Maddin’s Diner

July 2016.  Guy Maddin is a Canadian filmmaker whose father dies in 1977.  The father takes a very long time to die, possibly kept alive by Maddin himself who engages in certain behaviours designed for that very purpose.  The time finally comes.  Five years later Maddin begins the process of grieving through his dreams, one of the recurring themes, his father’s return to life.  He then makes a film, the intention being to recreate the dreams.  While he fails here he does succeed in making his film, appropriately called ‘The Dead Father’.

The film father returns to his family after he’s died and resumes ‘living’ with them, but more often, the family down the street which he seems to prefer.  His preference for this other family annoys the son who, one dark and stormy night, decides to reclaim his father once and for all.  He grabs a flashlight and heads for the trees and shrubs nearby where the dead customarily take their nightly rest.  The son moves among them and eventually spots his father.  Crouching beside him, he inserts a spoon into his father’s belly and begins eating, stopping only when his father stirs and glares at him.  Slowly, spoon still in his mouth, he shrinks away.

The practice of eating the dead is not entirely novel, but certainly distasteful, the more spiritual and metaphorical version easier. This is my body.  This is my blood.

The guy whose body Christians eat understood the use of metaphor.  He was even designated as the word made flesh.  If Nietzsche is right and all words are metaphors, he embodied what I think Maddin wants to achieve on screen.  In an interview for Border Crossings Maddin says, I want to do on the screen what words can do on the page with metaphors, produce that narcotic tingle poets talk about.

I intend to begin the collage with a dream image of people eating at a dinner theatre.  There is a small twist in that the diners are not the viewers; rather, they are the viewed.  I’m restless though, more intrigued with Maddin’s dead father film.  The image of the son eating his father is just such a startling image.

The Catholic church teaches that the bread and wine used in the Eucharist undergoes a transformation into the actual body and blood of Christ.  Obviously this transformation is of huge significance if it’s going to override the disgust factor.  Okay…so here it is:  you eat the body and drink the blood and you get eternal life.

In other circles it’s a part of the grieving process, a way to guide the souls of the dead into the bodies of their relatives.  My question: does the film son really want to reclaim his father to this extent?  Does he know what he’s getting himself into?

I finish the collage.  There’s no dinner theatre exactly; just a few videos playing by way of substitution.  And as far as I know, the diners are simply eating.  Real food.  Lots of bread.  Wine.  And Jesus just happens to be there that night.

Carrying Mother

June 2016.  These days I read memoirs:  Anne Carson’s ‘Autobiography of Red’, Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’, David Means’ ‘The Old Man’.   Means recalls two of his father’s jokes,  the first having to do with the key to life and the second with his own death, the idea being that a person’s life can be summed up in about 10 jokes.

According to the old man the key to life is to stick with asking only those questions you can answer.  The problem comes when you ask a question you simply cannot answer.  I think of my own father and suspect he would appreciate this joke.  The other joke is about his gravestone.  The father wants the epitaph:  I’m here and you’ll be here soon.

My partner and his sons have a similar joke between them as a result of a long and shared history of getting wood.  This joke also has been mentioned as a fitting epitaph for my partner’s gravestone:  It’ll burn.

An epitaph is essentially an epithet or adjective written on a tombstone.  Anne Carson says nouns name the world.  Verbs activate the nouns.  And adjectives are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity.  They’re the latches of being.

In Homer’s world, being is stable and adjectives the means.   Dawn is always rosy-fingered, women are white-armed or neat-ankled, men shining, knees quick, death black.  Along comes the writer Stesichoros who undoes the latches and releases being with a long lyric poem where practically everything is red and dawn is used as part of an adjective.

Even though Homer’s stable world is long gone, I want some kind of stability when it comes to the dead.    Something to hold them.  Epithets.  Jokes.   Jokes are kind of tricky though as their  nature is to destabilize, to unlatch the apparent from the actual.

The thing about reading Carson and Bechdel at the same time is that their characters merge and become somewhat Homerian.  The mothers are all long-suffering, cigarette-smoking.  The young women, women-lovers, the young and middle-aged men, men-lovers.  And tragic.  The men seem to die when they’re 44 or their autobiographies simply come to an end at that age.

I dream I’m with my mother and we’re waiting for an elevator.  I turn around to see she’s not with me.  Ah!  But she is.  Very low to the ground and reduced to a mere bust of her former self.   I pick her up and carry her into the elevator.  She is very light.

I bring Mary, Mother of God, into the collage and feel like a Stesichoros, unlatching her from her usual and fixed context.  Instead of carrying us and interceding on our behalf, she is being carried.  Does this amount to a kind of joke?

I wonder about an epitaph for my father.  He was not a joker.  There are other ways of summing up a life.  The minister at the memorial speaks of him as a dutiful man.  True enough, but that doesn’t make for a good epitaph.  At any rate, I drive to the graveside and read the small print on the temporary marker.  In loving memory.

Up Your Sleeve!

