!’ she shrieks. ‘It’s a stick of chewing-gum!’  It’s tomato soup!  It’s hot and creamy and delicious!  I can feel it running down my throat!’  And there’s Violante in Carson’s ‘Kitchen’.  Violante in the pantry/Gnawing at a mutton bone/How she gnawed it/How she clawed it/When she felt herself alone.  Seems there’s a progression of sorts here.  A tendency to go to greater lengths.  A movement from giving a fuck to GIVING A FUCK.

Consider Marcel Proust in’Rembrance of Things Past’ Volume 1:  One day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, not, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?

Proust goes on, realizing the truth must be in himself.  Putting down his cup he examines his own mind, paragraph after paragraph, all the while realizing it’s an abyss of uncertainty.  He suggests it would be easier simply to drink his tea and return to his more usual brooding, but the obsession has taken hold.

Word has it that if you’re a ruminant, ruminating is good.  If you’re a person, it’s not.  All that chewing.  Clawing.  Gnawing.  Thing is…if you’re a Violante or a Proust there’s bound to be a lot of chewing whether or not it’s good for you.  If you’re Anne Carson.

• Carson’s mother:  You remember too much.  Why hold onto all that?  And I said, Where can I put it down.  (Wacher)
• Dr. Haw:  When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?  Why keep watching?  Why not go away?  I was amazed.  Go away where?  I said.   This still seems to me a good question.  Why keep watching?  Some people watch, that’s all I can say.  There is nowhere else to go, no ledge to climb up to.  (Liberty)

Meanwhile I’ve developed an appetite for Petites Madeleines.   Have become quite obsessed, in fact.  Fortunately I know someone who makes them.

Sorry, No Encores This Side

August 2016.  I’ll be participating in a show this spring called ‘Crossing the Line:  Women of the Anabaptist Traditions Encounter Borders and Boundaries’.  The boundaries to be examined exist between public and private spaces, church/community and ‘the world’, sexualities and gender self-identities, race, ethnicity and class, religious and theological belief systems or expressions of transnational experience.  All this at the Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia.  I‘m surprised and pleased to be invited.  Surprised because I’ve not been an active member of the community during most of my adult life.  Pleased because this is my original tradition and I had little sense of its interest in examining the crossing of lines. Or in women.

The phrase ‘crossing boundaries’ is used often.  This is not surprising if Tjeu van Knippenberg, retired professor of pastoral theology is correct in suggesting that ‘boundaries are the symbol for the ambivalence of existence itself’.  In forming the dividing line between two areas, they act as protection, separating the strange from the familiar.  They’re also a challenge, inviting exploration. 

I’ve read boundaries are in trouble these days.  Are blurred and in danger of being dissolved.  In some instances they’re now referred to as wide grey lines.  Does that mean there’s no more either/or?  Just both/and?  

My dream is slippery. All surface and edges. The babies unmanageable, impossible to hang onto and sliding toward the edges.  I reach for the one, lose her.  Lose them all.  Suddenly I’m just hanging on, eventually losing myself and falling down to the street.  Immediately I get a whiff of freedom, only then acknowledging my status as a prisoner, and in the circus of all places.  I run through narrow crowded streets and come upon women collecting goods for the thrift shop.  I join them, hoping to escape notice of the circus police, but pushing my cart into the thrift shop I am horrified to discover it’s a front for the nightmare I thought I’d left behind.

In dreams boundaries are blurred.  Permeable.  Death, for the Greeks, is like this.  I read somewhere that if they’ve paid up, they get across the river no problem.  Otherwise they’re left to wander the river banks for 100 years.  On occasion and whether or not money changes hands they’re sent home.  Actually I only know of one Greek who experienced this.  Apparently Christians have had a few returnees as well.

I know of one Episcopalian who has little patience with this sort of talk.  The writer, Joan Didion, can speak only in terms of here or there, breathing or not breathing.  In ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ she admits to being obsessed with pinning down the exact moment of her husband’s death.  Wants to know…was he still alive when the paramedics took him down the elevator, when they arrived at the hospital?  Was he already dead in their apartment?  And what time would that have been?  Finally she realizes that he was never not quite dead after his collapse into the dinner plate.

I’m all for boundaries.  A bit of push back.  Some things exist only because of boundaries.  I tend toward the wide grey lines though.  If I have a choice, that is.  The 49 days between death and rebirth.  100 years on the river banks.  Some breathing and some holding of breath.

This spring I’ll be shipping my art across the Canadian/US border, breaking new ground.  And while the art moves toward new and strange horizons, I’ll be waiting on the banks, no doubt pacing.

