Poof

The machinery isn't working well today--I heard that line in a movie called PROOF and thought it was useful. I can remember what I wanted to write about, but I can't remember how I wanted to say it. It's not good if I can't remember how to say it.

I watched a movie version of PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. It was dull as the book. Stephen Dedalus reminds me of Henry David Thoreau, who over-intellectualizes something as organic as growing beans.

There was a time in our human history, maybe at the very start of human history, when life and art were one. We began to separate them, though, as we began to examine things out of context, much as visual art in a modern sense is sterilized into pale galleries instead of being integral to the architecture where its individual meaning can be lost and/or it informs on the larger structure. There is merit to examining text and context individually, depending on whether the interpretation provides greater meaning.

Thoreau takes beans out of context. "I want to know beans!" he says. But the way he did it, it was like putting navel lint in a Petri dish and expecting it to give you a dissertation on the last digit of pi. Poor Thoreau, he had no idea what Emerson was talking about (who does? but E says it all so beautifully) so Henry David had to fabricate his own intellectualism by doing something freaking farmers had done for centuries, but academically reinvent it by writing about it. Just because you write something down doesn't mean that you've given it meaning, and Thoreau did no more than duplicate a farmers' almanac.

In my next life I'm going to be a nuclear physicist. I would have been one in this life, but I was scared off by the math. Math is a language. It is a way of talking about concepts. Numbers have personalities, else why would they have different values or characteristics. The movie, PROOF (Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins), is about a genius mathematician whose equations dissolve into poetry. He begins to go over his proof, line by line, those algebraic letters reform into English words. The other characters call him crazy because he does this--it isn't MATH anymore! Nobody recognizes him as poet.

It doesn't matter if a writer writes about writing. Nor does it matter if a writer uses a thin metaphor to write about writing. All elements as they approach their limit change form. Matter turns into energy. Solid into liquid into gas. Life into death. It is elemental and beautiful, it is aesthetic and utilitarian. You can't make life or art more than they are through academics or any other means because that will send you on a tangent and you'll never reach infinity--art, life, meaning, beauty will disappear in your hand.