January 2016.  It all starts with a dream.  They all do.  I am in a room that is not altogether private.  Large chunks of the wall are missing.  To the right is a series of stations, to the left those substandard walls.   Peering through a large gap I become aware of  Satan watching me, an uncomfortable feeling to say the least.   I try to avoid his gaze and wish the lights could be dimmed.   Curiously I receive a directive from him to undertake a pilgrimage or penance.  Satan?  You okay?

I choose a background with a large feature wall.  I have an idea to create a painting on it.  Bring in a few stations of the cross.  Place them within the painting.  They belong to the Catholic tradition which is not mine, but mine lacks in the area of shrines, pilgrimages and general colour.

Many of my collages have to do with theatre, both the setting and dramatic aspects.  They’re not high enough to be called tragedies;  rather, they’re perched variously between tragedy at the one end and downright slapstick at the other.  A kind of tragicomedy.

I watch Laurie Anderson’s ‘Heart of a Dog’.  There’s something about the combination of music, images, story-telling and reflection that is so evocative.  I would like to pull all these elements into my life on a daily basis.

Anderson says her buddhist teacher taught that how a person dies is important.  You want loving words, good energy around them.

While I am working on this piece, my father is dying.  He has been dying for years but now he’s really dying.  Congestive heart failure.  He’s an old guy and his heart is tired.  A brother and sister-in-law come to help out.  There is little anyone can do aside from taking care of basic needs:  helping him to the bathroom, feeding him, putting him on the oxygen tank.  Mostly we sit with him.  He’s extremely restless and disoriented but occasionally lucid.  I love those moments.  I sit and stroke his hand.  He has beautiful hands.  Long fingers.  My brother tells me the custom among the Embaloh people is to stay with the dying until they are gone, someone at each limb stroking and soothing.  What a comfort this must be.

My finished work emerges after a rather long process.  I begin with a kind of story line but depending on the material I find, the particulars change.  Usually I start with the background and once that is more or less figured out, I can think about the characters, plot and subplot.  In ‘Up Your Sleeve’, I want the crucifixion theme to dominate but not exclusively.  A foil seems necessary.  Ah!  The magician.   It takes hours, days to arrive here.  I cut figures out, place them and leave.  Walk the dog.  Come back and rearrange the figures.  Look at them sideways.  At some point I make decisions and commit myself to a version.

My dad is a religious man.  A minister for many years.  His themes are salvation, the cross, the hope.  These days he speaks little but sermonizes, prays and sings hymns all night.  In low German mostly.  My mother doesn’t sleep.

I think about my dad’s life.  Soon it will be over.  Or maybe not.  He has fooled us many times. Fortunately however, my collage is finished, varnished and titled.

No Tidy Ending In Sight

March 2016.   I dream my vehicle drops through a crevice and I fall into what seems like a hotel lounge.  The walls don’t quite reach the floor, ending about a foot too soon.  Water pools in that space.    In fact, water pools everywhere.   I open the door to what appears to be a theatre. Red.   Also flooded.   I wade through the water but retreat as I sense the presence of ghosts, returning to the lounge to find a fundraiser in full swing.  Apparently I have organized it.

The theatre in my dream has a proscenium stage.  I had not realized there are so many types:  thrust, end, arena, flexible, profile.  And then there are the various types of theatre:  tragedy, comedy, improv and musical.  I suspect what is represented in this collage is improv.

My entire theatre, if not all the world, seems to be a stage.  Every available space is given over to drama of some sort.  Even the seating area is co-opted for those purposes, the pseudo ghosts, a few actors from ‘The Great Race,’ launching a pie fight for their own entertainment.    Apparently 4000 pies were thrown in the actual scene.  Less here.

I intend to glue the truck on top of the wave but just as I am pressing down I notice another wave and have a moment of indecision as to which wave I want.  I choose the wrong one.  Suddenly I feel the placement of the truck to be the most important thing in the world.

My father dies.  He has breakfast that morning, says a few words, is lifted onto the commode and dies.  One moment breathing, the next not.  Eleven twenty-one alive, eleven twenty-two, not.  I continue to flip back and forth…alive dead alive dead.

The idea of a happy ending seems forced somehow.  Are endings ever happy?  Shakespeare’s weren’t.  Later on some of his endings were rewritten and became happy.  But even so.  Even the fairy tale’s happily ever after fails.   There’s just something unsatisfying and often ultimately sad about an ending.  A feeling of incompleteness, of being left standing by the side of the road.  The writer Anne Carson bemoaned the fact that she’d come to the end of Proust and wondered how life could go on without him.

Carla Bley, composer and bandleader, is said to have had trouble with endings.  She apparently resisted resolutions mightily but finally had to concede.  Death is a resolution of sorts.  The tempo slows to a crawl, the volume adjusts down and the breath resolves in an exhalation.  Talk about an unsatisfying ending.  If there could be a proper recap at the very least.  A summing up.  Bley restating and reinvigorating her themes before letting them off the leash to blaze through half a dozen modes and configurations, promising again and again to end only to back off just one more time and then finally, exhausting herself and the audience, allowing the resolution to take place.

Carson writes:  prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light.   In the meantime…..there are those flood waters to keep your eye on.

Source: Oh, Canada / New York A cultural art exchange and dialogue | westbeth