Climbing is Hard to Give up

November 2016.  Leonard Cohen died this past week.  Along with a great many people I listened to his music and as many interviews as I could digest in a number of sittings.  During a couple of the interviews, one with Jian Gomeschi  on CBC radio, April 2009, and another with David Remnick from the New Yorker, September 2016, Cohen made a few references that took me back to my October post.

David Remnick mentioned Cohen’s proclivity to draw upon scripture, especially the Psalms.  Noted that Dylan had said Cohen’s tunes were like prayers.  Asked  if there was a spiritual purpose or heft in his songwriting.  Cohen responded:  I don’t like to be identified with Jewish thought.  In my own mind I know I’m deeply conditioned by…one of the great themes in Cabalistic thought is the idea that the thrust of Jewish activity is the repair of God.  God in creating the world…well…the creation is a catastrophe.  There are pieces of him or her or it everywhere.

Remnick:  Do your performances these last years have a spiritual dimension that’s self-conscious?  Cohen:  It’s not self-conscious.  I only know that if I write enough verses and keep discarding the slogans…even the hip ones…even the subtle ones…something will emerge that represents.

Cohen defined slogans (see October post for ‘cliche’) as ‘what is right, what is the good position; it’s something that goes beyond what is called political correctness; it’s a kind of tyranny of a posture, a tyranny of what the right thing should be’.  His response was to work hard at knowing his thoughts and feelings.  He was most emphatic:  ‘I have to write the verse and then see if it’s a slogan or not.  I can’t toss it until I’ve worked with it and seen what it really is.  I write and discard until I get to something that doesn’t sound like a slogan.  It’s not something that’s easy.’

I’m curious about his use of the term catastrophe, here in reference to God’s creation, a disaster in need of repair.  In my October post I categorize it as a means of cutting through cliche to reality.  Taken from the Greek, it means down or over-turning.  A reversal of what is expected.  As a literary device the final action that completes the unraveling of a plot.  Odd to think of creation as an unraveling of plot.  The two ideas seem oxymoronic.  But then again, think of Francis Bacon, John Cage and the Beats.  The Dadaists.  For them, the imperative in creative work is disruption.  For Cohen, the discarding of slogans.

I wonder though.  Why the idea that after all the shock and awe of the creative act, creation (or god) is still in need of repair, bits of him/her/it scattered everywhere?  Perhaps if Cohen and the Cabalists had used the word organize rather than repair…tidying up, rearranging.  As in picking up the cans of paint,  cleaning up the edges or editing for grammar.  Perhaps if I weren’t so attached to the noun being a static or fixed thing that rested on the seventh day and ever after.

At any rate, all this suggests that the activity the Jews are called to and the rest of us just do amounts to a kind of Sisyphean two-step.  First we commit a kind of violence involving a lot of words beginning with d: dissolve, discard, distort, disassemble, disturb and disrupt.  Then we move to the r-words: recycle, rearrange, reinvigorate, recreate, renew, reverse and repair.  Or as Leonard says…  first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.  And then… inevitably we cycle back to ‘ in the beginning’.

My dream is of walking into a room filled with people all sitting on chairs.  I grab an empty one and place it underneath a small door in the ceiling.  Climbing onto the chair, I jump, grab hold and hoist myself up and through.  Home at last.

I’m conflicted though.  Caught featuring rather than cutting through the veil of cliche.   There centre stage, my character is ascending the stairway to heaven.  What was I dreaming?  But if dreaming, perhaps I’m okay.  Symbols aren’t cliches, are they?  Or if they are, maybe they’re supposed to be.  What would Leonard say?  To play it safe, I’m ambivalent.  The woman might be ascending but there is a case to be made for the opposite view.  One look at her feet, so very unstable on those rungs, and you sense the possibility of movement away from apparent enlightenment.  Indeed, this might be the very moment before the fall.

Could Somebody Please Open One of Those Damn Bottles and Give It to Me

October 2016.  There seems to be agreement that something is in the way, removal of this something is desirous, and the means is some variation of distortion, subversion, violence, catastrophe or chance.

The apparent goal is reality, the nervous system, sensation, emotion and feeling.  The veil, cliche. The response, rage resulting in (see above).

I flip through an art magazine.  Talk about rage.  Every artist is either interrogating, blurring the lines, subverting, obscuring or disrupting.  Take Albert Oehlen, the leading proponent for Bad Painting.  The reviewer in Art in America, December 2004, writes:  Oehlen taunts the viewer.., barrages the viewer…, obscures the imagery.  The works are train wrecks of visual incident.  They look like they were painted as the artist was falling down a flight of stairs.

The brutality of fact is what the artist Francis Bacon is after, often engaging in what he calls free marks (throwing a can of paint at the canvas is one example).  He wants his subject’s reality, essence.   The facts.  Wants to sidestep the veil and translate directly to the viewer’s nervous system.  Understanding isn’t required, clarity is destroyed, storytelling hardly tolerated.   Rather, disruption and violence.

I want to say that art generally, naturally is about this sort of thing. It’s not.  Or…hasn’t been historically.  Instead art has been concerned with traditional aesthetics.  When Dadaism came along, it was labelled anti-art because its purpose was to offend, call into question the reason and logic of bourgeois society and embrace chaos and irrationality in protest.   One of its spokesmen said:  For us, art is not an end in itself but is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.

My collage starts with a dream image of a small number of people writing lines on a blackboard.  100 bottles of beer on the wall.  100 bottles of beer on the wall.  Elsewhere people are working on their art, painting images of statues.  I don’t much care for the idea of painting images of statues.  Seems redundant.  

I’ve just read Anne Carson’s translation of ‘Agamemnon’ by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus.  In her introduction she speaks of Bacon as being a huge fan of Aeschylus because, according to Bacon, their ends are the same.  What Aeschylus did with language, Bacon does with paint. I learn that Bacon painted a triptych inspired by Aeschylus’ trilogy, An Oresteia.   I‘m tempted to put a version of it in my collage as I have a few canvases to fill.  Bacon’s triptych is too raw though.  Messes with my nervous system.  I can’t help it, the entrails bother me.

It’s good to think about cliche.  Hannah Arendt does.  In her book ‘Thinking:  The Life of the Mind’ she writes:  Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.  That being the case, it’s not a bad idea to rage against cliche.  I suggest this to my partner who says…that’s just another cliche.

I still want to use Bacon in my collage.  I like his study of the screaming pope.  It’s taken from Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X.  Bacon’s idea is to get at the inside of the scream. My idea is to provide some relief for the screamer.  I don’t know about giving a beer to the pope in public but I’ve disguised him (small sketch on the left).  And I figure he could use one.  A question though:  what’s he got to rage about?

Petit Paul and Marie Dominate the Wall Space

September 2016.  I want a particular image and have to look through practically every magazine in the house.  I go to the studio and look some more.  The reason I’m so obsessed is that there’s something not quite right about the image.

Lately I’ve noticed that whenever I look at an image, say a photo of a couple or really, any number of people together, I immediately start scanning, searching for clues as to something being off.  At the same time, I’m looking for reasons why this can’t be so.  I only relax if everyone looks okay… with themselves, the world and each other.

So here’s this photograph.  Black and white.  Of a couple, Petit Paul and Marie from Jean Epstein’s 1923 silent film, Coeur Fidele.  Petit Paul is pressed up against Marie looking smitten while she is turned away looking most uncomfortable.  Whether or not Petit Paul is smitten, he certainly is determined to have Marie and Marie would rather have Jean but has little say in the matter.

The photograph calls to mind a few of my dreams.  A diminutive man clambering onto a woman’s lap and clinging to her, a formerly sane classmate insisting on a relationship and immediately taking control of the woman’s every move, a young man desperately wanting shelter only to create total chaos when the woman finally opens the door.  There are common elements.  The man initiates, persists and eventually has his way; the woman acquiesces.  The man acts, the woman doesn’t.  Oh no!  A dream in stereotypes.

I am not the only one who dreams this way.  I read somewhere that Martin Scorsese makes films that are mainly about men.  His men are tragic figures who’ve been described as angry, troubled and empty, exiled from the world, living on the edge of acceptability, afraid of humiliation, alone and seeking redemption as they struggle for humanity.

Scorsese’s women, on the other hand, are usually in supporting roles, existing in relation to men.  The men, the centre of the film’s universe, the women simply revolving around them, either abused or idealized or both.

I read too that one of the traits most often defining the role of women in literature is compliancy.  Confinement is the other.

How can a person relax I wonder.  With a set up like this.  I decide to finish watching Epstein’s film in hopes of a picture-perfect ending, even if stereotypical.  So far so good.  Petit Paul is killed and there are signs Marie will be reunited with her beloved Jean.  Yes yes…good..oh, wait.  The last image is that of the couple riding off together, Marie looking happy enough but Jean.  Oh Jean, what’s the matter with him now, so detached and pensive?  His arm is around her but even so, that’s little consolation if you look at his face.

My collage is not dramatic.  Quite passive actually.  The women for the most part, mother types.  The men small, that is, except for the man in the centre.  I keep forgetting about him.  Petit Paul and Marie hang on the walls…framed.  It does feel like they’ve been set up if not framed, given these roles in a melodrama all with the purpose of allowing Epstein, a film theorist, to experiment with some ideas that might elevate the thing.    

Suddenly I feel better.  If the roles are fixed and the unhappy couple is caught up in this low melodrama, somehow it’s easier to let it go.   After all, there’s no real tragedy here, unless Epstein does in fact succeed in his attempt.  Somehow I don’t think he does.  

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